Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Diplomessy
By M. Giant | Season 4 | Episode 21 | Aired on 05.08.2005
Outside the Undal Office, PMHC wants to know how long they're going to keep the Veep unaware of the raid on the Consulate. Palmer says as long as possible, although he doesn't explain why. He's really not any better at breaking the rules than he ever was, is he? They get the slower-moving viewers caught up on Lee's continuing inability to talk, as well as Kiefer's confirmation that his guys didn't shoot the Consul. "The Chinese won't care," says Palmer. "He died as a result of our trespass. We have to start constructing a scenario that doesn't implicate the United States government." PMHC says the Chinese will be hard to convince, but Palmer says, "The Chinese don't want a confrontation any more than we do. If we can create a scenario of plausible deniability, they may play along." Palmer tells PMHC to have CTU pull a list of groups who have attacked Chinese embassies and consulates in the past five years. PMHC says those groups are mostly Asian, but Palmer reminds us that Kiefer's team was masked. "No one saw their faces." Well, the guards would have seen the CTU team's eyes, which, as I understand it, is one of the more reliable indicators of an individual's Asian-ness or non-Asian-ness. That's the kind of thing that sets off an observer's A-dar.
Ahem. A subtitle facilitates our transition to the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles. The Deputy Chinese Consul, a uniformed security guard, and another Chinese guy in a suit are reviewing security camera footage of the raid. The other guy in the suit is, coincidentally, the actor who played the Chinese Consul in Los Angeles in Rush Hour. He's apparently been demoted to the position of the Consulate's head of security since then, and he doesn't look too happy about it. Or maybe he's unhappy about watching a masked Kiefer punching out the DCC and Lee and bodily hauling the latter out of the building. As Palmer said, everyone on the team was masked. Until we get to the point where Curtis and the Briefly Unmasked Agent entered the courtyard, and the Briefly Unmasked Agent was briefly unmasked. The footage is grainy, but they're able to zoom in and enhance it, although not nearly as quickly or as well as with the bleeding-edge, state-of-the-art image enhancement software that's owned by CTU. And Soul Patch, of course. After a few seconds, they end up with a somewhat clearer picture. The security head -- Consulate Cop, we'll call him -- wants the shot of the Briefly Unmasked Agent sent to Beijing and Shanghai and then cross-referenced with their intelligence databases. The guard moves to comply. In Chinese, of course.
3:10:42. Kiefer goes into the room where Curtis and the other agents have changed back into their non-Consulate-invading clothes, and tells them about the Consulate's death and how they all need alibis that place them somewhere else tonight so the attack can't be traced to the U.S. government. The Briefly Unmasked Agent wants to know, "Are we gonna be brought into this?" Hey, you were "brought into it" when you entered the Consulate, chief. Kiefer says he doesn't know, but "It's our responsibility to make sure that the United States government is never implicated in this operation." The Briefly Unmasked Agent looks troubled. We can tell because he's unmasked.