Episode Report Card M. Giant: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 5 | Aired on 01.21.2007
It's chaos in the streets, with fire engines tearing around and crowds of people hurriedly packing up their cars to search for less radioactive pastures. The mushroom cloud is still in the northern sky, starting to look more like a cauliflower cloud. At 10:07:13, a teenaged girl runs into the street for no reason, and is nearly hit by a red van, which skids to avoid her. Hey, where have I seen that red van before? Well, the sight of Fayed sitting in the shotgun seat on his cell phone provides one clue. It doesn't really seem like his style to go out of his way to avoid squashing an innocent civilian, but I suppose the last thing he needs right now is the state and local police dropping whatever they might be doing this morning so they can look for a red van that was involved in a hit and run. The teen's mom shepherds her out of the street. The van continues on its way, the cauliflower cloud in its rearview mirror. "The bomb never reached its target," Fayed's saying into his cell phone.
That person turns out to be a rather angry guy named McCarthy with an iffy Aussie accent, who's carrying some luggage out to his car. "I sold those weapons to you," he bitches. "The least you could have done was warn me before you blew them up in my city." Fayed says that wasn't the plan, and he's got problems of his own now: his nuclear scientist and the trigger reprogramming device both got vaporized, and now Fayed is sitting on four more nukes that he needs to get functional in a hurry. McCarthy says that he's headed to Vegas, until Fayed offers to pay him double the amount from before, whatever that was. Now he's got McCarthy's attention, but McCarthy still isn't sure he can find any one who (a) can and (b) will do what Fayed wants. But Fayed needs someone in the next few hours, and asks if McCarthy can help or not. McCarthy promises to get back to him, hangs up, and gets in his car. Fayed sighs unhappily. Even the sight of a helicopter that just crashed on top of a house he's riding past doesn't seem to cheer him up. Hell, that even cheers me up.
Nearby, some bloody guy is dashing around, trying to get some help from the panicked citizens dashing obliviously around him. Nobody wants to help him, so of course his attention lands on a guy across the street who's just standing there staring blankly at the cauliflower cloud in the distance. The blank-eyed guy is, of course, Kiefer. Being grabbed by someone in need seems to jolt Kiefer out of his state, and at 10:09:06, the bloody guy leads Kiefer at a run to where he left his friends. One of them is unconscious, the other is dead, and they were all in the same helicopter that just crashed. Which means that Fayed just passed within a block of Kiefer. That's just a bit too Six Degrees for me. I certainly hope there won't be any more unlikely coincidences coming up this hour. As they dash around the corner together, the guy says that he doesn't know what hit them. Kiefer does: the shockwave of a nuclear bomb. The poor guy hasn't even seen the mushroom cloud yet. Hey, shouldn't there also be an EMP? I don't know what the radius of that phenomenon would be from a one-kiloton nuke, and I'm assuming that's what the show's counting on. Reaching the house with the helicopter precariously jammed into its roof peak, Kiefer effortlessly (especially for a guy with a fresh knife wound in his shoulder) climbs the front porch trellis right up onto the roof and makes his way to the wrecked chopper, followed closely by the bloody guy. We see that the guy in the right front seat is awake now but trapped, while the guy on the left isn't moving. He must be the dead one. No idea how the first guy got out of the aircraft. Kiefer tries to open the chopper door, but it's jammed. So he finds something to pry it open: a broken off TV aerial antenna. Kind of an anachronistic artifact to discover up here, especially considering that we've already seen that the very same roof has a satellite dish on it. Still, it's just the thing for prying the door open. Kiefer rescues the surviving aviator, and not a moment too soon; no sooner are they all clear than the tail section snaps off, leaving the fuselage to drop into the side yard, where it explodes hugely. Because falling out of the sky wasn't enough to blow it up, but dropping two stories turned it into a fireball.