Episode Report Card M. Giant: C+ | 1 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Take These Secondary Characters, Please!
By M. Giant | Season 4 | Episode 10 | Aired on 02.20.2005
Lispy Skip's got a conference room all to himself when Driscoll comes in to ask for the latest timing estimates on the down-melting nuclear plants. The figures are forty minutes old, which displeases Driscoll. Skip apologizes, saying, "I've been a little upset about my mother." Driscoll tells him to put his emotions on hold for a little longer. "My mother just died, Ms. Driscoll," Skip says. "I can't put that on hold." So I guess she did die. As far as Skip knows, at least. I wish that after Skip's mom had killed herself, DoDder would have come up to Skip and said, "Hey, what you said to me before really hit home. I had to pull a lot of strings and promise to make some dispatcher a Joint Chief of Staff, but someone's on the way to pick your mom up now." Alas, this show hates me. Driscoll, rather than dragging Skip down to the clinic where her daughter nearly died a few hours ago, apologizes for being "callous." He promises to get his shit together as soon as they're done with the impending meeting. Which meeting consists of these two plus DaD, who enters, saying, "Bring [the new viewers] up to speed." Skip explains that they're working on fighting the MacGuffin and slowing the meltdown of the five remaining plants, but they're not going to be able to stop it. "So that means we still have to find the MacGuffin," DaD recaps. Driscoll explains to DaD that Kiefer's got TerrorDad cornered at the hospital. Which DaD knows, and which Driscoll knows DaD knows, because she was present when Kiefer told him. Who wrote this exposition, Ryan Seacrest? People, quit dialing in your votes and pay attention. You're being rude to the rest of the class. DaD brings up AIIIEEEE!sha, and Driscoll says she "sent Curtis to interrogate her." Because preventing an agent's personal feelings about a suspect from interfering with his judgment is less important than keeping the black people together in the same storyline, I guess. This subplot is brought to you by The Man.
It's 4:06:48. AIIIEEEE!sha's awake and getting "hooked up" to that nifty elastic wristband polygraph that CTU has. Is it still a polygraph if it only has one sensor? Wouldn't that make it a monograph? Curtis comes into the room. "I want to call my lawyer," is AIIIEEEE!sha's opening. Curtis doesn't exactly hop to. "I do have rights," AIIIEEEE!sha says. "TerrorGringo had rights too," Curtis non sequiturs. And then he has TerrorGringo's corpse wheeled in on a gurney. He flips back the sheet covering TerrorGringo's face and AIIIEEEE!sha recoils in horror. Well, who knew Curtis had such a flair for the morbidly dramatic? I guess he's tired of being limited to PowerPoint presentations all the time. Let's hope we can look forward to future CTU briefings where the visual aids will include the steaming, irradiated corpses of nuclear reactor crews. He tells AIIIEEEE!sha that the people who killed TerrorGringo are the same people who blew up her car. "Even if we let you go, you'd be dead in fifteen minutes." There's the door! But the only one leaving is TerrorGringo on his gurney. Curtis tells her that her "only chance to survive is to tell us what you know." AIIIEEEE!sha, demonstrating those brilliant room-reading skills that have carried her so far, says, "I want a deal." "You get to live. That's your deal," Curtis snaps. Wow, that's a pretty good deal. AIIIEEEE!sha agrees to cooperate. Curtis starts asking questions, but AIIIEEEE!sha doesn't have any answers, other than explaining that TerrorGringo sent her to CTU in order to "cover his tracks" if that "became necessary." Way to plan ahead there, TerrorGringo. She was in place for, like, three hours before you put her to work on that. Even though AIIIEEEE!sha doesn't have any names that can help Curtis, she says she can get them from TerrorGringo's computer in his office downtown. But it can't be accessed externally; it requires a thumbprint ID from either TerrorGringo or AIIIEEEE!sha. "Since he's dead," she finishes, "it'll have to be mine." She doesn't look too thrilled about leaving the relative safety of CTU. Hey, just have someone bring Curtis a Thermos full of ice and a pair of pruning shears and everyone's happy.