3.3 seconds that slipped through my fingers. 3.3 seconds when I could have done a thousand different things. Do you know the things you can do in 3.3 seconds?
— Hanson
Hanson's girlfriend Amy is shot dead right in front of him by a convenience store robber. Complicating matters is that Hanson was actually planning to break up with Amy that night. Following her death, Hanson sinks into a spiral of depression and obsession over her death. In the end, he pulls himself out of it, and decides to find and arrest the robber/murderer.
This episode provides examples of:
- Imagine Spot: After his girlfriend Amy is shot dead in front of him and Hanson feels he failed as a cop to not shoot the murderer, Hanson starts obsessively daydreaming about him shooting / catching the murderer. Amongst other versions, in one of these daydreams he appears like James Bond.
- Madness Mantra: Hanson repeats over and over to himself (and later to Judy) the things one can do in 3.3 seconds, as a response of seeing on the security tape that he'd had a 3.3 second window to interfere with Amy's killer.Hanson: You can take off your shoes, pop a beer, and shoot someone in 3.3 seconds. You can hold your finger down the remote control and pass 17 stations in 3.3 seconds. You can open a can of tuna fish, shuffle a deck of cards, or twist the tops of six bottles of ginger ale in 3.3 seconds. You can ring a doorbell 22 times, lock and unlock a deadbolt four times, or sing the entire alphabet in 3.3 seconds!
- Police Are Useless: Hanson is a police officer himself, but when his girlfriend dies in a robbery, he very cynically says the police won't find her murderer because her murder is just "number "X" on the list". Subverted in the end, when Hanson pulls himself together and finds and arrests the murderer.
- Rewind, Replay, Repeat: Hanson, after witnessing his girlfriend being shot in a convenience store robbery and feeling guilty that he was unable to stop this, spends his days watching the surveillance camera tape, replaying the same moment over and over, being obsessed over how much time it would take for him to have been able to stop the murderer.
- Sanity Slippage: After Amy dies, Hanson starts acting obsessive-compulsively, socially retreating and neglecting himself. When Judy visits him, she is shocked at his state of mind and the state his apartment is in.
