[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Irrational series premiere.]
“People are irrational, but predictably so. They’re more afraid of flying than driving when the fact is, driving is much more dangerous. We know we should eat healthy food, but then we give into temptation. We buy things we’ll never ever use. We assume people are making rational decisions, weighing the pros and cons, when most of the time we’re not. Instead, we rely on instincts, which are almost always wrong — sometimes dangerously wrong. One error in judgement leads to another, which is why eventually, someone ends up calling me,” Alec Mercer says in the opening voiceover of the new drama The Irrational.
Jesse L. Martin, who starred on Law & Order during its original run, is back solving crimes on NBC as a behavioral science professor who uses his expertise to help law enforcement. For example, we see him first talking down (using paradoxical persuasion) a man holding a woman and her baby hostage before we even see him in a classroom, a situation that also allows the show to sum up his relationship with his ex-wife Marisa (Maahra Hill), an FBI agent. “That ability that you have to completely divorce emotion and reason is both why I married you and why I—,” she remarks, and he finishes with, “am no longer married to me.” (But he is still in love with her, which is obvious to everyone, including his younger sister, Kylie, played by Travina Springer.)
It’s only after we learn that he helped the Rams win the Super Bowl that we see him standing in front of the students of his Applied Psychology 101 class, and right away, he explains the scars on his face. He was burned on over 60 percent of his body years ago, spending nearly three years in the hospital bandaged, and while he tells the class he was in a drag racing accident, the truth is he doesn’t remember everything that happened. (More on that in a bit.)
Sergei Bachlakov/NBC
The case-of-the-week for the series premiere sets out to answer the question, “Why would someone confess to a murder he didn’t commit?” Alec is brought in when a Senator’s son is arrested for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, and while he confesses, the professor can’t help but notice that he doesn’t remember details he should, especially as a former Marine. Alec even tests a theory, with an experiment in which he tells students they scratched lab equipment when they didn’t; all confess. It’s after checking out the suspect’s AA meeting and getting others to open up by doing the same (again, using what he knows about human behavior) that Alec realizes his sponsor framed him. It turned out that the sponsor didn’t take rejection so well. When Alec confronts him, the murderer kidnaps him and refuses to let him talk his way out of it, so the professor ends up totaling his car.
As for the more personal case for Alec, he gets a bit distracted when he learns that the man who was arrested for the bombing of a church that killed 13 and injured him is up for parole. Banning was never convicted of the murders themselves because he couldn’t place him at the scene. Though Kylie wants him to let that go, “it left a rather lasting impression,” he points out.
That bombing is also how Alec and Marisa met; she was the agent assigned to the case at the time. When he goes to see her about the current case — and has to stop himself from using a key to enter the house — she asks if his nightmare are back. He’s not talking to a therapist because he knows everything he knows and then some, he explains. But as Marisa sees it, he won’t get closure on the past unless he deals with it in the present. To that end, he plans to attend the parole hearing, in the hopes that his injuries will persuade the board not to let him out.
Leading up to that, the events of the case lead to Alec having flashbacks of the explosion and remembering a van — including the logo on the side — speeding away from the scene. At the parole hearing, Alec and Marisa watch as Banning makes a statement taking full responsibility for his actions … and then, after seeing someone in the doorway the others can’t, tells the judge that if he’s released, he’ll bomb more churches. His parole is denied. Alec and Marisa run outside, but they’re too late to spot the person or the license plate of his car. Banning didn’t act alone. Someone else pulled the strings, and that person is still out there.
So what did you think of Jesse L. Martin’s new crime show? Will you be tuning in each week? Let us know in the poll and comments below.
The Irrational, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC