"What are you doing?" asks FBI analyst Raven Ramirez. It's a very good question.
"I think better when I talk it out in rhyme," replies Nelson, who is four feet tall, looks about 12 years old and is played by former child rap star Lil Bow Wow.
This scene, with its crass ethnic stereotypes and absurd technological jargonese, plays out near the end of episode one of CSI: Cyber, the latest in the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise. Having exhausted all American cities, creator Anthony E. Zuiker turned to the internet, Earth's final frontier, for CSI: Cyber.
The show had its New Zealand debut on Prime on Sunday, and it brought one of the most enjoyably silly episodes I've watched in quite some time.
This might have been down to the residual horrors associated with enduring hour after harrowing hour of X Factor NZ just prior, but I think there's more to CSI: Cyber's charms than just "not the X Factor".
It's crammed full with very famous and quite good actors doing their tour of paycheque duty -- that Faustian pact of a period where they exchange much of their best years and remaining credibility for more money than God.
There's James Van Der Beek, formerly Dawson, but now away from the Creek and shooting snipers on motorcycles. Close behind: Patricia Arquette, demanding DNA samples from the nipples of nursing mothers, the Oscar she earned over 12 hard years for Boyhood weeping quietly in the background.
Back at the office, Peter MacNicol, aka mad old John Cage from Ally McBeal, looking pensive.
"Those poor parents," he sighs. "They buy a babycam to protect their child. That's the very thing that gets him abducted."
What a line! That's the core of the first episode, which involves live international baby auctions. What separates this from your regular live international baby auction is that it's happening online - the hackers are stealing babies to order after peeking in on them over the internet.
They've taken over baby cameras supplied by a callous corporate called Natalcam, which knew there was a glitch in their source code and just didn't care enough to fix it.
"You thought patch-and-pray was gonna make this problem go away?" says agent Krumitz to a terrified code monkey at Natalcam. Yes he did, and now the Cyber Crime Division of the FBI is going to have to take out the trash.
The hackery nature of the kidnapping brings it to the attention of Arquette's special agent Avery Ryan, PhD (because fake PhDs are free). She has no children herself, but "knows what it's like to be violated", she tells the panicked mother of poor kidnapped baby Caleb. It turns out this violation was the hacking-related loss of patient files 20 years ago, which doesn't seem quite on the same level, but nonetheless will become the long-running "motivator" plotline to run behind our lurid cybercrime-of-the-week.
Eventually Nelson cracks the 20-character encryption code, but not before the following events go down: an affair is uncovered; a hillbilly corpse is revealed to be smuggling drugs in her implants; a video game system is used to threaten Caleb's life, then locate the kidnappers; and, finally, baby Caleb is rescued from a submerged car by a diving Dawson (you can't keep him out of the creek, see), before Arquette performs baby-CPR.
So much plot! So many famous faces disgracing themselves! And so many magnificently terrible lines, delivered with extraordinary seriousness.
That's the CSI formula, one which has grown more than a little stale lately. But for some reason the flimsy digital filter applied to this particular branch of the franchise has brought this cold case to life, and early signs suggest CSI: Cyber might be dumbly brilliant television.
• Duncan Greive is editor of TV website TheSpinoff.co.nz
