Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Who Rescues the Rescuer?
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 3 | Aired on 01.15.2006
In front of the terrorists' camera, Derek is holding it together much better than his mom is as Beresch tells the world, "In fifteen minutes, your President will get another demonstration of our commitment." Kiefer asks Curtis how long it'll be until they're ready to move, and Curtis says it's going to be at least a half hour before everyone's in place. Kiefer says that's too long, and they argue for a minute. Curtis says they can't risk all the hostages for one kid, whatever Kiefer's connection to him might be. Curtis promises to hurry, and Kiefer realizes that it won't be long before he's forced to do something stupid.
Derek looks down and sees that he's kneeling in the blood of the hostage who was just shot. It's 9:26:34. Now that's a short act.
9:31:02. Derek waits to die, Kiefer watches from on high, Diane tries not to cry, and Buchanan straightens his tie. At Not Camp David, the First Lady is in her room watching a rebroadcast of Beresch's initial demand with her maid, Evelyn. It's clearly getting to her, so Evelyn starts to turn off the TV. FLOTUS grabs the remote away, and she's once again starting in on her "David Palmer tried to tell me something about national security last night" kick. And now that she's back on her meds and they've taken effect in the last half hour or so, she's lucid enough to have decided that somebody altered the phone recording that Logan played for her last hour. Evelyn wonders who would do that, which is her polite way of saying, "You a crazy lady." FLOTUS tells Evelyn to cover for her, and walks out the door, ignoring Evelyn's question as to where she's going. Evelyn hates her job so much.
Up in his hidden perch, Kiefer takes a camera phone photo of one of the terrorists, zooming in on a device in the front of the guy's vest. He then calls CTU and is surprised to get Chloe on the line. She explains that she doesn't have to go to a cell now that she's a member of the regular cast. Kiefer sends her the camera phone photo he just took, asking her to enlarge and enhance the device that caught Kiefer's interest. Seems that's a secondary detonator that allows the leader to blow up his guys via cell phone if one of them gets cold feet. Or if they talk back to him, maybe. I'd bet Beresch has a very respectful work force. Chloe gets working on identifying the detonator so she can get the detonation frequency for Kiefer. Kiefer has to admit that Buchanan doesn't know about this plan of his, and tells her to check the live feed of the next hostage to die. "Oh, my God, it's Derek," Chloe realizes. So she's on board now. As she hangs up at 9:33:47, she flags down Spencer, who happens to be walking by. "I was really worried about you," he says. Chloe brushes that off and asks for his help in figuring out how to get Kiefer's phone to emit an alternate signal. Spencer picks up on Chloe's even-more-intense-than-usual twitchiness, and realizes this isn't quite kosher. But she manages to get him to help anyway, without even having to flash her tattoo at him.