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
Hey, look who's at Not Camp David -- it's Palmer's former Secret Service guy, Aaron the Lipless Gnome. He taps on the door to FLOTUS's suite, saying he's there to escort FLOTUS to the Garden Room. But nobody's there except Evelyn the maid, who has to cover for her loopy boss. "She's in one of her moods," Evelyn tells Aaron through a crack in the door. "If you push her, it'll make it worse." Aaron nods wearily, like he's been through this a hundred times before, and agrees to wait outside. I bet he misses Palmer more than anyone else does.
FLOTUS is lurking through the hallways somewhere else in the compound at 9:35:56. She totally ambushes some guy in the men's room in the middle of his peeing. The closed-captioning even TMIs the phrase "[liquid flowing]." Dear God, closed-captioning. Go to your room and think about what you've done. The poor dude is already flustered at having been caught urinating in front of the First Lady of the United States, and then he has to zip up and answer her seemingly random questions about the call recording system. He explains that hard copies of call transcripts are kept in the Archive Room down the hall. FLOTUS wants in, but Archive Guy says that access is restricted, and he can't let even the President's wife into the room. She asks to borrow his security card, and he declines. And then we see that sometimes, in order to get what she wants, even the First Lady of the United States has to pop out a boob. "In about three seconds, I am going to scream louder than any woman you have ever heard in your life," she says calmly, hiking up her skirt. The guy's holding out his card to her by the time she gets to two. She politely thanks him, sticks his card in her teeth (ew, he didn't wash his hands!), puts herself back together, and leaves the men's room. It's 9:37:38.
9:42:04, and the standoff at the airport continues. Kiefer calls up Chloe while she and Spencer are furiously working to identify the detonator from the online Sears catalog, and tells them that Derek's going to be killed in less than three minutes. Actually, if my math holds up, Derek's going down in negative two minutes. But what's five minutes between terrorists?
At the command post, Curtis is giving instructions to his men. He tells them to be sure and shoot quickly, before the bad guys have time to blow themselves up and kill the hostages. Buchanan rings in from CTU and asks what their time frame is. As with almost every scene with Buchanan from now on in this episode, Audrey is in the room with him but has absolutely nothing to add to the discussion. To her credit, she refrains from talking anyway. Curtis says it'll be about fifteen minutes.