I read lips, Myles, not minds. -Sue Thomas
Sue Thomas is a deaf woman working for the FBI. Extremely skilled in lip-reading and ASL (American Sign Language), she finds out she has gotten the job for the FBI as the token "deaf one", in a job with no real significance. She protests, and gets moved to a better job where she uses her lip-reading skills and companion Levi to catch kidnappers, murderers, and terrorists. The show is based loosely on a true story.
Biography[]
Sue is a young deaf woman who is able to communicate in both English and American Sign Language. She applies, and is accepted, for a position with the FBI in Washington, D.C. She leaves her home in Ohio and drives to Washington, picking up her first hearing dog, Levi, en route.
Thomas' parents are concerned that she will not be able to cope with life so far from everything she has known, despite the fact that they have strongly encouraged her in living in both a hearing and deaf environment. Her mother fought for her daughter to have every opportunity to live life to the fullest, which has made Sue a very independent young woman. She speaks, signs, reads lips, plays the piano and ice skates (Although she has not done this professionally since her teens after her best friend died on a bus taking her to an ice skating championship; Sue was the better skater but couldn't match the music to the performance she was meant to be giving). Sue has a college degree from Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Thomas arrives at her job only to find she has been assigned to "Special Projects", with the mundane task of analyzing fingerprints. However, she has no intention of wasting her life examining fingerprints and marches into the supposed personnel office to tell them exactly what she thinks. Having done this, she discovers the office has been relocated (but not on the directory board) and the man she was telling off is not personnel, but a Special Agent, Jack Hudson. Impressed by her ambition, Hudson meets her at lunch, where he tests her skills by having her lip-read Myles who is seated some distance away outside. After which, Thomas is taken on as part of Hudson's "team", and she becomes a Special Investigative Analyst. She has some teething troubles early in her career, but quickly adapts to learn from her mistakes, using her lip-reading skills during various surveillance missions (although she has some difficulty lip-reading non-English speakers) while her approachable manner helps her appeal to various sources, regularly acting as the 'good cop' in interrogations.
Romantic Interests[]
Quotes[]
"I know it's hard, but you can't ever let them see that you're scared. They'll think you don't belong." (To Levi, Pilot Pt 1)