Renowned behavioral scientist Alex Mercer offers his unique insights into human behavior in order to help solve various cases, often working alongside his ex-wife Marisa Clark, an FBI agent.
This series contains examples of:
- Accidental Murder: In "Suddenly Alec", the murder of the week turns out to be this; Maya Hawkins accidentally shoved Desmond Thorn too hard during an argument, the back of his head slammed into a shelving unit hard, killing him.
- Admiration-Based Mimicry: In "Formal Ties", Alec tells his students that couples in long-term relationships often start to mirror each other's gestures. This becomes important later in the episode, when Rizwan notes that the Italian Ambassador and his right-hand man are mirroring each other; it turns out that they are in a secret relationship.
- Alliterative Name: "Scorched Earth" features a character named Dara Deacon.
- Armored Closet Gay:
- In "Scorched Earth", one of the suspects in the arson that killed Chris is his ex-girlfriend Kat Schmitt, who was supposedly stalking him after their break-up. When Alec and Marisa investigate her, they discover that she broke up with Chris because she realized that she's a lesbian, and her "stalking" was all an act to make her conservative family believe that Chris had dumped her so they wouldn't ask why she dumped him.
- In "Formal Ties", the culprit of the week is the assistant to Ambassador Bruno Conti... and also, secretly, his lover. Bruno was in line for a promotion that would take him back to Italy, where he intended to marry a woman in order to hide his sexuality from the conservative government. The boyfriend thought that having an assassination occur in the Italian embassy would prevent Bruno from being promoted.
- Big Damn Hug: The ending of "Straight from the Heart" sees Marisa finally sharing an embrace with her biological son Cam, who she gave up for adoption when she was younger.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: In "Zero Sum", Alec and Marisa deal with a working-class black family that has become entangled with a rich white family because the black wife used to work for the white family, but had an affair with the white husband, who felt guilty about the power imbalance between them and thus helped fund her daughter's education to compensate, which irritated his own son, who felt neglected.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: "Lazy" might not be the right word, as Kylie is constantly working. But while she's almost as brilliant with computers as her brother is with people, Kylie starts out the series with very little direction for her considerable talents, and the work she has been doing has grown more phoned-in as she isn't really passionate about it. Much of her arc in the first season is figuring out what she wants to do with her life.
- Career-Ending Injury: In "Lost Souls", Shanae Butler was a world-class tennis player up until she suffered a rotator-cuff injury. While officially, she's still in recovery, her physical therapist tells Alec that Shanae's injury is permanent and she'll never be able to play tennis professionally again. During the episode, Shanae breaks the arm outright during a nasty fall, effectively sealing her fate.
- Chekhov's Gun: The opening of "Formal Ties" sees Alec teaching his class about how people behave in relationships, with him noting that a couples in long-term relationships are more likely to start mirroring each other's behaviors. Later in the episode, Rizwan notes that the Italian Ambassador and his right-hand man are mirroring each other, which clues him and Alec in to the fact that the two men are in a secret relationship.
- Cooldown Hug:
- In "Bombshell", Alec, Phoebe, and Rizwan are all being held hostage by Wes Banning, the man who made the bomb that wounded Alec all those years ago. The stress of a hostage crisis sends Phoebe into a panic attack, and she can't get to her medicine. Rizwan suggests that she take a placebo while he gives her a hug so that she associates the placebo with comfort.
- At the end of "Stan By Me", Yoonie stares down her producer, Ji-Ho Kong, as he pulls a gun on her and threatens her life in order to get her on a jet so that he can flee back to Korea. After he's dispatched, Yoonie drops the brave face and acts precisely how you'd expect a 26-year-old to react to being threatened by her longtime mentor, and so Rose pulls her into her arms to calm her down.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Mercer was wounded in a bombing twenty years ago which had killed several people and left him severely scarred. He can't remember most of what happened.
- Dirty Cop:
- Downplayed. In "Point and Shoot", a pair of patrol officers harass Alec and Kylie following Alec's testimony against Viper Squad. One forces Kylie to perform a sobriety test under the excuse of her swerving over a white line, also making her count backwards from 1001 in multiples of three, even threatening to unholster his gun when she asks if it's necessary while taking sadistic pleasure in watching her squirm. Alec quickly realizes the truth, confirming it when the other officer notes his sister was the one they want, despite never revealing they were siblings to the officers. Alec is able to convince the second officer that it's not worth the bad press this would bring, and he manages to get the one harassing Kylie to knock it off.
- In the first-season finale, Mathias, the man who orchestrated the bombing that scarred Alec, and the man who's been pulling the strings for most of the season, is revealed to be Bob Caswith, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He owed Senator Sanford a favor and thus staged the bombing to cover up the accidental death of one of Sanford's campaign volunteers. He has since used his position in the FBI to stymie Marisa's efforts to investigate the bombing.
- Dramatic Irony: In "Cheating Life", longevity-obsessed Vincent Lee is revealed to have stage-four bone cancer. He faked his death in order to avoid his followers thinking that his nutritional supplements were to blame for his condition.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- In "Bad Blood", Soph Rawlings is initially unrepentant about the fact that she may have murdered Lia Cappellano in a fit of anger, because she's still overwhelmed by anger and the investigation (and attendant inconvenience) is just making her more angry. After she's cleared of the murder, the anger cools down and enormity of what she did hits her, and she decides she's actually not okay with the fact that she might have killed someone over a hockey game. She ends up pleading guilty to assault and accepting a suspension from her job to take some responsibility for her role in Lia's death.
- In "The Wrong Side of Maybe", Alec and his assistants run an experiment where participants are paid to sit in a chair with an even chance of getting hit with fish guts. When it's them in the chair, a majority of the participants are perfectly happy to sit in the chair and take the risk. When the experiment is repeated, but with an innocent old woman in the chair, almost nobody is willing to take the risk of her getting splashed. Alec's conclusion is that most people are less likely to take a risk if the consequences fall on someone they can see.
- Faking the Dead: In "Cheating Life", Vincent Lee killed his look-alike bodyguard in a hit-and-run to fake his own death so that people would not find out about his cancer, which he feared would discredit his vitamin supplement business.
- Fatal Flaw: In "Dead Woman Walking", Mercer and his team solve the case of who poisoned a journalist by goading her would-be killer into confessing, appealing to his desperate desire to have someone know that he pulled off a seemingly perfect crime.
- Fear-Induced Idiocy: Invoked several times, where Alec Mercer frequently points out how fear can impair judgment and cause people to make bad decisions.
- In "Lucky Charms", Alec's former student Camille Lawson ends up in financial trouble after her fear of losing a big poker game caused her to bet more money than she could afford in a desperate attempt to stay in the game, which kicked off a string of bad decisions that now threatens to put her mother's house in foreclosure.
- In "Anatomy of a Fall", Kenzie Williams died of a drug overdose. Her sorority sisters had nothing to do with her death, but when they found her, they panicked at the thought that calling the authorities would lead to a sweep of their house, revealing that they kept illegally-obtained drugs on the premise, and so they instead decided to sneak her body out to the campus clocktower and chuck it over the edge so that it would look like a suicide. As a consequence, not only do they face more serious charges, but they end up having to disband their sorority chapter.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: In "Bombshell", one of the jobs Kylie is looking into involves being a pet detective for the Ventura agency.
- The Gambling Addict: In "Lucky Charms", Alec discovers that one of his former students has gotten into trouble while gambling in Vegas, and owes quite a bit of money.
- Happily Adopted: Marisa gave up her son Cam for adoption decades ago, as she was young and didn't have her life together and thus was in no shape to care for him. She is relieved when she meets him years later and he assures her that he ended up with good, loving parents.
- I Reject Your Reality: For much of the first season, Alec insists that things are still good between him and his ex-wife Marisa, even though he's been reduced to living at his younger sister's house while his wife has already started rearranging their house. Towards the end of the season, he finally accepts that their marriage is over and allows himself to move on.
- It's Not You, It's My Enemies: In "Bad Blood", Rose tries to break up with Alec again, afraid that her work makes any relationship with him dangerous. Alec tells her that he doesn't care about the danger, that he's been living on stolen time ever since the bombing and he wants to spend as much of that time with her as possible.
- Jurisdiction Friction: In "Zero Sum", Marisa is forced to work alongside a private security consultant to resolve a kidnapping, and hates it, both because she sees private security as the refuge of failed cops and agents and because the consultant, Rose, happens to be an attractive woman who is also clearly interested in Alec.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Played with. In "Point and Shoot", in order to stop the victim from exposing a multinational company's crimes that the police unit "Viper Squad" works for, they proceed to make his death look like a case of negligence due to a misprinted arrest warrant, making it look like an accidental officer-involved shooting rather than a flat out murder.
- Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot:
- In "Bad Blood", the apparent accidental murder of Lia Cappellano leads Alec and Rose to a string of HR complaints, which in turn leads to an embezzlement scheme.
- In "Anatomy of a Fall", the apparent suicide of a young student is revealed to have actually been a murder done in order to cover up a scheme to illegally shift high-paying clients to the top of an organ-donor list.
- In "Straight from the Heart", an English professor's recurring nightmares about a shooting eventually lead her and Alec to expose a corrupt police department that has been in cahoots with a meth dealer.
- Never Got to Say Goodbye: Phoebe's mother died the day after they'd had a terrible fight. The guilt has been haunting Phoebe for years.
- Never Suicide: In "Anatomy of a Fall", Alec is recruited to investigate an apparent suicide on Wylton's campus to see if there's any risk of other suicides. With Marisa's help, he quickly determines that it was not a suicide.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In the second season, Phoebe gets blacklisted from almost every psych department at Wylton after she reports Dr. Myers for plagiarism and embezzlement. The only professor who will take her is Dr. Mercer, and even there, she is technically demoted, because Rizwan became Alec's new head research assistant after she left.
- Not Helping Your Case:
- In "Bad Blood", the primary suspect in the murder of the week is Soph Rawlings, an entitled rich girl who complains at every turn about how the investigation is inconveniencing her. Rose, her fixer, keeps having to remind her to stop talking before she incriminates herself further.
- In "Stan By Me", Yoonie's attempts to prove her innocence in the murder of Mia Carr are hampered by the fact that she's also trying to cover up the fact that she was with her boyfriend, Dae-Min, on the night of the murder; they were supposedly broken up after Dae-Min got arrested for a DUI, which was a major scandal in their native Korea.
- Not Me This Time: In "Bad Blood", Kylie is forced to go undercover with her coding club to find out who stole a code that she designed and used it in a ransomware attack. One of her friends, Angelique, admits to "borrowing" Kylie's code for one of her jobs, but insists that even if it had somehow been stolen from her and weaponized, she'd already removed Kylie's signature so it wouldn't have been traced to her.
- Oh, Crap!: In "Zero Sum", Rizwan is forced to cover one of Phoebe's lecture while she does work on the latest case. Previously, he'd only served as a teaching assistant for small classes, but Phoebe's lecture has almost 200 students. Naturally, he's horrified. He's even more horrified when, despite his first lecture being a disaster, Mercer decides to send him out again.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: Phoebe is shocked to learn that her new professor Rachel Meyers stole another student's report on chat bots to use in a grant proposal.
- Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: In "Stan By Me", Yoonie Kang eventually admits to having an intense friendship with one of her more obsessed fans, Mia Carr, that somehow managed to be almost mutually beneficial, as Mia was given a focus for her otherwise-aimless life, while Yoonie got the affection and validation that she craved but which was denied to her by her tightly-controlled career. Of course, once Yoonie got a new boyfriend that Mia didn't approve of, this arrangement fell apart rapidly.
- Red Herring:
- In "Dead Woman Walking", the initial suspect in the poisoning of a journalist is a Russian gangster that the journalist and her partner were investigating, but then the gangster is suddenly shot dead.
- In "Lost Souls", Kylie notices that the same man keeps appearing in the background of photos and videos of Shanae Butler, including the last known video of her from before her disappearance, and believes that he might be involved with whatever happened to her. He ends up coming to Alec of his own will and reveals that he's an insurance investigator; Shanae has a massive life-insurance policy, but it's tied to her assumed future earnings as a tennis player, and the company (rightly) suspects that she's been covering up an injury that will end her career.
- Refuge in Audacity: In "The Wrong Side of Maybe", in order to shut down a troubled railway line that is overloaded with trains carrying combustible chemicals, Alec resorts to jumping on the rail and frantically waving his arms to trigger the sensors, forcing the entire line to shut down. He very nearly gets hit by the train at the front, as the conductor waited until the last possible moment to stop, convinced that Alec was bluffing.
- The Resenter:
- In "Zero Sum", Veronica's kidnapper is the son of her mother's ex-paramour, who resents Veronica because his dad took an interest in Veronica's education and he feels that he's being neglected.
- In "Scorched Earth", the culprit in the arson that killed a young man and badly wounded a young woman is Caroline Rixton, the co-owner of the house that they were in. She was angry that her sisters blocked her plan to turn the property into an animal refuge and thus set fire to the place so that neither of them would be able to enact their own plans for the property.
- Revenge Before Reason:
- In "Collateral Damage", Rose and Alec are kidnapped by a widower whose wife was killed in an MI6 operation gone wrong, one which happened to involve Rose. Alec figures that there's no point trying to reason with the guy, because he wants revenge and Alec's research has shown that anyone who wants revenge badly enough won't be deterred by logic.
- In "Kicked in the Teeth", the killer of the week is initially just knocking off his half-siblings in order to increase his share of the inheritance from their shared father, but as he realizes just how many half-siblings he has, and how many of them are living better lives than he is, his resentment grows and he becomes increasingly sloppy, making it easier for Marisa and Alec to track him.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The plot of "Point and Shoot" borrows heavily from Breonna Taylor case, in which a black nurse was killed by cops serving a no-knock warrant on her boyfriend. The episode also borrows from the case of Anjanette Young, who was terrorized by police who were mistakenly given a no-knock warrant for her address, although that case only ended in a wrongful arrest.
- Scars Are Forever: Mercer is heavily and visible scarred on the right side of his face; despite treatments for the injuries which caused them they're clearly permanent. He's asked frequently about how he got his scars, which Mercer answers usually by making something up.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the first season finale, Phoebe suddenly receives a job offer from Dr. Myers, one of Alec's colleagues. Still traumatized from her experiences being taken hostage in "Bombshell", plus with Mercer's office having been destroyed at the end of that episode, she reluctantly decides to take the offer, hoping that it will at least provide her with a safer work environment. While she feels guilty about abandoning Alec, he reveals that he had actually reached out to Dr. Myers in the first place, as he felt Phoebe would benefit from a change of scenery.
- Smokescreen Crime:
- In "Point and Shoot", it turns out that the murder of the week was intended to cover up several local cops and a judge being on the take from a corrupt multinational corporation.
- In "Scorched Earth", the culprit of the week sets off a string of fires near unhoused camps in order to make the burning of the Rixton house look like the work of a serial firebug.
- In "Reciprocity", Alec and Marisa learn the truth about the bombing: Kevin Sanford accidentally killed Natalie Price, a campaign aide, and in a panic, called up Bob Caswith, an old war buddy who worked for the FBI. Caswith helped cover up Natalie's overdose, then arranged for a bombing in which she was supposedly killed.
- Spotting the Thread: In "The Real Deal", Rose detects that a room has a hidden door because the room's dimensions don't match up with the floor plan.
- Suspicious Lack of Theft: In "Kicked in the Teeth", Marisa and Alec investigate the murder of a newscaster. At first, the police assumed it was a robbery gone wrong, but Alex and Marisa notice that the killer didn't really take much of value, despite the victim being well-off, and thus assume that the real motive was the murder.
- Tension-Defusing Joke: In "Ghost Ship", the only surviving witness in an apparent violent mutiny aboard a ship is a Vietnamese immigrant named Quan, but he's too shell-shocked to speak, and the authorities accidentally make things worse when they interrogate him as a potential suspect. In order to win Quan's trust, Alec brings him over to his father's house for dinner. The home-cooked meal and a bit of alcohol help loosen him up, and then once the elder Mercer tells him an amusing story that gets a laugh out of him, he finally trusts Alec enough to talk to him about what happened.
- Tough Love: In "Zero Sum", Mercer decides that Rizwan needs to move out of his comfort zone, and thus has him cover some of Phoebe's lectures, despite Rizwan having very little experience with large classes. As he later explains, he does not expect Rizwan to do well, but he expects that he'll learn more about how to give lectures.
- Twofer Token Minority:
- Kylie Mercer, Alec's sister, is a queer black woman.
- In "Point and Shoot", Alec testifies in the case of an officer-involved shooting where the victim was a gay black man.
- Viva Las Vegas!: In "Lucky Charms", Mercer and his team head to Las Vegas when one of his former students gets into trouble.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Alec has an understandable aversion to fire as a result of being so badly burned. In "Scorched Earth", he gets locked in a burning building and very nearly loses his composure.
- Wicked Stepmother: "Lost Souls" features a gender-flipped version: Shanae Butler's stepfather David is a failed tennis player-turned-abusive coach who attempts to murder her in order to collect on her massive life-insurance policy.
- Win Them with Laughter: In "Ghost Ship", the only surviving witness in an apparent violent mutiny aboard a ship is a Vietnamese immigrant named Quan, but he's too shell-shocked to speak, and the authorities accidentally make things worse when they interrogate him as a potential suspect. In order to win Quan's trust, Alec brings him over to his father's house for dinner. The home-cooked meal and a bit of alcohol help loosen him up, and then once the elder Mercer tells him an amusing story that gets a laugh out of him, he finally trusts Alec enough to talk to him about what happened.
- Working with the Ex:
- Alec frequently works alongside his ex-wife Marisa. He hopes that this will eventually repair their relationship, but Marisa shows signs of already having moved on. He eventually makes peace with this.
- In "Bad Blood", Alec works opposite Rose on investigating the death of a stockbroker. He's been hired by the DA, but she's working for one of the suspects.