Episode Report Card M. Giant: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Gray Widow
By M. Giant | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 05.01.2005
Outside Casa Miss Iletech, cops and paramedics are all over the place, making sure Miss Iletech and Potato Face are uninjured. The latter shoos away the paramedic hovering over her: "I did the shooting," she says, leaving the "and you're next" just barely unspoken. He leaves her alone so she can get to work on the hard drive. While she's doing that, she's talking on her hands-free headset to Kiefer back at CTU, who has her on speaker. In a nice touch of continuity, Kiefer is still standing over Lispy Skip's desk, and Curtis is still in the background. They've also been joined by Buchanan during the previouslies. Kiefer tells Potato Face that the hard drive "belongs to someone who has no previous experience with nucular weapons." Wow, those guys standing in a barn in Iowa with him and the nuke are really brave, then. Kiefer points out that Missile Tech had to have some source for his knowledge. Potato Face technobabbles about the emails she's already decrypting; they all come from the same person, but the source address is shielded. Kiefer asks her to send everything over to CTU so Skip can trace them, and Potato Face adds that whoever sent the emails is in the U.S. Kiefer thanks her and tells her to hold on, then picks up a handset. He Velvets, "Hey. How you holdin' up?" I thought for a second that he had just randomly (and quickly) called DoDder, but then we see Potato Face answering, "I'm not used to the idea that I just killed someone, if that's what you're asking. But I'm doing my job." And then I thought he was going to say, "Oh, I was trying to call DoDder." But I was wrong. I like my version better. "Fair enough," says the guy whose personal body count for the day is pushing triple digits. He tells her to get back to CTU as soon as she can. Not to give anything away, but it's wise of him to be nice to her and keep his options open here.
Of course, this is all the time Lispy Skip needed to trace Missile Tech's emails to a Chinese national named Lee Jong. There's already a photo of a fortysomething Asian man on his screen and everything. Lispy Skip exposits that Lee was a research scientist on China's nuclear weapons program, until he was fired in 2001. Buchanan wonders if this means that the Chinese are backing ImhoTerror, but Kiefer doubts that the Chinese government would use someone so easily traceable. Which means that Lee is working freelance. They all agree that Lee might know where ImhoTerror is, and Buchanan tells Skip to check with the INS to see if Lee is in the country. I love how ImhoTerror is so tricky and slippery, but CTU manages to find someone new who's connected to him just about every hour.
Just then Kiefer's cell phone rings. It's the CTU surgeon, calling to say that Grayadder is well enough to have a brief visit from Kiefer. Kiefer leaves the hunt for the warhead to his colleagues while he trots off to visit his boyfriend. Who knows when he'll get another chance, right? It might be the last chance they have to talk for a while.