And the Winner Is…

Synopsis
Larry turns up again after having wandered the desert for quite some time, while the FBI works to solve jewelry heist at an awards show, while dealing with celebrities and their egos.

Plot
Don is at Charlie’s house, hoping to watch a hockey game only to discover Amita is watching the 6th Annual Cinema and Television Viewers’ Select Awards. During an acceptance speech, the theater for the awards show starts to fill with smoke and the venue is evacuated. In the rush of people trying to get outside, a group of enterprising thieves manages to steal expensive jewelry from sixteen celebrities. Colby and Nikki start interviewing stars who had items stolen while David meets Elizabeth Hopkins, a representative from Lloyd’s of London, attending the awards show to keep an eye on the items her company insures.

Colby and Nikki are sent to talk to the director of the awards show to get the film footage of the event. Oliver shows them the footage and explains the smoke is too distorting to really make out much of anything. They take his footage for analysis and also add in all of the footage taken by various news outlets present. David and Elizabeth talk to Hans Stollbach, the owner of a high-end jewelry store where most of the stolen items were from. David suspects Hans was in on the robbery in order to get the insurance pay out. Hans explains the jewels were severely undervalued and he wouldn’t really get much from the insurance claim.

Looking over the footage and other director’s notes for the show, Charlie is able to work out there were six people who committed the crimes and where the thieves had to be sitting order to maximize their chances for theft. The seats he points out where all supposed to be for celebrities, but Oliver points out the need for seat fillers, people paid a small fee to fill seats when celebrities are not present to make the theater look full. Nikki goes to talk to Paula Watson who arranged the seat fillers for the event. She states all of her seat fillers are college students with dreams of being famous, they aren’t the type to commit robbery on such a scale.

David and Nikki run checks on the names Paula gave them and discover six aliases on the list. Nikki goes back to Paula who explains Geno Morelli, one of the cameramen, gave her the six names and said they were friends who wanted to be at the show. David, Colby and Nikki go to Morelli’s apartment only to find the cameraman dead. Before they do a proper search, someone starts shooting and they chase Jose Duran. Duran chooses to jump to his death. When the FBI searches the apartment later, there are no jewels. However Morelli did have a connection with Raul Hernandez and known thief to Elizabeth Hopkins.

Using facial recognition and crown flux dynamics, Amita and Charlie are able to identify the other members of the robbery crew at the theater. A check on the other names shows three of them worked at a sweatshop together. David leads a bust at the sweatshop and they find the whole crew, including Raul Hernandez, and the stolen jewels. The only problem is the jewels they find are all fakes.

All of the recovered jewels came from Hans Stollbach’s store. Hans admits he gave the celebrities glass instead of the real thing as he’s had problems getting items back. He didn’t want word to get out that he was offering fake jewels instead of real ones, and filed the insurance claim. Raul Hernandez tells Nikki Morelli was killed because Hernandez thought Morelli had switched the stones. Charlie works out that the remaining stolen jewels were the ones Jose Duran stole and he is able to recreate Duran’s escape route from the theater. Duran took a much longer route to leave and David works out Duran handed the jewels off to someone in the crowd so he wouldn’t be caught. Actually what happened was a double hand off, Duran to Morelli and Morelli to someone in the audience who hid the jewels in a compartment under one of the seats. The FBI catches Regina Landers, one of the celebrities who states she had been robbed, in the theater taking the jewels from the compartment. She states Geno was an old friend and she needed the money from the insurance claim.

Main

 * Rob Morrow as Don Eppes
 * David Krumholtz as Charlie Eppes
 * Judd Hirsch as Alan Eppes
 * Alimi Ballard as David Sinclair
 * Dylan Bruno as Colby Granger
 * Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan
 * Sophina Brown as Nikki Betancourt
 * Peter MacNicol as Larry Fleinhardt
 * Aya Sumika as Liz Warner

Reccuring

 * Rowena King as Elizabeth Hopkins
 * Stephen Spinella as Hans Stollbach
 * Marilu Henner as Regina Landers
 * Alanna Ubach as Paula Watson
 * William Katt as Sven Regal
 * Rick Hoffman as Oliver
 * Kate Siegel as Rachel Hollander
 * Armando Molina as Raul Hernandez
 * Taylor Wilcox as Scarlet McBain

Trivia

 * Although the episode seems to promise a reunion of 'Taxi (1978)' stars Judd Hirsch and Marilu Henner, they in fact have no scenes together.

Goofs
Larry talks to Charlie about a star that had been dead for 2.2 million light-years. A light-year is a unit of distance, not a unit of time. There is no way that an astrophysicist would make a mistake like this.

Larry Fleinhardt says he had a special interest in a star he calls M170. He says one time he looked for the star, it wasn't there anymore, having "died 2.2 million light-years ago". Unless he was using a powerful telescope (which he didn't mention), it's not possible to see an individual star 2.2 million light-years away. The most distant stars visible to the naked eye are less than 7000 light-years away.

Multiple times Elizabeth Hopkins says that she is an employee of "Lloyds of London" and that her "company insured" an item of jewelry. Contrary to popular misconception Lloyds of London is an underwriter, or market, of insurance policies but does not actually insure anything.

Larry uses "light year" to describe a long period of time, when it is actually the DISTANCE light travels in one year, about six trillion miles. It has nothing to do with time, it would be like saying someone will be twenty miles old on his next birthday.

Grazy credits
[This appears on the beginning of the episode] 16 victims, 6 robbers, 24 million dollars, 22 million witnesses