Episode Report Card M. Giant: A- | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT That'll Do, Pig
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 7 | Aired on 2007.02.05
McCarthy and his girlfriend (on whom he now bestows the name Rita) are chilling in their hotel suite. Actually, McCarthy is working, having moved his laptop from the desk to the bed for some mysterious reason, and Rita's about to hit the vending machine in the lobby. McCarthy says that they'll be leaving soon. "You said that an hour ago," Rita says, even though they haven't been here for fifteen minutes. After she pouts off into another room of the suite, McCarthy pulls out his cell phone to notify Fayed that he's found a guy who can reprogram the remaining nuke triggers. "Who?" Fayed asks. Declining to supply a name over the phone -- which is kind of a giveaway that we're going to know the individual in question -- McCarthy says that he's just sent the man's entire CV to Fayed's computer. Glancing at his screen, Fayed seems satisfied with the candidate, even when McCarthy warns him, "He'll need to be coerced." McCarthy promises to deliver the guy within the hour, and then the coercion may presumably commence. It's 12:11:12.
12:15:35. In a highly convenient development, Nadia notifies Buchanan that, during the commercials, the NSA just intercepted a data stream that includes an audio recording of a phone conversation, one of the participants in which is Fayed. I don't know why Tom needs all his police-state nonsense when technology like this exists. Nadia leads Buchanan over to Milo, who plays back the conversation we just heard right before the break. After we've heard the entire exchange a second time, Milo identifies the second voice as belonging to McCarthy. Buchanan -- always on top of everything -- realizes that this means Fayed is looking for a replacement for Numair, who of course vaporized himself with the nuke earlier this morning. Milo has more good news, which is that the data stream also included an image file. Now, I'm no tech whiz, but I'm pretty sure that an email and a phone call aren't going to be part of the same "data stream," even if they're occurring simultaneously. But this is a major plot point this hour, so we have no choice but to go with it. At 12:16:33, Milo explains that NSA thinks the image file is a photo of the engineer McCarthy found for Fayed. They head over to Morris's desk, where he's working on decoding a screen full of corrupted pixels. Looks tedious. Let's watch it all hour. "Recovering this image may be our only way of stopping those nukes," Buchanan intones. So, Morris should keep working on it, then? Morris says that it could be anywhere from ten minutes to an hour before he's finished. He doesn't add that the closer it gets to the end of the hour, the more likely it is to result in a shocking revelation.