Episode Report Card Manimal: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Doppelganger
By Manimal | Season 1 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.27.2001
Oh. Back to the recap. The camera pans over the "big guest star," who is Kevin Mitnick, celebrity hacker. You see him for all of three seconds. Whoop-dee-doo. That is such a lame guest star. Who gives a shit? Bring back the Golden Days of television, when you had guest stars like Charo, and Shirley Jones. Now that was quality, kids.
Schiller -- who is one smart snickerdoodle -- points out to Vaughn that he has no idea if Sloane is the fraud, and that for all he knows it could be Vaughn himself. Vaughn concedes that he's right. You know what I want for Christmas? An actor with a wee bit of gravitas and maybe a few more facial expressions. Pretty will get you so far, and then it gets you bored.
Vaughn enters the secret room. He wants to get a plane to take Schiller to Langley, VA to prove that they're CIA. Shouldn't the nimrod have thought of that before he formulated this plan? Mitnick/CIA drone tells him, "Hey, Vaughn, we're in."
The next few minutes are boring. Basically: Kelvin is giving SD-6 access to a fake web site with just enough real info to fool them. Once SD-6 downloads all the info, it'll give the CIA access to their computer systems and their entire network. Sydney is forced to do a few steps of the Exposition Foxtrot to get all this across. You know, I'm not really a technology guru, but isn't it practically impossible for even the best hacker to get in and out of a system without leaving a few fingerprints? And if a huge, monolithic organization like the CIA is doing it, they're going to be a lot less agile and invisible than one drunk fifteen-year-old in Massachusetts who's fucking with their firewalls. And if someone as Luddite-ish as me knows this, wouldn't the frickin' CIA?
Whatever. Sydney "Jughead" Bristow compliments the plan. It was Vaughn's. Jennifer Garner should protest to the hair and make-up people, because when she wears her hair slicked behind her ears, she looks like a loving cup. I can't go one more recap without mentioning the fact that almost every actor on this show is a charter member of the Happy McForehead Club. Jennifer Garner may in fact be close to knocking Helen Hunt off her throne as Queen Forehead of Hollywood (although Mena Suvari is definitely one to watch in this race, too). You could show Lawrence of Arabia on that noggin. Not to mention that Michael Vartan and Bradley Cooper aren't exactly slowpokes themselves in the Giant Forehead race. And Victor Garber...man, don't get me started. If any of these kids mated with the Beek, it would produce a forehead that could possibly Take Over America. Or at the very least a forehead that one could show IMAX movies on. Also -- did I mention her ears? The opposite of tiny.