Renowned behavioral scientist Alex Mercer offers his unique insights into human behavior in order to help solve various cases, often working alongside his ex-wife Marisa Clark, an FBI agent.
This series contains examples of:
- Alliterative Name: "Scorched Earth" features a character named Dara Deacon.
- Armored Closet Gay: In "Scorched Earth", one of the suspects in the arson that killed Chris is his ex-girlfriend Kat Schmitt, who was supposedly stalking him after their break-up. When Alec and Marisa investigate her, they discover that she broke up with Chris because she realized that she's a lesbian, and her "stalking" was all an act to make her conservative family believe that Chris had dumped her so they wouldn't ask why she dumped him.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: In "Zero Sum", Alex and Marisa deal with a working-class black family that has become entangled with a rich white family because the black wife used to work for the white family, but had an affair with the white husband, who felt guilty about the power imbalance between them and thus helped fund her daughter's education to compensate, which irritated his own son, who felt neglected.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: "Lazy" might not be the right word, as Kylie is constantly working. But while she's almost as brilliant with computers as her brother is with people, Kylie starts out the series with very little direction for her considerable talents, and the work she has been doing has grown more phoned-in as she isn't really passionate about it. Much of her arc in the first season is figuring out what she wants to do with her life.
- Cooldown Hug: In "Bombshell", Alec, Phoebe, and Rizwan are all being held hostage by Wes Banning, the man who made the bomb that wounded Alec all those years ago. The stress of a hostage crisis sends Phoebe into a panic attack, and she can't get to her medicine. Rizwan suggests that she take a placebo while he gives her a hug so that she associates the placebo with comfort.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Mercer was wounded in a bombing twenty years ago which had killed several people and left him severely scarred. He can't remember most of what happened.
- Dirty Cop:
- Downplayed. In "Point and Shoot", a pair of patrol officers harass Alec and Kylie following Alec's testimony against Viper Squad. One forces Kylie to perform a sobriety test under the excuse of her swerving over a white line, also making her count backwards from 1001 in multiples of three, even threatening to unholster his gun when she asks if its necessary while taking sadistic pleasure in watching her squirm. Alec quickly realizes the truth, confirming it when the other officer notes his sister was the one they want, despite never revealing they were siblings to the officers. Alec is able to convince the second officer that it's not worth the bad press this would bring, and he manages to get the one harassing Kylie to knock it off.
- In the first-season finale, Mathias, the man who orchestrated the bombing that scarred Alec, and the man who's been pulling the strings for most of the season, is revealed to be Bob Caswith, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He owed Senator Sanford a favor and thus staged the bombing to cover up the accidental death of one of Sanford's campaign volunteers. He has since used his position in the FBI to stymie Marisa's efforts to investigate the bombing.
- Dramatic Irony: In "Cheating Life", longevity-obsessed Vincent Lee is revealed to have stage-four bone cancer. He faked his death in order to avoid his followers thinking that his nutritional supplements were to blame for his condition.
- Faking the Dead: In "Cheating Life", Vincent Lee killed his look-alike bodyguard in a hit-and-run to fake his own death so that people would not find out about his cancer, which he feared would discredit his vitamin supplement business.
- Fatal Flaw: In "Dead Woman Walking", Mercer and his team solve the case of who poisoned a journalist by goading her would-be killer into confessing, appealing to his desperate desire to have someone know that he pulled off a seemingly perfect crime.
- Fear-Induced Idiocy: Invoked several times, where Alec Mercer frequently points out how fear can impair judgment and cause people to make bad decisions. For example, in "Lucky Charms", his former student Camille Lawson ends up in financial trouble after her fear of losing a big poker game caused her to bet more money than she could afford in a desperate attempt to stay in the game, which kicked off a string of bad decisions that now threatens to put her mother's house in foreclosure.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: In "Bombshell", one of the jobs Kylie is looking into involves being a pet detective for the Ventura agency.
- The Gambling Addict: In "Lucky Charms", Alec discovers that one of his former students has gotten into trouble while gambling in Vegas, and owes quite a bit of money.
- I Reject Your Reality: Alec insists that things are still good between him and his ex-wife Marisa, even though he's been reduced to living at his younger sister's house while his wife has already started rearranging their house.
- Jurisdiction Friction: In "Zero Sum", Marisa is forced to work alongside a private security consultant to resolve a kidnapping, and hates it, both because she sees private security as the refuge of failed cops and agents and because the consultant, Rose, happens to be an attractive woman who is also clearly interested in Alec.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Played with. In "Point and Shoot", in order to stop the victim from exposing a multinational company's crimes that the police unit "Viper Squad" works for, they proceed to make his death look like a case of negligence due to a misprinted arrest warrant, making it look like an accidental officer-involved shooting rather than a flat out murder.
- Never Got to Say Goodbye: Phoebe's mother died the day after they'd had a terrible fight. The guilt has been haunting Phoebe for years.
- Oh, Crap!: In "Zero Sum", Rizwan is forced to cover one of Phoebe's lecture while she does work on the latest case. Previously, he'd only served as a teaching assistant for small classes, but Phoebe's lecture has almost 200 students. Naturally, he's horrified. He's even more horrified when, despite his first lecture being a disaster, Mercer decides to send him out again.
- Red Herring: In "Dead Woman Walking", the initial suspect in the poisoning of a journalist is a Russian gangster that the journalist and her partner were investigating, but then the gangster is suddenly shot dead.
- The Resenter:
- In "Zero Sum", Veronica's kidnapper is the son of her mother's ex-paramour, who resents Veronica because his dad took an interest in Veronica's education and he feels that he's being neglected.
- In "Scorched Earth", the culprit in the arson that killed a young man and badly wounded a young woman is Caroline Rixton, the co-owner of the house that they were in. She was angry that her sisters blocked her plan to turn the property into an animal refuge and thus set fire to the place so that neither of them would be able to enact their own plans for the property.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The plot of "Point and Shoot" borrows heavily from Breonna Taylor case, in which a black nurse was killed by cops serving a no-knock warrant on her boyfriend. The episode also borrows from the case of Anjanette Young, who was terrorized by police who were mistakenly given a no-knock warrant for her address, although that case only ended in a wrongful arrest.
- Scars Are Forever: Mercer is heavily and visible scarred on the right side of his face; despite treatments for the injuries which caused them they're clearly permanent. He's asked frequently about how he got his scars, which Mercer answers usually by making something up.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the first season finale, Phoebe suddenly receives a job offer from Dr. Myers, one of Alec's colleagues. Still traumatized from her experiences being taken hostage in "Bombshell", plus with Mercer's office having been destroyed at the end of that episode, she reluctantly decides to take the offer, hoping that it will at least provide her with a safer work environment. While she feels guilty about abandoning Alec, he reveals that he had actually reached out to Dr. Myers in the first place, as he felt Phoebe would benefit from a change of scenery.
- Smokescreen Crime:
- In "Point and Shoot", it turns out that the murder of the week was intended to cover up several local cops and a judge being on the take from a corrupt multinational corporation.
- In "Scorched Earth", the culprit of the week sets off a string of fires near unhoused camps in order to make the burning of the Rixton house look like the work of a serial firebug.
- In "Reciprocity", Alec and Marisa learn the truth about the bombing: Kevin Sanford accidentally killed Natalie Price, a campaign aide, and in a panic, called up Bob Caswith, an old war buddy who worked for the FBI. Caswith helped cover up Natalie's overdose, then arranged for a bombing in which she was supposedly killed.
- Spotting the Thread: In "The Real Deal", Rose detects that a room has a hidden door because the room's dimensions don't match up with the floor plan.
- Tough Love: In "Zero Sum", Mercer decides that Rizwan needs to move out of his comfort zone, and thus has him cover some of Phoebe's lectures, despite Rizwan having very little experience with large classes. As he later explains, he does not expect Rizwan to do well, but he expects that he'll learn more about how to give lectures.
- Twofer Token Minority:
- Kylie Mercer, Alec's sister, is a queer black woman.
- In "Point and Shoot", Alec testifies in the case of an officer-involved shooting where the victim was a gay black man.
- Viva Las Vegas!: In "Lucky Charms", Mercer and his team head to Las Vegas when one of his former students gets into trouble.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Alec has an understandable aversion to fire as a result of being so badly burned. In "Scorched Earth", he gets locked in a burning building and very nearly loses his composure.
- Working with the Ex: Alec frequently works alongside his ex-wife Marisa. He hopes that this will eventually repair their relationship, but Marisa shows signs of already having moved on.
