After a well-deserved two-week break, detective Will Trent returned tonight on ABC with the series’ sixth episode, titled “Should I Go Get My Tin Foil Hat?” Will Trent’s episode titles seem to always come from a quote, and this doozy is said by Will’s boss Amanda. Why? Well, this recap will show you.
The prologue is set in the Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta. In the master bedroom of one of the houses, we see a married couple – Kevin (John Dixon) and Sally (Almeera Jiwa) – feverishly packing. It seems that they are in trouble and trying to run for their lives. But it’s too late. A window is broken. Kevin motions to Sally, who hides in a closet, watching through the louvered door as her husband is shot and killed.
Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn) has dinner with her boss, Director Armstrong (Ric Reitz), learning of his plans to retire. He is going to nominate her to be his replacement. She’s excited, but he warns her that the job is a “beast,” requiring lots of handshaking with politicians and powerful Georgians. They clink glasses in celebration.
Will Trent (Ramón Rodríguez) arrives home to find his dog Betty cozy on the couch with his dog sitter Nico (Cora Lu Tran), who used some of the key ingredients for Will’s planned dinner to treat the dog (and feed themselves). It’s late, and Will offers for Nico to stay, but they quickly get up to leave his house.
Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson) argues with her son Jeremy (Deion Smith) when he tells her that he wants to take a semester off school to travel around Mexico. Their conversation is interrupted by a sound from inside the house. Faith draws her gun and begins to search the house, finding Jeremy’s father Charles (Rotimi) cowering in fear in one of the rooms. He believes he’s being followed and Faith asks him if he’s taking his medication and attending his veteran’s group therapy. He confirms that he is, saying that a silver Lexus has been trailing him for days. She agrees to take him back to his apartment and check things out with him.
(ABC/Danny Delgado)
Faith has Will meet her at the address where Charles rents an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) above the garage. Will knows all about ADU’s and seems to have ambitions to build one someday, after watching so many home renovation shows about them. Will notices that the window blinds are closed, which is odd since there are lots of plants on the counter that need sunlight. Charles says they were open when he left. With Charles’ apartment so clean, Will also finds it odd that there’s a dirty footprint by another window, which faces the home of the couple Charles rents the room from. Charles says it’s not his footprint. Will presumes that the intruder used Charles’ apartment to spy on the couple and decides they should check in with the landlords, Kevin and Sally. But upon entering their home, they find them both deceased.
Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen) enters the APD to find one of her informants, Katy, was arrested for drugs. Because Katy is helping Angie take down the Zero Mile human trafficking ring, she has a literal “get out of jail free” card. Angie talks to her about the need to stay sober and attend her group sessions while being protected for being their witness. Katy is distraught about a young girl she got involved in the ring before she knew how bad things were. She asks Angie to help get Jade out of the same situation she was once in.“I will go get her, I promise,” Angie vows.
Will examines the crime scene with medical examiner Pete Chin (Kurt Yue). Pulling out his tape recorder, Will walks through how the events likely unfolded. He imagines the perpetrator shooting Kevin first, tying Sally to a chair, and interrogating her about something. Since the rest of the house has been ransacked, the assumption is they were demanding the location of an important item. When Sally resisted, they inflicted pain by starting to slit her throat. They didn’t finish the job, however, choosing to leave and let her bleed out. Will crouches down and notices something unusual about Sally’s fingers. Despite blood having run down her arms, her left fingertip is clean. He looks under the chair and finds that she drew a star with her own blood. A clue, but what does it mean?
In a GBI conference room, Amanda looks at photos of the star with Will and Faith. They discovered that Sally worked for a tech company called Selantis, which is the software the GBI uses for all of its systems. The star, however, doesn’t make sense to them. Since Charles is involved, Amanda jumps to the conclusion that he did something wrong. The comment upsets Faith, who tells her boss that Jeremy’s father is staying in her son’s vacant room until this is all figured out. Amanda tells Faith that she just got rid of her baby by sending him to college and that she doesn’t need another mistake. Outside, Faith vents to Will about her frustrations with “Auntie Mandy,” blaming her and her mother for threatening Charles to stay away from her, which is why he enlisted and therefore the reason he has PTSD. Will acknowledges that Charles seemed like a great guy to him.
“They trying to keep people out or in?”, Will asks as her and Faith arrive at Selantis, which is housed in a menacing-looking building. A man named Vince Arrigotti (Walter Belenky) is standing by the front desk when they arrive, introducing himself as one of Sally’s colleagues when Will and Faith reveal they’re with the GBI and have a warrant to search her office. He escorts them there and Will questions why it’s so clean, noticing the lack of any papers or even personal belongings. Vince tells him the company is paperless, but Will asks why there’s a pencil holder full of pencils. The company’s CEO enters the doorway and Will and Faith ask for access to all of Sally’s company emails to aid in the investigation of her murder. While they wait, Will takes Faith to the break area, making her eat a banana for her diabetes. When he goes to tip the cashier, he discovers something unusual about his wallet, but he doesn’t mention it to Faith. While she eats, she notices a poster for a tech convention sponsored by Selantis, held at a hotel where Kevin worked.
Will and Faith go to the hotel and meet with the head of security, who is confused because he already talked to the GBI about Kevin. Will tells him that person was lying. The security guard has a record of anytime Kevin’s card was swiped, and Faith asks to see security footage of the last time it was used. He finds it and they watch as Sally enters a room with it, exiting with something concealed under her arm. When Will asks whose room that was, the security guard reveals that it was part of a block of rooms booked by Selantis.
That night, Faith arrives home to find Charles teaching Jeremy how to make eggs, pancakes, and bacon. She seems overjoyed that Charles cleaned her kitchen and made dinner. The next day at work, Faith moves into her new office, which came with a dirty microwave left behind by its former occupant. Will asks her if Charles knew what the bloody star meant and she says he didn’t. However, she learned that on the night Sally used her husband’s hotel key to steal something, Kevin gave him tickets to a music festival. She believes they wanted him out of the house that night. The GBI’s new tech guy, Rocky, interrupts their conversation to bring them the information he retrieved from Sally’s phone. When Will asks him to search for star, the interesting result is a contact whose name is simply a star emoji. They call the number, and we see a woman answer in her car. She doesn’t say anything, and when Will reveals that he’s a GBI agent, she gasps and hangs up.
Angie tells her partner, Michael Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin), about Jade, the trafficked girl she promised to rescue. They don’t have a warrant for it, but he seems excited when she says she wants to just wing it. He decides to join her.
Will returns home to find Nico on the couch with Betty. He asks his dog sitter if they took money from his wallet, sharing that because of Will’s OCD, he knows exactly how much was in there and always has the bills facing the same way. “Whatever, you can afford it,” Nico scoffs, confessing to taking $20 from Will, who says he’d prefer that Nico ask if they need more money, not steal. “I don’t need any favors,” Nico declares, getting up and saying they quit. Will sits on the couch with Betty in defeat, hearing his loving pet let out a groan. “Yeah, rough,” he agrees.
When Faith gets back home, she finds that Charles is in a state of panic. Jeremy explains that he took his dad to the park for some fresh air, but when they got back to the house, he started to freak out. “Someone was here,” Charles tells Faith, saying that the house smelled different when they returned. Jeremy didn’t notice anything, but Faith tries to calm Charles down by saying they will clear the house. And then she finds something, calling Will to tell him that someone broke into her house and wrote “back off” on her bathroom mirror in red. Will, who is out for a jog at the time of the call, notices that he’s being followed by a silver car. He leads it to a parking lot, losing it by ducking behind some parked cars, and then cutting it off by emerging again farther down. He runs to the window to find a woman behind the wheel, the same one who was in Sally’s phone labeled as a star emoji. She reveals herself to be a reporter for the Atlanta Star, Jess Noonan (April Billingsley).
ABC/Danny Delgado)
Will and Faith meet with Jess in a restaurant and learn that she knew Sally from college. Sally came to her with a tip, sharing that Selantis had a backdoor into the GBI’s software and was selling information to its investors about intel the GBI has. Jess hasn’t told anyone at the Atlanta Star yet because she needs proof, which Sally was working on getting her. She produces a key, saying that Sally had stolen a hard drive with evidence and was planning to tell her where she could take the key to find it, but she was murdered before that could happen. Will offers to take Jess to the GBI to keep her safe, but she refers to it as “the belly of the beast,” turning the offer down. She warns them both not to use any devices with Solantis software while they investigate. “If you want to stay alive, trust no one,” Jess says. These are her final words, for as she gets up to leave, a bullet breaks the restaurant’s window and kills her. The key drops to the ground. Will Trent picks it up.
Paranoid, Faith has declared her office a clean room, having removed all phones and computers. When Amanda enters, Faith asks for her phone, placing it in her microwave and telling her why she did that. “Should I go get my tin foil hat?”, Amanda asks, mocking Faith’s tactics. Will tells Amanda about the Solantis data breach. Rocky enters to share that IT wants them alerted to the fact that someone seems to be performing maintenance on all of the GBI computers, which wasn’t ordered by the IT team. Faith believes Solantis is scrubbing the software of any evidence of a backdoor in their code. Amanda wants to tell Director Armstrong, and Will warns her not to, saying anyone higher up than her is potentially involved. She gets offended, asking if he will think these things of her when she’s in charge of the GBI.
In Amanda’s office, Armstrong tells her that it’s insane to accuse Solantis of murder. Amanda reminds her boss that she once investigated one of Solantis’ board members, who curiously seemed to know about all of the evidence the GBI had against him in court, which is how their case was won. Armstrong warns her to let this go, saying there’s simply a system of checks and balances in place. “The system of law enforcement works exactly as it needs to,” he says.
Faith calls Charles to the GBI, and in her office, he instantly recognizes the key they got from Jess as belonging to a PO Box that Sally owned. He even knows the box number. Pulling out his phone, he emails the details to Faith and Will gets furious that she didn’t take his phone when he came in. Amanda pokes her head in to say she believes them and to go solve this case before she loses her job. Just then, everyone in the GBI loses the ability to access their computers.
Meanwhile, Angie and Michael end up a business called the Hollywood Talent Agency. Angie received a tip that the owner gets girls from the Zero Mile trafficking ring, making them think they’re doing things for acting roles. He tries to stop them from entering, but Michael says they heard a scream and therefore have probable cause to search the place. He holds the owner at bay while Angie opens a few doors, soon finding Jade (Gabriella Cila) on a casting couch with another man, who she kicks out. The leader of the trafficking ring told Jade this would be her big break and she is reluctant to say anything about him, but after Angie asks to see her tattoo, which she reveals, Angie shared that the last tattoo she saw like this was on a dead body at the morgue. Angie gets Jade to admit that she is being forced into these situations and escorts her out of the building.
Inside the post office, Will and Faith arrive to find that Vince is there and already has the box’s contents. He ducks behind the counter into the mail room and Will and Faith follow him. A shootout ensues, but they eventually get Vince on the ground by the loading docks. Unfortunately, he flung the hard drive outside into the street and it is immediately run over by a passing truck. Faith arrests him.
Vince’s gun is linked to the crime scene of Sally and Kevin. Will, Faith, Amanda, and Armstrong sit in a conference call with the Solantis CEO on via live stream. She tells them that the information Vince stole is what helps make their software run so smoothly and tries to explain that he went rogue with a plan to sell the software to other law enforcement companies. Will calls her bluff, saying they were stealing intel and that the proof died with the hard drive since Solantis removed the backdoor from their code. Amanda announces that the GBI is parting ways with Solantis. The CEO asks Armstrong if that’s true, seemingly surprised that it would come to this. With pressure in the room, Armstrong says he has to stand by Amanda’s assessment.
Faith returns to her office to find Charles waiting for her with a new office gift – a plant. He has found a new place to live and also talked Jeremy out of his interest in taking a semester off in Mexico by making plans to teach him how to cook more things. Faith apologizes for the way things turned out between them and questions whether they could’ve raised Jeremy together. He tells her what a great kid she raised.
Angie finds Will in the office, having heard that Nico no longer works for him. She knows this because Nico is sitting in an interrogation room in the APD after getting beaten up. Will goes in to talk to Nico and the two stare each other down. Will shares that his record for waiting for someone to talk is 23 hours, but Nico says that Betty has about an hour before she makes indoors. Will calls the bluff and Nico finally comes clean, revealing that a man in their apartment building has been extorting Nico for $20 each day in exchange for not beating them up. Will acknowledges that Nico needs to get out of that apartment building. In response to their snarky comment about how much it costs to move, Will gets an idea. They go tell Angie that Will is going to convert the space above his garage into an ADU, announcing that they’re on their way to Home Depot. Will seems excited for the renovation project that awaits.
Will Trent returns next Tuesday, February 21st, at 10/9c on ABC with “Unable to Locate.” Here’s the official episode description.
When the GBI discovers that a neo-Nazi organization is planning an attack, they prioritize the case to protect innocent people. Meanwhile, Angie faces a potentially life-changing scenario and investigates a sneaker release gone wrong with Ormewood.