Rizzoli & Isles 5×08 – Lost & Found – Recap

Since current showrunner Jan Nash took over from her predecessor, Janet Tamaro, at the beginning of season 5, a significantly larger portion of each episode has been dedicated to the crime of the week. Rizzoli & Isles 5×08 was heavily crime-focused even by season 5 standards, but there was still some lightheartedness thrown in for good measure. Read on for our recap of “Lost & Found”:

This week’s victim gets shot when she takes a smoke break in an alley outside a club. They do say smoking kills…

Remember when Maura canceled dinner with new beau Jack, a professor, three times in the last episode? In Rizzoli & Isles 5×08, she and Jane finally make it to the Dirty Robber, where Jack decides it’s a good idea to tell a story about his fly being down in class. Awkberg. But Jane seems to think the evening’s going great and encourages Maura to loosen up. Of course, Maura proceeds to tell an embarrassing story involving a camping trip she took to the Adirondacks with Jane. I feel like I read fanfiction about that once.

The next day, Maura’s still obsessing over whether Jane actually liked Jack, but is soon distracted by the crime scene. Turns out the victim was married, but her husband didn’t call her cellphone when she failed to come home the previous night on account of being, well, dead. Frankie checks the husband’s credit card records and determines he was staying at a hotel downtown. Could divorce be a motive for the murder? Judging by the fact that the husband is found dead in his hotel room (shot through the peephole – ouch), the answer’s no. Ballistics confirms that husband and wife were killed by the same gun, and Korsak theorizes that the perp was a hitman based on the fact that the weapon had a silencer.

Boston Holiday

When Frankie heads to the BRIC (Boston Regional Intelligence Center – now you’ve learned something today), he meets Chicago transplant and tech whiz Nina Holiday, who is able to find video of the potential killer using the hotel’s security footage and then isolate the suspect’s face using his reflection in an elevator door. The elevator angle will become kind of ironic later, so keep reading.

Later, Korsak tells Jane that Nina is Homicide’s new hire – but she’s a BRIC homicide analyst, not a detective, so Frankie’s position remains unchanged.

According to executive producer Jan Nash, Nina’s quiet introduction was deliberate, given that she’s the first major new character to the show since actor Lee Thompson Young’s suicide last year necessitated the exit of Det. Barry Frost. As Nash told TV Guide:

I think usually it would be a big deal for any show, but we didn’t make it too much of a thing at the beginning. We wanted to ease into it given the circumstances. … We really put a lot of thought into creating this new character. We think of her as a new character, not his replacement per se. She’s filling a part of the show that is adjacent to, but not quite what Frost was doing.

Jane’s baseball debacle

It’s no secret that Jane likes baseball, and Jack is evidently trying to curry favor with his new lady’s best friend by capitalizing on this. He sends her a signed baseball worth $500… on which Jane promptly spills coffee. She turns to her mother for help, and Angela is able to wipe away the coffee stain… along with the last three letters of the autograph.

That’s about it for humor in this episode, as the case quickly develops into something even more dangerous. By talking to the dead man’s colleague, Korsak determines that his wife was a gold-digger and he wanted a divorce but was less keen on splitting his money. His bank records confirm that he was withdrawing money to hire a hitman. So why did he end up dead? The team determines that a teenage girl witnessed the woman’s murder, so to cover his tracks, the perp had to kill the person who put the hit out on her as well.

A terrifying ordeal

With some brilliant detective work, the investigators determine that the witness is a homeless girl named Tasha who is living by herself and existing on Social Security benefits from her parents’ deaths. Jane sweet-talks a check-casher and gets access to video from Tasha’s last visit, which yields a partial address from the envelope of her last check.

Jane heads to the abandoned building and persuades Tasha to come back to headquarters – but as they step outside, shots ring out. Tasha and Jane are hit, but at least Jane’s wearing a bulletproof vest. Forced to leave her gun on the floor where it fell, Jane leads Tasha into an elevator and stops it between floors. She doesn’t get cell service in the building, so all she can do is use a belt to stanch Tasha’s wound, try to keep the girl conscious, and do her best to reconnect the broken elevator phone. Once the phone is usable, she calls for help, drapes her vest over Tasha and climbs out of the elevator shaft.

The hitman trips a switch that makes the elevator slowly move down to the basement. An injured Jane inches down the stairs and finds him standing with his gun pointed at the elevator doors, ready to kill Tasha, who by now has passed out. She hits him from behind with a metal pipe, and as they struggle, Korsak bursts in and shoots him.

In the closing scene of Rizzoli & Isles 5×08, Jane and Tasha are both wheeled out on gurneys, and there’s a touching moment when they hold hands. The two of them are going to be OK – but what about Jane’s unborn baby?