Breathe

"Breathe" is the series premiere of Shadow Unit, with production number 1x01. It was written by Emma Bull.

Basic Statistics
Locations: Washington, DC; Los Angeles

Point of View Characters: Worth, Brady, Reyes, Falkner, Lau

Away Team: Lau, Worth, Reyes, Chaz, Brady

Timeline: March 2007

Unsub: Cora Marie Pace

Major backstory revealed: Worth had a run-in with the Anomaly previous to joining the WTF in which a gamma killed two of her fellow EMTs.

Synopsis
On Daphne Worth's second day on the job, the team gets a case involving five deaths by asphyxiation in Los Angeles. Sol is working an unrelated case in North Dakota, but for the first time ever, Chaz accompanies the team into the field. In LA, despite an uncooperative local police force, they discover that all five victims were smokers, and all five had some connection to Holy Cross Hospital. Eventually, Daphne and Chaz uncover the last missing link: all the victims had children in their care. Frost also calls with a cause of death: the victims choked on their own tongues. All of this information leads the team to believe that a hospital employee -- likely a nurse or aide -- is the unsub.

At the hospital, while interviewing employees, Chaz and Worth see a nurse going out for a cigarette break start to choke. Daphne helps her, and Chaz spots the unsub, who takes off running. They give chase, eventually cornering her in the physical therapy, where she tries to drown Chaz in the therapy pool. Daphne considers shooting, but begins to choke and loses control over her hands before she can. Eventually, Chaz, who is pinned and can't get a good angle, uses a supercharged tazer Reyes has given him to take out the unsub -- by plunging it into his own skin, which is wet. The unsub is incapacitated, but begins to wake up and choke Daphne while she performs CPR on Chaz. Eventually Brady shows up and shoots the unsub, and Chaz is resuscitated.