Take Out

Summary
Multiple, initially non-violent, robberies at upscale restaurants bring Don's team in once they escalate to murder. Elsewhere, both Charlie and Don must do some soul searching, as the latter tackles a psychiatric review and the former questions the ethics of a pharmaceutical company that wants to use his name, apparently with CalSci's, specifically Mildred's, blessing.

Main

 * Rob Morrow as Don Eppes
 * David Krumholtz as Charlie Eppes
 * Judd Hirsch as Alan Eppes
 * Alimi Ballard as David Sinclair
 * Peter MacNicol as Larry Fleinhardt
 * Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan
 * Diane Farr as Megan Reeves
 * Dylan Bruno as Colby Granger

Guest

 * José Zúñiga as Bernardo Infante (credited as Jose Zuniga)
 * Rhys Coiro as Ricky Jones
 * Marc Jablon as Meisner
 * Montae Russell as Officer at Scene
 * Wendell Pierce as William Bradford
 * Kathy Najimy as Dr. Mildred Finch
 * Benny Nieves as Hector Campos
 * Elisa Llamido as Maria Campos

Title
A play on words, with the overlapping, interweaving images of food eaten at home, but collected from the restaurant, and the permanent removal of a player from a game, possibly by killing them, or at least preventing them from playing any further significant role.

Trivia
The restaurant where Don and his team is waiting for one of the robber teams is called "Three14" which is a reference to Pi usually shortened to 3.14

The numbers for this episode are "3 Course meal 1 Restaurant 4 Robbers 1592 Death Squad Murders." The first six digits of pi are 3.141592.

Pi is referenced at least twice, which has the approximate value of 3.14, the number of the episode itself: A. When Charlie meets Mildred in the garden, she's reading a book called "Life of Pi". B. When Charlie explains his idea using the refrigerator example, he counts various kinds of foods, and end his list with a pie (a homophone of Pi).

Pi is a number closely associated with circles--though as Charlie said in a previous episode, it also shows up in other places seemingly at random--and for many centuries mathematicians struggled to accurately calculate its digits. Some of the earliest advancements, after Archimedes, in approximating pi were achieved (separately) by Chinese and Indian mathematicians in the fifth century. The menus Charlie pulls out of his drawer when evaluating past targets to predict future targets are for an Indian restaurant, a pizza restaurant called "Pie Oh My!," and a Chinese/Mandarin restaurant; both the Indian and Chinese menus feature a circle prominently in their cover design. Additionally, it is pizza (sometimes referred to as "pie") that Millie brings to the Eppes house for dinner.

If one wanted to make the connection, the "circle circle tangent" joke Charlie mentions telling "the senator" at the fundraiser could be considered yet another reference to pi, both in the reference to circles, to which pi is closely associated, and even more loosely in a common fractional approximate to pi (22/7) which bears a passing resemblance to the 007 formula on which the joke is based.

The number three is recurring in this episode: three survivors of the village massacre, three deaths during the robberies (two police officers and a valet), three members of the Eppes family, three robbers captured at the restaurant. If rounded to a single digit, pi would be three.

Goofs
The character of Colonel Infante is said to be from the Mexican Army, and constant mention is made of Mexico. But when the file with Infante's information is shown, two Guatemalan flags (a white horizontal stripe between two blue stripes, with a blue emblem in the center) are prominent on it, and no Mexican flag is in evidence.

At one point, Charlie finds Millie sitting on a bench outside on campus, reading "Life of Pi", a book by Spanish-born Canadian author Yann Martel. As Millie pauses in her reading to speak with Charlie, there doesn't appear to be any words on the page that she stops at in the book.

Crazy Credits
3 Course meal 1 Restaurant 4 Robbers 1592 Death Squad Murders