Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Finger Pointing
By M. Giant | Season 8 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.17.2010
Back inside, Kiefer barks at Chloe, "We need to find out where your suspect went after he left Ms. Reed's apartment. Start checking traffic-cams!" It's 5:37:47, and he gets to just take over CTU resources like this? Even a resource that the boss doesn't like very much?
5:42:04. Meredith Reed is sitting at a small white table in a tiny, cylindrical, windowless white room. Hastings is in the adjoining observation room with an interrogation tech, who tells him to start off with some easy questions so he can get some baseline readings. "Make her comfortable," he suggests. How hard can that be, when she's sitting with her hands strapped to two separate reading devices? Hastings enters the interrogation capsule by way of a door panel that slides up and then back down, leaving the only view from outside the one that comes from the surveillance cameras. So let's hope CTU never wants to interrogate anyone during a power failure or anything. Hastings paces around her a bit before suggesting they start over. This room doesn't even have a chair for the interrogator to sit in, so he has to crouch awkwardly next to the table as he offers to let her tell her side. This is not an effective power dynamic, but she nods. His first question is when she first met President Hassan. She says it was six months ago, at a conference of oil ministers. He agreed to an interview, and they met twice in the lobby of his hotel. So far, so dull.
At the U.N., Hassan and his entourage return to the council chamber to resume the talks. He greets Taylor, who is grateful to him for wanting to continue. "You are no stranger to making personal sacrifices for your beliefs," Hassan says. "If the price of peace is my life, so be it." Taylor says their goal is to avoid that, and says they're working on it. Hassan asks Taylor what she knows about the suspect, and Taylor can't tell him much, other than to promise they'll keep him in the loop as they learn more. She wisely refrains from mentioning, "Oh, by the way, we knew about this threat an hour before you did. Sorry about that."
At CTU, Kiefer is watching the live video feed of Reed's interrogation at 5:44:32. If he's using his superpower of being able to tell when people are lying, he's keeping his findings to himself. Behind him, Chloe's coming up empty on her traffic-cam searches. Kiefer suggests something else, but all Chloe can think of is CTU surveillance drones, and she doesn't have the clearance to raid the archives stored in Arlo's station. So Kiefer tells her to hack in and do just that. Which she does. "I'm glad you're here. Thanks for staying," she says as she gets on it. Then she has to jinx everything by adding, "This'll all be over soon and you can get to California." Oh, she might as well just shoot him in the face if she's going to make comments like that. A second later, she's got footage from a drone that was apparently hovering at third-floor level, showing Toombs getting into a cab. She can't track the taxi, but this magical drone does have high enough resolution to allow her to zoom in close enough to read the cab's medallion number. That's all Kiefer needs; he tells her to call the cab company and find out where it went. "I'm not tracking this guy without a weapon," he says. She tells him to check out the CTU armory, and he'll need a handprint to get into it. He lets the machine on the table scan his palm (don't ask me why Chloe brought a palm-scanner in here for a simple debrief) and tells her to wipe it from the system as soon as he's gone. "I'll call you as soon as I'm on the road," he promises, and heads out. Wait, what's he going to drive? Or will he just take a cab, like everyone else seems to be doing?