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Knight Rider kicks off this new series by setting up some mysteries for our main character to tackle over the season and some bonding between KITT and Michael.

Those that watched last season’s TV movie of the rebooted Knight Rider are already caught up but for those that aren’t give me a sec to fill you in on the new guy behind the wheel.  His name is Michael Traceur and he is in fact the son of the original Knight Rider Michael Knight.  He is a fomer military man turned race car driver.  He used to date a girl named Sarah who incendentally is the daughter of the man who created KITT Charles Graiman.  Some people tried to kidnap him and steal the new KITT but Michael was able to solve the mystery and get everyone back.  His mother was fataly shot and he was finally able to meet his father at her funeral.  Now he works for the U.S. Government driving KITT (the new Knight Industries Three Thousand) to help solve problems.  With him are Sara, Charles, FBI agent Alex Torres and FBI agent Carrie Rivai along with a whole team of agents.

This first episode opens up right in the mix of things of Michael and Sara undercover trying to get a code cypher from a man at an upscale party.  Of course both encounter problems as Sara is taken prisoner by some men looking for Michael Traceur and Michael is having problems getting close to the man with the cypher.  When KITT informs him that Sara is in danger he ops to let the cypher go to rescue Sara.  He frees her and they run from the building as they have been found out.  They promptly escape in KITT but a missle has been fired at them that explodes and catches KITT on fire.  The fire is not able to be put out and the team back at headquarters tries to find the solution to putting it out.  The chemical compound is a lot like napalm and it has to burn itself out.  The temperature continues to rise and Michael and Sara are in trouble of being cooked alive.  Billy at HQ runs some simulations and finds that if KITT reaches over three hundered miles per hour the fire should burn out.  He turns out to be wrong but Charles deduces a way to get KITT into the HQs air tunnel and vaccum out all the oxygen.  It works but Mike and Sara pass out due to the heat before hand.  They are quickly resuccetated but are still upset over losing the cypher.

Michael tells Sara that there are gaps in his memory during his stint in the military.  The team locates the cypher once again and sends Michael out to get it.  On the way Michael and KITT talk about his memory gaps and KITT thinks either FBI agent Torres or agent Rivai have access to Michael’s files and are leaking them or might know more info about his memory gaps.  Just as he is about to pick the man up a woman pulls up in a sports car and tells Michael that she knows him and shows him a tatoo she has wich matches the one on his arm.  She then sucker punches him and steals the man Michael was supposed to get.  Him and KITT follow.  KITT tries to find files on the mystery woman and finds video survalliance of Michael and her in Beruit that Michael does not remember.  They then focus on the woman’s car using satellite imagery and see her cut the man’s thumb off before kicking him out of her car.  Michael stops to pick him up and this where the man tells Michael that the cypher is the man’s DNA.  The key to the code is hidden in his DNA and if she has it it’s falling into the wrong hands.  They find that she is meeting a man at a subway station to pass the thumb off to so of course KITT changes into a truck and uses the subway tracks to get into the subway to stop the meeting. 

Michael jumps out and gets the thumb from the mystery woman.  She finally realizes he doesn’t know who she is and is about to tell him when Agent Rivai shows up and shoots Michael.  The mystery woman gets away.  Michael wakes up and Agent Rivai tells him that his is now offically dead.  They came up with the scheme to kill him off so the people from his past wouldn’t come looking for him anymore and complicating their missions.  She gives him a folder with a lot of his classified files in it that might be useful in getting some of his memories back.  Michael gets KITT and leaves saying he is going home but KITT informs him the FBI have already been there and he has been declared dead.  Michael then returns back to HQ and is told to pick a new name.  He decides on his father’s name Michael Knight.  He tries to get Sara to start over with him.  At the end of the episode we over hear Charles talking with one of the head FBI agents running the project and told him that if Michael finds out that the agent was the one that was reponsible for his memory gaps that he would come after him.  We then see inside of KITT and that he was recording it.

My opinion?  It’s melodramatic at times, it gets a little goofy, but all in all it’s not bad.  I would have taken it in a different direction.  Maybe the government wanted to use KITT for evil purposes and Michael steals KITT and is running from the government.  Then the show would be them on the run while Michael tries to figure out what his missing memories are about.  Make it dark and gritty.  But I don’t work for NBC so that’s not going to happen.  The most interesting part of the show so far is Michael’s missing memories.  Not sure if I like the having the whole team backing them up on things and having to report to a government agency.  But I’m still holding onto rumors that Hasselhoff and the original KITT will be making an appearance sometime this season.

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