- Title: King & Maxwell – King’s Ransom
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Rigby (Michael O’Keefe) calls in King (Jon Tenney) and Maxwell (Rebecca Romijn) to help on the kidnapping of the young son of an oil executive (Andrew Airlie) by a high-end kidnapping ring from Columbia when he starts to butt heads with the K&R agent (Catherine Bell) the parents hire to negotiate with the kidnappers who just happens to be an old friend of King’s from his days in the Secret Service. Although we don’t get much interaction between the pair, Tenney and Bell work well together and provide Maxwell to do some of her own speculating over the course of the episode as to the nature and duration of their relationship.
With Edgar’s (Ryan Hurst) help the pair are able to put together footage of the kidnapping from a variety of footage shot in the park from different hand-held video cameras which gives them a partial view of one of kidnappers. The help of an old friend (Dichen Lachman), leads King to follow the tattoo back to one of the kidnappers who reveals the people who paid him definitely weren’t Colombian. When the first money exchange goes south the kidnappers call back demanding twice the payment in 24-hours and gets the FBI and its consultants thrown out of their command center in the parents’ home.
Based on a single innocuous comment from the kidnap victim’s young brother, King and Maxwell begin looking into the mother (Reiko Aylesworth) which leads them to an 18 year-old art theft and the true motive for the kidnapping. As twists go this one works pretty well as the woman’s recently paroled former partner (Nicholas Lea) has finally shown up for revenge. Realizing her former partner wants the mother to steal the painting from a nearby museum, King and Maxwell agree to help her steal the real ransom to help the grieving mother get her son back. With a few nifty camera tricks and some slight of hand King and Maxwell make it appear the painting has been stolen and follow the mother to the exchange where they are able to recover the son, the money, and capture the kidnappers with the help of both Rigby and King’s old partner.
Four episodes in the show finally gives us an episode without world-shattering implications but with much more reasonable stakes that work just as well (if not better than the more elaborate plots of the first few episodes). “King’s Ransom” also continues Edgar’s investigation into the shooting that ended King’s involvement with the Secret Service and Edgar’s discovery that the split-second of blindness wasn’t the sun, a flash bulb, or bad luck, but an attacked aimed directly at blinding King and giving the shooter a narrow window to carry out the assassination.
