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
A uniformed guard escorts Chloe up to Kiefer in the hallway, and they have their annual hug. "You look like hell. Are you all right?" she asks. Kiefer claims to just be a little tired, and after they walk along talking about the CTU servers for a moment, Kiefer stops to break some news to her: Tony's the big bad. Chloe doesn't believe it. "I know he was devastated over Michelle, but..." "Tony is not your friend," Kiefer interrupts. Nice use of the singular. "The Tony that you knew? He doesn't exist any more." Chloe insists there must be a reason. "A reason for what?" Kiefer asks. "Bringing down two passenger planes? Trying to ambush 25 federal agents? Chloe, he tried to kill me. He betrayed us all. You, me, and Bill." He seems pretty sure Tony wasn't just maintaining his cover. Kiefer wants to know Chloe is with him. So she agrees to do whatever he says. "No," he insists, "I need to know that you are with me on this." Whatever that means, and however it's different from what she just said, she agrees to it.
A white sedan pulls up outside a brownstone apartment building with Tony at the wheel and the Faux-yer in the shotgun seat at 3:46:13. Holding her laptop open, the Faux-yer reminds us and Tony that their target is Jibraan Al-Zarian, a 27-year-old construction worker with an expired visa. No ties to extremist groups, but she says his parents were killed in American air raids on the Pakistani border when he was 11, and he's been raising his younger brother ever since. "Fits the psych profile," Tony says. Here's another thing about Jibraan Al-Zarian that I'm probably the only viewer to notice: his name sounds exactly like "Alzarian," which is what the character Adric from old-school Doctor Who was. And an Alzarian is a humanoid alien with the ability to heal amazingly quickly after being wounded. So Jibraan Al-Zarian should fit in on 24 just fine.
Inside, Jibraan is already awake, making breakfast, so clearly he's on the early shift. He's also watching Fox News. So much for the psych profile. His beard and glasses make him look professorial, but his wife-beater and arms...don't. The younger brother rolls out of bed, and a discussion about breakfast reveals that the elder brother has a foreign accent, while the younger looks and sounds completely American. Jibraan also tells his brother to come straight home after work. "It's not a good day to be a Muslim," he explains. The younger brother points out that not only are Muslims innocent in this, everyone thinks he's Puerto Rican anyway. All this character exposition of course more than justifies why these two have to be awake before four AM instead of being just rousted out of their beds at the end of the episode.