Episode Report Card Gustave: B- | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
By Gustave | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on November 5, 2001
Instead, we see gritty marketplaces where dirty people buy dirty vegetables and speak some sinister-sounding language like they're in a Duran Duran video. A wiry thirty-ish Caucasian man enters a ground floor apartment whose bleached wood exterior makes it look like a Lake Tahoe Radisson, but judging from the hookers and beggars outside, we're obviously supposed to think it's a seedy hotel. He enters a room, takes a padlock off a door inside, opens a laptop, picks up a telephone, and identifies himself as "Victor Rovner" and requests permission to log on. Permission is granted by the guy on the other end of the line, and with sweat dripping from his forehead, he downloads some information from a spy satellite. There's a loud knock on the door, and crazy foreign shouting is heard outside. So you just know that this Victor Rovner guy has found out something that someone else doesn't want him to know…or something.Meanwhile, at a formal party in downtown Los Angeles in some glass tower where there are candelabras and live piano, it is 12:02:14 AM, and an older mustached gentleman -- who we later find out is Kiefer's boss -- gets a cell phone call. He takes leave of some chick he's talking to and continues the conversation over by the wall out of earshot. It's some agent-y looking guy on the other end of the line, who informs Boss of Kiefer that he's spoken to Victor Rovner. "Do we know who the target is?" asks Boss of Kiefer. "Senator David Palmer," says the agent-y guy. Boss of Kiefer's eyes widen.
Next, we're at Senator David Palmer's campaign headquarters, which seems to be a Hilton Hotel suite. A Steadicam follows his wife, whose informal twin set is the same warm beige as the carpeting and the curtains which adorn the glass walls. Whoever art-directed this series obviously has a serious hard-on for glass walls and floor length curtains and the color cream. Either that, or it's supposed to be symbolic that all the interiors are transparent but veiled. Palmer, a poor man's Denzel Washington, and his staff are sitting out on the balcony having a speech-writing meeting. I guess we're supposed to think that Palmer is good ole simple decent guy who just wants to be President so he can do right for the country, because he keeps making changes in the speech in order to make it sound less "self-serving" at the suggestion of his wife.