Episode Report Card Erin: A | 1 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT A chip off the old Élodie
By Erin | Season 5 | Episode 14 | Aired on 05.09.2006
Sloane's basking evilly in front of a roaring fire as Peyton stalks up and interrupts his me time by asking if he's decoded the page yet. Sloane just minces that it's going to take time and perhaps she should stop bugging him already and go get him that damned pitcher of Eau de Rambaldi he asked for! Since it's been over a week and Sloane hasn't delivered the decrypted message, Peyton asks when they might see some results. Sloane gets his back up and is all, uh, this ain't the Word Jumble, Princess Pain-In-My-Ass! The message has been hidden inside that document for over 500 years; I'm thinking that a little ol' week is no big deal here.
Peyton then weirdly suggests that Sloane take a walk outside on the grounds to clear his head. Sloane asks if the armed guard outside the door would mind if he slipped away to enjoy a bite of lunch. Well, considering that the establishing shot of the castle showed it to be dark outside, I'm thinking the armed guard might be wondering why you're going out for lunch when it's DINNERTIME. Peyton snarks that Sloane's not a prisoner in the castle, so how 'bout knocking the gigantic chip off his shoulder? She goes on to say that she knows he's had to make some tough sacrifices; they all have. Sloane chomps onto this last little bit like it's a tasty bit of amaretto-flavored licorice. "You think I'm having a crisis of conscience because I killed Nadia?" he spits at her. "Let me be clear: no one will stand between me and the fulfillment of Rambaldi's ultimate vision. No one. And unless you and your superiors know someone else who's familiar with fifteenth-century cryptography, I'm sure you can wait a few more days." This shuts Peyton up for the moment, and she gives him leave to continue about his business of not decrypting the page for reasons that are totally unclear at the moment. What? I'm not giving anything away!
Marshall's Garage of Geekiness. Getty, Jack, and Marsh are meeting about the Élodie chip. Marsh says that the chip was probably manufactured back in the seventies. He sticks the chip in his machine and discovers that there's 100Kb of data on it, but it's all encoded. Jack's amazed that Marsh would have a problem with thirty-year-old technology, but Marsh says half the code is missing and that it was probably corrupted over time. So, basically, he can't figure out what's on the damn thing. Getty asks what the little marks are on the outside of the chip and Marsh sticks it underneath a microscope. "Whoa!" he says after he's looked at it. "What is it?" asks Jack. Marshall puts whatever it is up on the monitor. We don't see what it is, but Getty suddenly says that they should tell Sydney. Jack says that he'll talk to Sydney and that Marshall and Getty should work on finding out what else is on the chip and why it was inside Élodie. At that same moment, a man listening in on their conversation from a high-tech monitoring room gets on the phone and tells whoever is on the other end that they just got a hit on one of the hard lines and they should call Peyton. The man who was listening in is no one I've ever seen before.