The essential episodes of Bugs
Watch these 10 in order and you've got Bugs — each pick states its reason.
- 01
Ros and Beckett first meet, after Beckett is forced to leave The Hive when he is framed for leaking information. The real traitor turns out to be Beckett's boss, Cottrell, working alongside his lover, Elena Johnson. The pair are trying to steal SACROS, a device which jams satellite signals. Beckett, Ros and Ed race against time to save Beckett's job and SACROS, and to stop Cottrell and Elena.
- 02
Ed and Beckett go 'under cover' and end up on board a submarine. They are, however, found out to be fakes and, whilst Ed escapes, Beckett is left on the submarine with a money hungry man, eager to gain access to a bank and steal some diamonds a long the way. Beckett ends up getting trapped on the submarine, as it slowly fills with water. The man, meanwhile, has got his associate to steal these diamonds, but their plan is foiled when Ros enters the scene. Ed goes under the sea to search for the submarine and but will he find Beckett in time?
- 03
R-6 is a new type of metal, and it has an explosive nature. A man called DaSilva decides to take advantage of this property of the metal and tries to steal it. The Bugs team are involved and try to stop DaSilva leaving the country with the metal to make it into deadly weapons.
- 04
A special formula has been developed which enhances the performance of athletes. However, no-one has considered the after effects, which are that when the person's heart reaches a certain rate, the body can't cope and the person drops down dead. Ed comes to realise this when he is having a karate match with a person who has been injected with the stuff, and the man goes hyper, then falls down dead (whoops!). Ros eventually goes to find out more about the stuff, and ends up with another hyper person chasing her, then he suddenly collapses. however, Ros is still caught and taken away by the developer of the formula, to be his new guinea-pig.
- 05
Many small companies are being bought up by two mysterious men and Ros, Ed and Beckett are called to investigate. When the manager in another company is suddenly blown up, Beckett takes his place. The two suspicious people turn out to be Jean-Daniel and his brother, Patrick. They realise that Beckett is not the real manager and Jean-Daniel goes round to ‘Gizmos' (the place where Ros, Ed and Beckett were based in Series One) Beckett ends up being kidnapped. Ed's friend, Clare, has also got mixed up in the brothers' plans, and her daughter, Katie, has been held hostage until she gives them exactly what they want. Jean-Daniel's brother is killed. Beckett and Katie manage to escape and stop Jean-Daniel's plans, and reposition the missile that stops any type of computer generated items from working, to where they are.
- 06
A deadly powerful creature called Cyberax has escaped from a computer and then suddenly Cyberax the company is born, by no other than Jean-Daniel. He creates a machine that takes over some of the user's mind. Once they have finnished using the Cyberax headset, it leaves a little bit of itself behind. when the person finds out about Cyberax again, as they forget all memories to do with Cyberax, their brains go into overload and they kill themselves. Roland Blatty (the old bureau chief) gets hold of one of these headsets and blows his brain up when Ed jokingly says that he hopes that Roland has had the system checked for viruses. The whole Bureau team are also wiped out when they too discover the deadly truth about Cyberax. Beckett decides that the only way to stop this is to pretend that he has used the headset and had his brain blown up (so to speak) and he is taken away by Cassandra, who is now working with Jean-Daniel. Jean-Daniel realises that Beckett wouldn't do something so stupid
- 07
Another second parter to end the Series. Cyberax's destructive nature has entered Ros' brain and Beckett and Ed find themselves racing against time (and the fact that if Ros finds out about the true nature of Cyberax, her mind will explode) to save her. Beckett ‘foils' Jean-Daniel's plans, but in the process accidentally tells Ros the truth about Cyberax, and Ed has to kill her, electrocuting her. The reason being that ‘because Cyberax is a virus in the memory, you have to shut down the system and reboot with a completely new set of instructions'- (as said by Ed).
- 08
A man creates a holo-imager which is used on the new £100 notes. Another guy, North, who helped design the holo-imager and who is also supposedly dead, turns up alive, and is trying to make fake £100 notes to ‘up' his bank balance. Ros goes to dinner with the man who created the holo-imager and he ends up being told to shoot her, but he lets her go.
- 09
The legendary tomb of King Arthur is supposedly at a site, where suddely a lot of people are becoming ill and new owners have stopped all normal work. beckett goes undercover to find out what is going on, and with the help of the others, they discover that the digging for the tomb has unearthed a plague. Alex falls ill with the pague and Ros works at finding her a cure. She is also worried about Beckett, who insists to stay at the site and stop the men from letting more people die and shows for the first time since they split up that she still cares for him.
- 10
Ros has yet another brush with death, this time because she was shot in the head by Zephyr. As she fights for her life in hospital throughout the episode, Beckett is desperately trying to find the people (Wymark and Zephyr) who put her there. Zephyr and Wymark end up in the same hospital as there is the new G-5 chip there which they need to gain enough processing power to con a bank into giving the m a few million pounds. Many things interrupt the surgery being performed on Ros (by a rather eccentric surgeon) including a power cut brought on by Wymark shooting the main power cables, leaving it up to Beckett and Ed to put it back to normal (which they manage to do, of course). At the end, Ros wakes up and is OK, and Beckett actually kisses her, putting the hope in everybody's hearts that they are actually going to get back together. However, this vision is quickly destroyed, as after Alex and Adam's wedding, Beckett and Christa are talking together and Christa practically proposes to h
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