Tonight on CBS FBI: International airs with an all-new Tuesday, May 17, 2022 season 1 episode 20, “Black Penguin” and we have your FBI: International recap below. In tonight’s FBI season 1 episode 20 as per the CBS synopsis, “The Fly Team and Jaeger head to Berlin when the 19-year-old son of an American billionaire is found unresponsive in his apartment.
As the team works to determine if foul play was involved, they realize there’s a shadowy group on the case.”
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Jaeger still has two weeks left on the job. She was fired and so she thought she would ride her last remaining weeks with her head down. But then something odd happened. The American Ambassadors to both Hungary and Germany reached out to Special Agent Forrester because they wanted him to take a case. They wanted him to find out what really happened to Thomas Watts. Thomas was found unresponsive in his apartment. He was an American student in Germany going to the university there. His was important because Thomas was the nineteen-year-old son of billionaire Gabriel Watts. And Watts was pulling strings to get answers.
Watts wanted to know what happened to his son. He and his wife flew into town to attend their son’s graduation and their son never showed up. Hence they went looking for him. They found him at his apartment seizing on the floor. Thomas had been overdosing on fentanyl. Something the local German police were denying was a problem in Berlin. The lead detective had said that was an American problem. When Forrester and his team agreed to take the case, they spoke to that detective. They felt he was lying about fentanyl being a problem. They looked into that and they also talked to Watts.
They found out from Watts that his son was a rebel against money. Watts was worth over sixty billion dollars. Thomas hadn’t wanted to touch any of it. He didn’t want bodyguards. He didn’t want a private car driving him where he wanted to go. He wanted to live a simple life as an artist. The only thing he agreed to take was an apartment and he didn’t even live there. He just kept it for show. Thomas was actually slumming it in another posh apartment in a place his parents hadn’t agreed to and so Forrester went there with Kellet. They found the place being ransacked by a private detective firm that Watts had hired.
Watts had called every politician he knew to get them to work his son’s case, but he thought he could handle the overdose as does everything else and that meant throwing all his resources at it. Only he was contaminating the case. The FBI told him to back off. They said they would get answers and so Watts agreed to hand over Thomas’s private laptop and cell phone. It wasn’t long before Forrester found the girl that Thomas was last seen with. Thomas had drawn a picture of her. It was at his fake apartment. The one where he also threw a party on the night he took drugs. The girl said that Thomas had offered up the drugs. She only took one pill. He took several.
Thomas had apparently gone into a manic state. He allegedly took several pills all at once. The girl said the drugs had been his and that taking them had been his idea. He was still taking them long after she left. Or so she claims. There was no way to prove it because Thomas’s cell phone hadn’t been turned over to them and, when they went to go complaint about it to Watts, they ended up witnessing Thomas’s last moments. He died of an overdose. The parents were so distraught that they demanded that their private firm handled everything from here on out. And that didn’t sit well with Forrester.
Forrester didn’t believe a private firm should control a joint task force. He said he and his people were going to continue to work the case. They found the drug provider. They got the deliveryman to come to meet them. Only, the German police had called in Watt’s people. They detained the deliveryman and that left the team unable to follow the guy into learning who the source was. Watt’s people as well as the German police blew the case. They ruined. They were ruined at several levels. Almost as if they wanted to destroy any chance of finding out who was calling all the shots in the Berlin drug trade.
Forrester finally snapped at the local German police. He blamed them for the incompetence of the case. Chief Detective Honsel knew darn well what he was doing when he informed Mark Levinson about an active case. Levinson has been working for the Watts family for the past fifteen years. He knew them better than anyone. This is why Forrester began to doubt him after Levinson’s people ruined the case. They looked into it. It turns out Levinson was the one who bought the drugs for Thomas. Thomas had no idea where to get the drugs for himself. Levinson got it for him. And so his death was Levinson’s fault.
The FBI arrested Levinson. He basically asked for a lawyer once he was confronted and so that confirmed things for Watts. He went running in there to get his hands on Levinson, but they pulled him off him. And the FBI later received an apology from the ambassador who wanted them to drop the case.
The team arranged a private viewing of all of Thomas’s paintings as a way to comfort his family. They were doing that while Jaeger was using the new political capital she got from closing this case. She made sure that Smit was fired and that she was reinstated as the Europol liaison with the FBI.
THE END