Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Gassing The Gap
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 8 | Aired on 02.12.2006
There's not much to tell about this scene. It's just a lot of teary grief-scene clichés, with nothing much notable said except for Mrs. Walt's regret that she wasn't with her husband today. So...Mrs. Walt was in California, even though her husband works in Washington, D.C., but she wasn't staying at Not Camp David? She seems awfully devastated given what I've been able to glean about their marriage from the few facts at my disposal. Anyway, the point is that when it comes right down to it, FLOTUS doesn't have the heart to tell Walt's widow the truth. She leaves the room, defeated, but no less disgusted with her husband. You can tell by the way she glares at him when she finds him lurking and smirking (smlirking?) outside the door. And then they hang each other.
I think we've all learned something from that scene, but more importantly, we've given Henchman #1 time to arrive back at the motorcycle garage. Chloe reads out the exact address, and Kiefer says they need to move fast to prevent the release of any more gas. Buchanan agrees at 2:58:47. McGill tells them to go ahead, and Kiefer masks up, giving the order to the support teams to do the same. In other splitscreen windows, Logan is back with Novick, FLOTUS is back with Mrs. Walt already for some reason, and the folks at CTU look pensive.
Henchman #1 runs into the motorcycle garage, every phoneme of his body language reading, "Where is everybody?" Because everybody's gone. But not far; from down the street, Erwich is watching through binoculars from behind the wheel of the latest in their series of vehicles as Kiefer and a bunch of other gas-masked CTU agents rush toward the garage. Erwich calmly picks up something that has a prominent antenna, and I think he's going to blow the place up by remote (because if you're going to be on a long sea voyage, and I'll just let you complete that thought yourself), but it's just his phone. Meanwhile, Kiefer and Curtis are out of their vehicle and getting ready to enter the garage.
Inside which, Henchman #1's phone is ringing. He answers it and it's Erwich, telling him he was followed after all. "You know what to do," Erwich tells his henchman. And Kiefer appears in the doorway just in time to see him do it. "No!" Kiefer roars as Henchman #1 shoots himself in the head. Kiefer rushes over to the dead man as Curtis takes a reading and sees that the air is clean. And so is the garage; not a terrorist or canister in the place. Kiefer reports in, "Erwich is gone, the canisters are gone, we've got nothing here. Dammit!" And from his vantage point across the street, Erwich calmly pulls a gray pickup out into traffic and drives off with two guys next to him, leaving me wondering where he picked up not only a new vehicle, but another henchman. It's 3:00:00.