THE IRRATIONAL Post-Mortem: Kirk Moore Breaks Down an Important Scene from ‘Point & Shoot’

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Monday, October 30 episode of THE IRRATIONAL.]

When Alec (Jesse L. Martin) agreed to be an expert witness for a wrongful death trial on the Monday, October 30 episode of THE IRRATIONAL, he thought he was helping out his sister, Kylie (Travina Springer). (After all, Kylie was friends with the man bringing the lawsuit, in the aftermath of his husband, Joshua, being killed during a no-knock raid.) 

But things took a scary turn for Alec and Kylie after he testified: Their car was pulled over by cops. 

One cop claimed Kylie, who was driving, drifted over the solid white line and asked if she had been drinking.

“Nope, just Diet Coke,” she replied, agreeing to take a field sobriety test.

The officer asked her to walk in a straight line, one foot in front of the other, counting down from 1001…by threes. She did, but questioned if it was really necessary. In response, the cop unbuttons the strap from his holster, indicating he was ready to pull his gun on her.

“No part of this calls for a gun,” Alec said to the second cop on the scene, who was monitoring him. ”She’s shaking with adrenaline. He’s going to make her count backwards until she stumbles forward.”

The second cop told Alec that no one was talking to him—they were dealing with his sister. Alec immediately clocks that they know who they are; it wasn’t a random traffic stop. “You’re targeting us?” he asked.

The second cop insisted Kylie crossed the divider without signaling, but Alec pleaded for Kylie’s sake: She has nothing to do with the trial, take him in if they want—and deal with the fallout from that—or let her go.

The second cop questioned the first about whether Kylie was passing her test. The first was hesitant, until the second said Kylie seemed fine and they should go—leaving a shaken Kylie behind.

For THE IRRATIONAL writer Kirk Moore—who penned “Point & Shoot”—pulling off that sequence with “care and understanding, but, at the same time, tension” was a high priority for the episode.

“I wanted people to really get into the head of Kylie and Alec,” he tells Give Me My Remote. “[To] understand the millions of things that go through your mind when that happens, whether it’s in a tense situation like [this] case, or just on a regular Wednesday; the impact and the effect that that can have on someone as they’re trying to move through their day or move through their week.”

“People think, ‘Oh, routine traffic stop,’” he continues. “But even a routine traffic stop, depending on your race or ethnicity or what you’ve been through, can have a serious lasting impact on you. And I wanted to make sure that that was handled with care in showing it. And making sure that while it was tense, at the same time, we understood the emotionality behind it.”

To that effect, Moore was careful about how much Alec said to the second officer in defense of Kylie.

“We wanted Alec to comment on the situation, but not in a way that in real life would heighten the situation,” he explains. “We didn’t want Alec to do anything that would incite the cop. We really wanted him to use his intellect to sort of plead to emotion: ‘Listen, she’s scared. So if she’s scared, she can make a mistake, thus putting her in more danger.’ We wanted him to use his skill.”

“The fact that he is a smart man and understands behavior, [he is] able to communicate how much danger they’re putting Kylie in, even if they don’t realize it,” Moore continues. “So, we were hoping that we can show how even if one officer is going off the rails, it is the other officer’s responsibility to say, ‘Hey, fellow officer, this isn’t right. Let’s stop this. Let’s move on.’ And so that’s what we wanted to get through in that scene, [with] those emotions.”

Ultimately, the intimidation didn’t work Thanks to Alec’s work, they were able to figure out that Joshua was targeted by a dirty judge who sent the raid to the wrong address to hide his own misdeeds.

THE IRRATIONAL, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC

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