Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | 1 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Time for Plan E
By M. Giant | Season 7 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.27.2009
After she hangs up, she steps into her shoes and walks around the bed to give her sleeping son a cuddle. Then she goes to Morris to wake him. "Are you speaking to me again, then?" he asks instantly, demonstrating that snark really is his natural state. Chloe explains that she has to go, and she needs Morris to take the kid out of the city. He wants them all to go, but she refuses. "FBI needs me," she says. He reminds her that she got arrested last time she went to help them out, but she insists she's the only one who can do it. Morris doesn't want to leave her in range of a biological attack. She hugs him and says, "Jack needs me, and I just need for you and Prescott to be safe." Morris agrees, tells her to be careful, and kisses her goodbye. She grabs her purse and goes. So I guess he'll do the packing up, then. It's 3:37:25.
Now it's 3:41:52, and a meeting in the FBI-DC conference room is about to get started. Kiefer finishes giving himself a fresh injection and enters just in time to take the floor from Walker. "I know many of you have lost friends and colleagues today," he speechifies. "I have too. Unfortunately, the time to mourn these brave men and women is going to have to wait." So get to it then, already. He tells them about the incredibly vague threat they're facing, about which they currently have precisely dick in the way of leads. A red-haired Field Ops guy asks who's behind it, and Kiefer goes over to the big screen to pull up photos of Tony and the Faux-yer, shown in her blonde wig on the White House security camera. "We're still trying to identify her," Kiefer says, without explaining why that's taking the 24-verse equivalent of four months. As for what they do have, Kiefer explains, "Right now we are solely working off an operational theory that the people that are behind this will need to manufacture evidence in an effort to offload the blame for this attack. Either another group or an individual with terrorist sympathies. During the ensuing panic, these people will move in and seize power under the guise of creating and maintaining stability." Wow, that's not how Hodges put it at all. It sounds so much more cynical in Kiefer's words. Anyway, Walker says they need to look for that manufactured evidence. How, asks Janis. Walker starts rattling off some scary-sounding ideas (as Kiefer is handed a note and leaves the room), until Janis interrupts, "Not only is that type of blanket surveillance illegal, we don't have the capacity to pull it off. The search algorithms simply don't exist." Walker says CTU has them, and when Janis points out that CTU doesn't exactly exist any more either, Walker says they're digging the servers out of mothballs and having them installed now. And indeed, when Janis looks out the glass wall of the conference room, she sees a tech messing around with shrink-wrapped servers and running cables up into the ceiling. Wow, these servers are so fast they practically install themselves. Still, Janis isn't pleased. "What does that make us, CTU Lite?" she asks. "Last I head, the Bureau was a federal entity, bound by federal statute." Walker rather coldly tells Janis, "Do this or I will find someone else who will. I do not have time to argue." Try using contractions, then. Janis says she's just asking, but Walker doesn't have time for that either. "Moving on," she bulldozes.