Elisa Mukerji (Pragda Desai) is the hidden main villainess of "Father Figure", episode 1.15 of Missing (airdate December 13, 2003). She was a molecular biologist for Lipodyne Pharmaceuticals and a colleague of fellow biologist Michael Devereaux.
The episode began with Michael being kidnapped while preparing to leave work with Elisa, who had rushed back inside to get her notes and coming back to find Michael and his car gone. After Michael was reported missing, Elisa told the investigating FBI that she believed the targeted weight loss drug Lipolycide (which was capable of reducing fat wherever it was injected into the body) was the reason behind Michael's disappearance, as the drug's creation had earned Michael many professional enemies and Lipodyne could not release the drug for production without Michael's knowledge about Lipolycide's molecular topology.
While Elisa initially appeared to be a worried friend of Michael's, the episode's progression would reveal Elisa as the greedy mastermind behind her colleague's abduction. As revealed in the episode's climax, Elisa enlisted her brother and his friends in kidnapping Michael, having them do so while they were preparing to leave work together to give herself an alibi. Elisa additionally threw the authorities off her path by telling Brooke Haslett about Maggie Goodheart, the owner of her own diet brand who was angry at Michael for not taking an offer for Lipolycide, having planted a parking pass in Michael's discarded car to support the false story that Maggie was behind the abduction. While under captivity, Michael was injected with a truth serum in an effort to make him confess his classified knowledge about and began suffering a heart attack, driving Elisa's brother and his cohorts to abduct cardiologist Dr. Telford Ronning to revive Michael, killing him after he did so to tie up loose ends.
While Elisa's machinations initially worked in Maggie and pharmceutical smuggler Lawrence Keelor being suspected in kidnapping Michael, the FBI eventually realized that they were both framed and that the person responsible had to be the perosn who set them on Maggie's trail to begin with: Elisa, with Brooke revealing her revelation to her father Sam (who worked at Lipodyne as their head of security). Upon seeing Elisa, Sam tried to call her over, only for the villainess to attempt to flee in response. Elisa was eventually cornered and restrained by Jack in a field, and when Brooke demanded to know where Michael was, Elisa initially claimed she didn't know and said it "wasn't her problem" that Michael was at risk of dying from his heart problems. But once she was threatened with being charged for Michael's death as well as Telford's, Elisa confessed that her brother and his cohorts were holding him at a Pier 4 salvage barge, while stating that Telford's death wasn't part of her plan. Elisa and her accomplices were arrested, and while her motive is never explicitly stated, it can be assumed Elisa was intending to use Lipolycide for her own greedy and self-serving agenda.
Trivia[]
- Pragda Desai also appeared on Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye as the evil Jessica Saunders.
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