Episode Report Card M. Giant: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Glower, Cower, And Tower
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 6 | Aired on 01.28.2007
What Kiefer's got is his brother's face, shrink-wrapped. Graem is trying to breathe through the plastic bag Kiefer's got over his head, and it's not going too well. I'm going to assume that the bag hasn't been there the whole time; it's been a good six or seven minutes, but Graem's not dead yet. Kiefer yanks the bag off, telling Graem that it goes back on if he lies again. Graem coughs and gasps, his head all grody with sweat and condensation, and starts talking. While crying. He says that Kiefer's right about the nukes. Of course he is. If this hadn't been the one lead out of fifty that was going to pay off, Kiefer never would have tortured his brother in the first place. Graem says that their dad doesn't want to be reached, sobbing, "After the bomb detonated, he told me he was cutting himself off." Graem starts crying even harder when Kiefer says that he doesn't believe him. He starts coming at Graem with the bag again, and Graem does this: "I don't know, I don't know, all right all right all right all right!" Heh. Kiefer holds off with the bag, and Graem tells him that their dad went to see a contract employee of their company. That employee's name? Darren McCarthy. We, of course, have already met McCarthy: he's the ambiguously Australian guy who's been fishing around for someone who can make Fayed's remaining nukes work. But Kiefer doesn't know this, so he asks what McCarthy's connection is. Graem cops to having made a mess Dad's trying to clean up.
Under Kiefer's questioning, Graem tells the whole story. Gredenko, the ex-Russian general Assad mentioned last week, was responsible for having nuclear weapons transferred to the U.S. to be decommissioned. He gave Dad's company, BXJ, the contract to dismantle the smaller bombs and recycle the cores for energy production. They can do that? "We do it all the time," Graem explains. The problem arose when Graem hired McCarthy to run the job, but failed to check him out thoroughly enough: "He had good references. I saw no reason to get all anal about it." Because there are more important things in life than looking into the background of someone to whom you are entrusting NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Kiefer agrees with me, summing up that the nuke detonated in Valencia was stolen from Graem by McCarthy. Kiefer also realizes that they knew about this before today -- since Dad left yesterday -- and yet they didn't report it. Graem says they thought they could handle it "more efficiently." Kiefer's kind of pissed about all the people who have died to cover Graem's ass today, and he doesn't even know how Graem purposely tried to have a whole plane full of people shot down last year for the same purpose. Graem says that his and Dad's plan to recover the nukes is much better than anything CTU could have come up with. It consists of "putting together a security team" and "staking out McCarthy's office." Excellent plan. With Graem and Dad in charge of national security, I see no reason to continue paying taxes. Kiefer pulls out his knife. It looks a lot like the same knife he carries every season, and I really want to know how he got it back. Maybe it's standard-issue and he took it from a CTUmobile, but why then did he yank out the lamp cord with his bare hands at the end of the last hour? I'm letting it go for now, but if the man-purse shows up next, I'm crying foul. Using the knife, Kiefer cuts Graem loose and says that they're going to McCarthy's office themselves. Graem doesn't want to leave his family today, but Kiefer insists. At 11:09:54, Graem grabs his jacket and follows Kiefer out of the office.