Episode Report Card Manimal: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Doppelganger
By Manimal | Season 1 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.27.2001
SD-6: Where men are men and sheep are nervous. More pointless slo-mo. Sydney VO tells us that they're being sent to Badenweiller to fetch the inhaler prototypes and then destroy the factory. Would Sloane really do this? He seems too smart to trust her with something this important. Unless he's setting her up. She blathers on and on about how she doesn't know how much longer she can lead this life of ambiguity, and that increasingly she wants to leap across the table and "use the skills [she's] learned at SD-6 against him." I didn't know gross incompetence was a skill you could learn -- I thought, like greatness, some are just born with it. SVO asks what her countermission is.
Gas station. Sydney pulls up in her annoying SUV. Vaughn is there. They pump gas (not a euphemism -- they're both pumping gas). Sydney says, "He practically apologized." Vaughn is astonished. At least that's what I think he is. His two facial expressions are getting very creased from overuse. Sydney tells him that Sloane says the factory could fall into the hands of neo-Nazi terrorists; Vaughn says that's BS, and that Sloane wants the prototype so he doesn't have to go through the five years it took HAN-sell Corp to go from formula to prototype. Vaughn gives her the counter: while Dixon sets the explosives, Sydney will steal the prototypes and get them to the CIA ops already in the building. They'll switch the inhaler so that she takes a fake back to SD-6. Then she'll disarm the explosives, giving the CIA a few minutes to search the building. Sydney says that by the time Dixon's figured out the explosive won't charge, security will be on their way while the CIA will have gotten their files. Whoa. Whoa! Doesn't this sound like a terrible idea? I mean, I'm strictly an armchair spy myself, but even I can see that this plan wouldn't stand up in a gust of strong wind. Isn't Dixon already suspicious? And Sydney's not exactly on great footing herself, either, what with all the mishaps and screw-ups she's had at SD-6. Does Vaughn have a special Book of Short-Sighted and Half-Baked Plans he uses to flesh out these missions?
Vaughn asks if she's all right. She asks him about Case 332L, which was missing from her father's file. Vaughn whips out expression 2a.1.1.03 -- mildly perturbed -- and says that he looked for those missing files, but that there was no record of it anywhere. He also points out that Calder, one of the agents on the case, was from the FBI, not the CIA. Sydney expositions that the FBI wouldn't be involved unless they suspected her dad of selling secrets.