Episode Report Card M. Giant: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Check But Not Mate
By M. Giant | Season 7 | Episode 7 | Aired on 02.02.2009
Somewhere below them, at 2:10:53, the Matobos are ushered into an office and locked inside. Matobo is already having second thoughts about letting his wife come, but she reminds him that it wasn't really up to him. She assures him, "Jack Bauer will be here soon." She doesn't yet know Kiefer well enough to realize that isn't necessarily a reason not to worry.
In fact, Kiefer is kind of already there. Chloe directs him and Walker to a vent where he'll have a vantage point over the whole control room. That'll be nice. Maybe they can camp up there and pick everyone off one by one.
At FBI-DC, Sean is telling Janis, "The entire NSA has been combing the firewall searching for the next CIP device breach. If this were something, don't you think they'd already know about it?" Janis retorts, "I can live without your negativity today, Sean." Okay! Plot hole plugged! Numbers are flashing on her screen, and they're familiar to her as that code fragment she saw earlier. The other, more user-friendly item on her screen is a location that's familiar to us: Kidron, Ohio. Janis alt-tabs over to Homeland Security's high-value target database, and quickly comes up with nearby Boyd Chemical. "What do they make?" Sean wonders. "Insecticide," Janis answers, apparently off the top of her head, and asks for the number. Sean quickly pulls up the number for plant manager John Brunner, complete with a geographically accurate 937 area code, and Janis autodials it, and gets a receptionist, with whom she gets a tad shirty: "Ma'am as I just stated, I'm with the FBI. Does that sound vaguely important to you?" See, it is possible to be bitchy and funny at the same time, Chloe.
At 2:12:44, John Brunner (played by Tom Irwin, who's had about fifty pretty memorable guest shots since his one season as Angela's dad on My So-Called Life, but that's a goddamn long shadow Graham Chase casts) is pacing around a busy control room when Janis is put through on his Bluetooth. Janis introduces herself and starts to explain about the government firewall. "I know what it does, honey," he interrupts, which preemptively makes me feel better about the fact that he is doomed. Janis asks if they're having any problems right now. Brunner tells her that in fact, some safety valves on the primary storage tank aren't exactly living up to their name at the moment. And what's in that tank? Methyl isocyanate, of course. I was going to put a joke here about whether this season's writing staff includes someone whose job is to come up with names of chemical compounds, but then five seconds of research clued me in that this stuff actually exists, as anyone from Bhopal could tell you. In fact, some Indian immigrant living in Kidron is probably about to be all, "Fuck, not again." Anyway, Janis says, "Mr. Brunner, I have reason to believe that this is a terrorist attack on your facility." She tells him to initiate security procedures and stay on the line. Brunner orders his techs to shut down the tank, but they can't seem to pull it off, and the pressure is rising. Brunner tells Janis, "If we cannot stop this, we're looking at atmospheric release." In a shaky voice, Janis tells Sean to run and find Moss. "Dubaku has targeted that facility. We need to alert the president." Janis tells Brunner to start evacuating people. But first, he needs to spend a few seconds staring into the camera. It's 2:14:32.