"Dark Matter" is the nineteenth episode of the second season, and the thirty-second episode overall of Numb3rs.
Charlie helps the team determine how many shooters there were in a school massacre.
Plot[]
A school bell rings and students file out of their classrooms. A flash grenade goes off and assailants open fire throughout the school. People run and hide trying to get away from the chaos. One of the shooters gets shot after shooting at two girls in a closet by an accomplice saying ‘DMG rules!’
Don talks to the school principal. There were two shooters. Seven students, and one teacher were killed plus 12 students were wounded. Don wants to talk to everybody. David takes Don to the body of the shooter that was shot. Megan IDs him as Paul Elins. He was marked as absent that day. Colby figures that the other shooter got away with the crowd as security found a backpack with a similar outfit to Elins’ in it. A cellphone starts to ring, the caller ID showing ‘Dad’. Don answers and informs him of his daughter’s death.
They discuss Elins’ history to see if they can find why he shot up the school. The school uses RFID tags to show them where each kid is while at the school. Don takes the information to Charlie, Amita, and Larry. They have methods to figure out how the shooters moved through the school. Megan, David, and Colby talk about Elins’ and his potential friends from a group he was in – The Dark Matter Guild (DMG for short). The school paper did an article about them not long ago. The editor of the paper, Karen Camden, was with Becky Flynn, the girl that was killed in the closet. David and Colby follow up with Gregory Dietrich, the self-proclaimed leader of the DMG (at least in the article). They were a guild in MMORPGs. He denies knowledge of the school shooting or Elins' eventual actions prior to them happening. He was sick from school due to a cold, but Colby isn’t buying that. Megan goes to talk to Karen. She wonders why Elins’ didn’t shoot her. She said they were bullied by other students and she wrote the article to try to show people who they were. She never saw the other shooter. Upon more questioning she tells Megan that Justin Price, one of Elins’ closer friends would brag about guns and was obsessed with the Columbine shooting.
David and Colby inform Don about what they found about Price. Don found out that he has a juvenile record. Overall they can account for 46 of 77 of the ‘absent’ students. They were there, they just forgot their badges. 31 were absent including Price. Megan comes in with the ballistics report. The shooters used guns that were owned by Price’s uncle. Charlie and Larry arrive with the news of where the shooters entered the school from. It turns out that the metal detectors at that entrance were down for scheduled maintenance. Larry sees a picture of Elins and Price. He recognizes the neon light behind them as a fixture at an all-night cyber café. David and Colby bring a team in to get him. He is there and has a gun. He starts firing and SWAT fires, killing him.
The blood on Price’s boots matches blood from the shooting, however the gun that he had on him only matches two of the five kills he was suspected of carrying out. He had no others on him. The rest of the uncle’s guns are still in the wind. They put surveillance on the rest of the DMG.
Charlie and Amita are plotting out people on a grid marked like the school. The two of them and Larry discuss high school and then his feelings towards Megan. Charlie is back at the board confused by some of the data. Larry is suggesting that they go to the school to see if the topography has changed.
Megan talks to Price’s mother. She only met Elins, nobody else in the DMG. She wanted to take better care of her son, but wasn’t able to in trying to work as a single parent. She got her brother to help take care of him. After her brother died it left a hole in Price’s life. She didn’t know her brother still had guns as she asked him to get rid of them. There was also a storage locker paid for via money order in her name that she knew nothing about.
The brain trio are at the school mapping out the halls. When Amita was in school one of her classmates held two people hostage at gun point, but eventually let them go and then jumped off the roof of the school. They can’t find any differences between their map of the school and the actual school. Charlie gets some walkie talkies off of the cops there and goes through the path that Price took with Larry and Amita keeping time. Charlie needs to talk to Don.
Colby finds unused ammo at the storage locker, but no guns. There were also blueprints of the school and the maintenance schedule for the metal detectors. Megan and David found a game on Price’s computer that was a mock-up of the shooting. He and Elins were playing the night before, but other DMG members had also been playing. Charlie arrives at the FBI office with his findings. There wasn’t enough time for Price to get to all of the victims that they assumed he shot. There had to have been a third shooter that they now need to find. Megan and David go back to the school. They talk to the principal again. They want the files of the DMG members, but the parents of the kids won’t consent to the files being given out. Megan thinks they should go the military route as they have the same access to the school files as colleges.
Megan drops off more files with Charlie, Amita, and Larry. He’s thinking he’ll have everything analyzed within the next day. Charlie and Amita excuse themselves, leaving Larry and Megan alone. He asks her out on a date which she accepts. Halfway through the analysis Charlie hasn’t found anything. Don, David, and Colby discuss. Colby found an e-mail on the school server from Dietrich saying they should be careful the next day.
Charlie and Larry talk about Larry’s upcoming date with Megan. Amita comes in and identifies Dietrich as a good suspect for the third shooter. Larry has turned his attentions to the map of the shooting and wonders about his path through the school.
Megan tells Don that Dietrich bought a device that can hack into Wi-Fi networks. The school found a breech on their Wi-Fi a week after he bought the device. Colby lets them know he was seen at his house. David and Colby stake out Dietrich’s house. Neither can understand what’s happening now with the school shooting. They see him leave the house and they go after him. He runs and throws the bag he’s carrying away. David gets the bag and Colby tackles Dietrich.
Don and Megan interrogate him with a lawyer present. He says that Price gave him the gun to go into the woods to shoot cans. He claims that the blueprints he stole were for the game he made for authenticity. He pins it all on Elins and Price. The gun he had doesn’t match any of the shootings on campus. Colby finds out that the e-mail came from his account, but was sent from the library. He would have had to be in two places at once for him to have been the one that sent it, but there is security footage of him being off-campus at the time.
Larry comes into Charlie’s office. He’s picked an Ethiopian restaurant for his date later. Charlie turns back to the case, telling Larry his questions about shooter three’s path weren’t unfounded. Charlie briefs the core FBI team. Shooters one and two made a logical path through the school, but shooter three made a circular path which was inefficient. Shooter three was targeting specific people and using the RFID trackers for the students they were able to find them quickly.
Megan and Larry are on their date. They talk a bit about the case. He wishes he could go back in time to talk to the kids before they did the shooting. They talk about Megan’s past and a bit of how she got into the FBI. They talk about the case again and how different shooter three was so different from one and two. Larry gives her some insight.
Don is annoyed that he got a call in the middle of the night from Charlie with new information for the case. Megan thinks they should look at the victims to figure out who shooter three could have been. Charlie talks to the core FBI team about the victims. All three were part of a steroid scandal and a party that was broken up by the cops. Karen Camden was on the police report from the party. Since she was at the party and knew the DMG students they think that she may have been in on it. She bought a PDA not long before the shooting which would have enabled her to track the students and she and Price were found to have spent some time in a hotel room. He could have been manipulated into doing the shooting. David finds out that an article on the steroid scandal was written by Camden and in the end some of the team captains lost their college scholarships. Meagan and Colby talk to her mother. They want to know what happened at the party to make them targets. Camden comes in and lets them know that they had raped her in retaliation after the article. Becky set it up and the boys roofied her. They took pictures of the act. Because they were the stars of the school it would have been he said, she said scenario. Megan, David, and Colby approach Jake Porter, one of the school wrestlers. They’re there to arrest him for Camden’s rape. He denies it saying that she’s the crazy girl who shot up the school and how could anybody believe what she says. Holt, one of the victims of the shooting, had recorded the asset on his cell phone giving them all of the evidence they need to arrest him.
At the Eppes’ house Don is reading an article about the shooting. He likes to see how they spin it. Don and Charlie talk about their high school experience.
Cast[]
Main[]
- Rob Morrow as Don Eppes
- David Krumholtz as Charlie Eppes
- Judd Hirsch as Alan Eppes
- Alimi Ballard as David Sinclair
- Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan
- Diane Farr as Megan Reeves
- Peter MacNicol as Larry Fleinhardt
Recurring[]
Guest[]
- Leighton Meester as Karen Camden
- Jesse Head as Gregory Dietrich
- Christine Estabrook as Laura Price
- Rob Moran as Jon Northrup
- Marin Mazzie as Joan Camden
- Mary Gordon Murray as Marlene Stallworth
- Daniel Booko as Jake Porter
Trivia[]
Deaths[]
Crazy Credits[]
[This appears on the beginning of the episode] 4 years, 1.8 million hazing's, 192 rounds, 6 minutes
| v - e - dSeason 2 |
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| Judgment Call • Better or Worse • Obsession • Calculated Risk • Assassin • Soft Target • Convergence • In Plain Sight • Toxin • Bones of Contention • Scorched • The OG • Double Down • Harvest • The Running Man • Protest • Mind Games • All's Fair • Dark Matter • Guns and Roses • Rampage • Backscatter • Undercurrents • Hot Shot |