Pilot

Pilot (#CA101)
First Aired:	July 13, 2010
Writer:	Matt Corman & Chris Ord
Director:	Tim Matheson
Guest Starring:
Previous Episode:	None
Next Episode:	Walter's Walk

Synopsis

Annie Walker is training to become a CIA agent, when she is plucked out a month early and brought to the headquarters, supposedly because of her language skills (she speaks seven languages). Her mission is to trade intel with a Moscow assassin, exchanging information for money. But when their meeting in the hotel is interrupted by rapid gunfire, Annie barely manages to get out alive, and is unable to get the intel. The stress of the work is not helped by her tumultuous social life, having been abandoned in the middle of the night by her past boyfriend, who seems to have as many secrets as Annie.

Full Recap **This section contains SPOILERS. Read ahead at your own risk.*** click here to skip to the cast

CIA trainee Annie Walker is doing a polygraph examination for the CIA admission. After control questions, personal questions follow and the interviewer asks about her last serious relationship to determine whether she will be able to separate her work life from her personal life and she answers, "yes".

A lot of CIA trainees wait for their first parachute jump. The instructor asks who wants to go first and Annie volunteers. After the jump, Annie is picked up to see her commanding officer who informs her that he got orders to pull her from training and sent her to headquarters because they need her language skills for a case.

When Annie Walker enters the CIA headquarters in Langley, she meets a guy named Conrad who guesses she is new and offers his help to show her where to get her badge. While Annie is filling out the paperwork and takes the oath to become a CIA agent, the director of clandestine services, Arthur Campbell, is holding a meeting for the internal staff, to tell them that one of them is a traitor and feeding fied information to a journalist named Liza Hearn. He promises they will find the traitor and punish the traitor.

A blind tech ops named Auggie Anderson picks Annie up to give her a tour through the CIA building and to lead her to Joan Campbell's office. Joan Campbell is the head of the domestic protection division and Annie's new boss. Joan Campbell introduces Annie to her case. The CIA made a deal with a Russian assassin working for the FSB called Stanislav Orlovski to exchange a list with the FSB's current targets for asylum and compensation. Annie was assigned as Stas' handler and is ordered to meet with Stas in his hotel room, hot-sync two dedicated two-way encripted transponders to exchange bank codes for his payment and the intel for the CIA.

Annie waits in the lobby of Stas' hotel for the meeting where she sees an attractive man who invites her to have a drink with him. She rejects his offer and leaves when her pager signals that Stas is ready for the exchange. Annie meets Stas in his hotel room. They start to hot-sync their devices when suddenly a sniper takes the room under fire and kills Stas. Annie is not able to take her device with the intel, but she can escape the room. Outside, CIA agents are already waiting to bring her to safety, and the sniper escapes.

Annie's boss Joan Campbell and her husband Arthur, director of clandestine services, are sitting down with a couples counselor because Joan thinks Arthur is having an affair and is hiding behind his job. Arthur denies having an affair when Joan's assistant interrupts them to inform Joan that they have a situation.

Joan meets Annie and tells her that most operatives never see gunfire during their whole career. Joan reasons that Stas' intel was worth killing for and learns that Annie didn't grab the device. Joan explains that they won't be able to get the intel because the FBI is already at the crime scene, but Annie tells her she can get it back.

Annie dresses up and Auggie gives her another device to download the intel from the two devices in the hotel room. Annie returns to the hotel and is allowed to access the crime scene when she tells the investigating officer that she was in the hotel room when it happened. The FBI agent who guesses Annie is a call girl interrogates Annie who gives him a false name and tells him she works for a club named Gold Circle Club. While she tells him what happened, she gets close enough to the devices to download the intel. When she has the intel, she turns to leave, but the FBI agent holds her back and asks why she came back. She takes the shoes she left during the gunfire and tells him she came back for her Christian Louboutins which don't come cheap. When Annie is gone, the agent calls the number for the club Annie gave him and Auggie answers as Gold Circle Club.

Annie returns with the intel and Joan, Auggie and Annie take a look only to learn that Stas had only old intel and nothing useful for the CIA and Joan closes the file on Stas. Soon later, Auggie finds Annie who is upset about her first day at the CIA. He gives her a pep talk and invites her to have a drink with him. At the bar, Auggie asks Annie why she joined the CIA and she tells him when she traveled the world she fell in love with a guy, but he broke her heart when he left in the middle of the night. She continued to travel but realized that she had let her guard down and didn't want to get burned again so she joined the CIA.

Meanwhile, Joan who is still convinced that her husband is having an affair, finds Arthur in a restaurant with an attractive woman. The two assure Joan that their meeting is work-related, but Joan doesn't believe them. She confronts Arthur with phone records that proves he called the woman multiple times and he is stunned that she used agency resources to track him. He asks her why she can't be a good CIA wife, but Joan replies that she is not a CIA wife, but a wife who works for the CIA and leaves.

At the bar, Conrad has joined Auggie and Annie when Annie suddenly realizes that she was supposed to be at her sister's house an hour ago and quickly leaves. On her way to her sister's house, Annie discovers that another car is following her. She uses her training to counter-pursue her follower, but the other driver is able to lose her. When Annie gets home to her sister, she is just in time for the dinner where she meets Ethan. Her sister Danielle invited Ethan to set the two up, but Ethan turns out to be pretty annoying.

The next morning, Danielle apologizes to Annie for inviting Ethan. She adds she can't believe Ethan even tried to kiss Annie when Annie remembers that Stav called her kiisu several times before he was killed. She wants to leave quickly, but her sister misunderstands her behavior and believes Annie is mad at her because of Ethan. Danielle adds that she just wanted to help Annie because she hasn't had a relationship for quite some time which makes Annie mad at her and she leaves.

Meanwhile, Arthur Campbell welcomes Liza Hearn in his office, the journalist who is receiving intel from someone in the CIA. She makes sure from the beginning that she won't reveal her sources, even if she has to go to jail. Arthur offers to be her source, but Liza Hearn doesn't let him charm her. She tells him she will balance her coverage a little better if he never calls her for another sit-down again and leaves.

At the Georgetown University, Annie meets her old Russian teacher. She tells him that she is dating a Russian guy from Moscow who calls her kiisu. He gets serious and tells her not to work for the CIA and warns her that nothing good will come out of it. She denies working for the CIA and asks again about kiisu which she never heard before. Her professor tells her that kiisu means kitten, but not in Russian, but Estonian. A guy from Moscow wouldn't use that word, only someone who would pretend to come from there.

When Annie returns to the CIA headquarters, vehicles turn up to block her way. In Joan's office, Joan Campbell informs Annie that she breached the protocol when she involved a civilian, her former professor, in a CIA matter. Annie tries to argue that Stas is still alive because things don't add up like the car chase, the bad intel and the word kiisu a Russian wouldn't use, but Joan just sends her back to the farm and tells her that she will be lucky if she get a desk job and dismisses her.

Soon after, Auggie finds Annie crying in the rest room and gives her another pep talk. He tells her that Joan would already have fired her if she wanted to and adds that the CIA likes people who take initiative, so Annie asks Auggie for his help.

The two gain access to the morgue and start looking for Stas' body. When Annie finds the body, she starts looking for the tattoos Stas' body would be covered with, since he spent ten years in a Siberian prison. She doesn't find any tattoos, but the FBI shows up to arrest the two.

Auggie and Annie are both being interrogated by the FBI agent Annie met at the hotel room and both tell him a story about being a call girl and a client who visited the morgue because Auggie is kind of a fetishist who is turned on by dead bodies. Annie tells the agent that her agency is very discreet with a number of federal employees and civil servants as customers when the agent's phone rings. The agent leaves to take the call. When he comes back, he tells Annie that he was just called by his boss's boss who told him to release them.

At the headquarters, Joan receives a report from the NSA to tell her that her husband's conversations with the woman from the restaurant were all work-related. The agent reporting tells Joan her husband is not having an affair and she thanks him.

Back at the headquarters, Annie and Auggie learn that they were right and that dna samples proved that the body is not Stas. Auggie, Annie and Joan figure that Stas didn't fake his death for the money since the transfer didn't go through and Auggie checks the HSTL, the high security threat list, which lists Stas as deceased. Now that no one is any longer looking for a deceased Stas, he is free to kill a target. They check the threat matrix and find an outspoken Russian journalist named Victor Petrov who is visiting D.C. and who is at an awards dinner at the Smithsonian at that moment.

Annie, Joan and other agents arrive at the Smithsonian dinner. While Joan approaches Petrov and brings him to safety, then they continue to look for the assassin Stas. Ethan, Annie's date from her sister's dinner whose employer is also a sponsor bumps into her and starts apologizing for the other night when Annie excuses herself, because she spotted the assassin who is the guy she met in the hotel before she went to the exchange. She chases the real Stas through the kitchen, out of the Smithsonian and into a Metro station. Annie loses Stas for a moment, but he comes out of the shadow and overwhelms her. Annie tries to save her life by telling him that the CIA loves to negotiate, and when it doesn't work, she reveals that she noticed his Spanish accent was faked. He orders her to get to her knees, but she attacks him. The two fight and Stas overwhelms Annie and starts choking her. Before she passes out, a train rolls in and Annie sees her long lost love walk out the train. He shoots Stas and gets back on the train before the train leaves.

Later, Annie is given the intelligence commendation award for her work on neutralizing an enemy spy. She thanks Arthur Campbell and tells him that she is looking forward to return to the agency as soon as her training is over and learns that she won't have to return, but can stay at the agency as of now because her country needs her. After receiving the award, Annie approaches Joan to tell her she saw someone she met before kill Stas. Joan answers that Annie went through a lot and that another agent arrived in time to kill Stas. Then Joan takes Annie's award because awards don't leave the headquarters and stay there in the vault.

Joan leaves and meets her husband. She tells Arthur that the guy Annie fell in love with in Sri Lanka, Ben Mercer, resurfaced the moment they brought Annie in. She asks Arthur if they should mobilize an ops team, but he answers not yet because Ben Mercer would slip away if they moved too quickly. He asks Joan to keep Annie working, to keep her out there and hopes she will lead them right to Mercer.

When Annie comes home to her sister's home that evening, she goes straight for the fridge to get some ice cream. Her sister Danielle shows up and realizes that Annie had a rough day. Annie assures her that she is fine, but Danielle answers that she is such a bad liar that she would make the worst spy ever. Danielle asks Annie if she wants to talk about her day, but Annie answers not that night and leaves for the guest house. Outside, Ben Mercer is watching her and leaves soon after.

Cast

Main characters

• Piper Perabo as Annie Walker
• Christopher Gorham as Auggie Anderson
• Kari Matchett as Joan Campbell
• Eric Lively as Conrad Seehan III (Only episode as main)
• Anne Dudek as Danielle Brooks

Recurring characters

• Peter Gallagher as Arthur Campbell
• Eion Bailey as Ben Mercer

Quotes

Auggie Anderson: Seeing that dead body really turned me on.
FBI Agent: You're blind.
Auggie Anderson: What, are you a sightest?

Annie: So is this, like, your thing? You wait outside the entrance and chat up girls on their first day?
Conrad: Absolutely. I'm both lazy and predatory.

Joan: How much do you know about the domestic protection division?
Annie: Uh, I've actually never heard of it.
Joan: Good. That's the way we want it.

Annie: Can I ask you a question?
Auggie: I was special ops in Iraq. I got out of a humvee to look at what I thought was a dead dog. Next thing you know, I'm Ray Charles.
Annie: Oh. I was gonna ask what the headphones are for.
Auggie: Oversharing. My bad.

Danielle: Wow. Straight to the Cherry Garcia. Rough day, huh?
Annie: No. I'm fine.
Danielle: You're such a horrible liar! You'd make like the worst spy ever.

Arthur: Welcome, Miss Hearn. So glad you could make it. I brought along some legal counsel to brighten up the room.

Auggie: You alright?
Annie: I saw a man get killed today. I lied to a federal agent. I was shot at.
Auggie: Or as we call it "Thursday at the agency."

Auggie: Blind guy leading you around the CIA. Insert ironic joke here.

Trivia, Songs & References

Trvia

• Piper Perabo was the first actor cast for the show.
• The CIA is prohibited by law to work on cases on US soil. So the name and description of the Domestic Protection Division portrayed on the show is taking dramatic license.
• Annie's first mission is one month prior to when her training was supposed to be completed.

Songs

• "Dog Days Are Over" by Florence & The Machine. Annie skydiving.
• "Something Good Can Work" by Two Door Cinema Club. Annie, Auggie & Conrad at the Tavern.
• "Young Blood" by The Naked And Famous. Annie, Auggie & Conrad at the Tavern, 2nd song.
• "People Say" by Portugal The Man. Annie, Auggie & Conrad back at the bar before Annie leaves.
• "Good Morning Midnight" by Fanfarlo. Outside Annie's house before dinner.
• "Finish Line" by Fanfarlo. Dinner party.
• "Before It Breaks" by Brandi Carlile. Annie's bedroom.

Gallery

References

• Annie references the Baltimore Colts when she describes how her boyfriend left her. This is a real life infamous incident when the NFL team packed up all their equipment and left town in the middle of the night, having never announced they were relocating the team to Indianapolis.

See Also

Season One