As far as I’m concerned, Without A Trace just vanished and I won’t be bothering to send out anyone to look for it.  It was an interesting premise, but it required a lot of suspension of disbelief to watch (the FBI doesn’t get involved in most missing person cases).  I only started watching it because it came after CSI (and I’m a sucker for crime shows).

Warning, spoilers ahead (just in case you haven’t seen the show).

Anyway, they went off the PC deep end last night with an episode about a Saudi medical student who went missing.  Before his disappearance he was turned down for a letter of recommendation to work at the CDC and his girlfriend rejects his marriage proposal.  In both cases, he sees it as prejudice against Arabs.

His coworkers think he’s a terrorist and some of the FBI agents think that he’s planning some kind of attack.  Of course the PC FBI agent cautions everyone not to jump the gun.  In the end, the doctor kills his friend and is seen at the hospital waving a gun and screaming that there’s a bomb in the building.  It turns out that his friend had been the one planning the attack and the killing was after he got into a fight trying to stop him.  He went to the hospital to warn people to get out.  However, in the last seconds, as one of the FBI agents is facing him, he fails to put his gun down and is killed by an FBI sniper.  We’re supposed to come away from this having learned our lesson that it is bad to profile people.

I realize that television is a notoriously unsubtle medium.  But this show just went over the top.  The writers’ contempt for all of us simplistic, racist, dunderheads out here in flyover country was so thick as to be palpable.  I realize that people have jumped to conclusions about terrorists before (sometimes with rash and horrible results), but I don’t need to be beaten about the head and shoulders to be reminded of it.  Maybe some Arabs and Muslims out there have gotten a bum deal since the terrorist attacks, but let’s get real here.  It wasn’t a bunch of little old ladies from Des Moines who flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.