Summer TV Rewind: Moonlight 1.04: “Fever”

“What do you do when the one you need to save your life is the one thing that would make life unbearable?”
- Mick

Oh in media res openings. If you watch TV enough, you’re bound to run across at least one in every series out there. This begins in a crappy motel in the desert with Mick lying in a tub of ice looking really bad. He’s about to bite Beth’s neck when we jump back 21 hours. Josh is trying a big murder case and Beth is reporting on it. She was trying to be just factual to keep her bias out of things. It’s kind of cute. Although I will be honest I was always more of a Mick and Beth fan than a Beth and Josh and so seeing how much they are pushing the latter is a little annoying. Beth is trying to get more information out of Josh about his court strategy but he’s tight lipped.

It turns out he’s got a secret witness hidden away in a safe house with some cops. Her name is Leni and she was the nanny for the daughter of the man on trial. She is also played by the actress who played Sugar on Glee. It is always amusing to find connections with actors that have been on other things I’ve seen. Anyway, Leni snags one of the cops’ phones and makes a call. Not long after, the safe house is hit. Both cops get killed but Leni gets away. Thanks to Beth’s good word, Josh now wants to hire Mick to find Leni and bring her back to testify. Mick begrudgingly hears him out and agrees to take the case. Yeah, that’s definitely not what Mick wanted to do on a Sunday morning. He’d rather be asleep in his freezer.

Mick and Josh walk the crime scene and Mick repeatedly corrects Josh’s assumptions about what happened. It was one shooter. There isn’t any of Leni’s blood downstairs and she didn’t take the predetermined route out of the house in case of attack (thanks to bullets flying). Mick tracks Leni’s blood (she cut her hand on the window latch in her escape attempt) and she apparently stole a car. Thanks to a little illegal GPS tracking from Beth’s camera man Steve, she and Mick find the car at the house of the dead guy, Jack. Mick finds some photos of Jack and Leni and then does a little snooping through a filing cabinet to figure out where Leni might have gone. So while he heads off to Victorville, Beth is supposed to stick around to be the clean line of communication to Josh. Josh is worried about a leak (obviously) and doesn’t want to risk anything else going wrong.

Mick gets to Victorville and after Leni freaks out and shoots him, he convinces her to go inside the truck stop and talk. Also, he needed to get out of the sun because as he told Beth, any sun is too much sun. Not only is the heat taking its toll on Mick but he’s starting to need some fresh blood, too. There isn’t really time for that, though. Especially after he figures out that Leni is pregnant and that’s a major factor in her decision not to testify. Back in LA, one of Josh’s colleagues points out that one of the dead cops at the safe house had a phone that mad a call to a cell phone registered to the guy on trial. So Josh gets a warrant and they mount up to figure out who got the call. I don’t entirely know why Beth had to be there but I guess it was convenient for when Mick called to tell her he’d found Leni. Josh tells Mick to stay put and local PD will be there within the hour. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not a good idea.

The same guy who hit the safe house shows up (after presumably killing a cop to get the uniform and the squad car) at the diner. Luckily, Mick gives him the slip by stealing said cop car! Unfortunately, since the guy on trial is an arms dealer, he’s got access to a helicopter with missiles. Yes, actually freaking missiles! So while Josh and Beth figure out that Leni called the girl she used to nanny (so that didn’t lead to the safe house hit), Mick and Leni have to avoid being nuked. They barely make it out alive. And on the other end, Josh gets the call about the burned up car. Beth understandably is angry. She accuses Josh of needing to figure out who the leak is, especially since Mick only talked to the two of them.

While Beth goes home and cries, Mick and Leni struggle through a few miles of desert before finding the crappy motel we saw at the start of the episode. In short order, Mick has Leni get lots of ice and he climbs into the tub. He fears he’ll bite Leni if he doesn’t get blood soon so he sends her to try and make contact with Beth. Finally, there is cell reception and Leni gives Beth the details of their location. Somehow, the hitman is still on their trail. Beth gets to the motel and after Mick initially refuses to drink her blood, he does (from her arm, not her neck like most people would assume). It’s a good thing he did, too. The hitman shows up and tries to threaten Beth. Mick breaks through the bathroom door and snaps the guy’s neck. Awesome! Oh and after feeding some fake information to his top two colleagues, Josh figures out who the mole was so problem solved there. Leni testifies and helps Josh win the case so hooray for the good guys all around!

Still, Beth can’t help but think about the experience of Mick feeding on her and clearly Mick needs some time to get Beth out of his system (literally). Beth shows up at Mick’s place but he doesn’t let her in. he thinks that her being around him is too dangerous and so he needs to keep his distance from her. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not going to last very long.