ET exclusively premieres a sneak peek from Tuesday’s episode.
Bridges are getting burned on Manhunt: Unabomber.
On Tuesday’s episode of Discovery Channel’s eight-part drama series, titled “Abri,” FBI profiler James “Fitz” Fitzgerald (Sam Worthington) throws his partner, rookie investigator Tabby (Keisha Castle-Hughes), under the bus after she defies the rules and slips him a classified document so he could gain an upper hand in the hunt for the Unabomber.
In ET’s exclusive sneak peek from the episode, Fitz chases Tabby down after she’s been fired for helping him break the case. “I stuck my neck out for you,” Tabby angrily says to Fitz, as she storms down the hallway, box in hand, with Fitz trailing not far behind. “Look, I can fix this,” he promises. But it’s too late.
“I looked up to you. I wanted to be you,” Tabby says, snarling at her naiveté. “When you came, it was like someone finally saw me, saw my potential. I thought I could be something cool, do something more -- but you used me and you screwed me over.” Fitz’s response was less than ideal: “Well, you did break protocol.” Ouch.
Worthington explained why the moment between Fitz and Tabby summed up Fitz’s inability to understand the magnitude of his obsession with the Unabomber case, burning every bridge imaginable along the way.
“That harshness [of that scene] is good because you’re going, ‘I like that character and they did have a relationship,’ and to cut like that, you can see he’s severing ties. It’s almost like what Ted does to his brother, his own flesh and blood. There’s something in that brutality,” Worthington recently told ET. “That’s the tragedy -- he didn’t really see what he was doing to Tabby [but] we see it as an audience. In his eyes, it’s perfectly innocent. He’s just trying to do his job and trying to get his guy.”
Hughes echoed Worthington’s sentiments about the professional breakup, telling ET that the scene was indicative of Fitz not having Tabby’s back.
“It’s a high-stress job and she’s the first one to see how consumed by the case Fitz becomes. It’s really unhealthy, his relationship with the case, and there’s a tipping point where Tabby can go either way and she’s starting to go down that road herself. She’s spending long nights reading the manifesto over and over again. They’re trying to convince themselves of narratives that don’t exist and almost making stuff up,” Hughes said. “She has enough reason to stop that and I think that’s when their relationship becomes strained because it becomes apparent early on that he isn’t someone who doesn’t like getting his own way and she challenges that.”
Manhunt: Unabomber airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery Channel.