Episode Report Card M. Giant: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Glower, Cower, And Tower
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 6 | Aired on 01.28.2007
Milo enters Buchanan's office to ask what's going on with Nadia. Buchanan tries to play it off, but Milo insists upon knowing what's going on. Buchanan reluctantly tells Milo that Nadia's been flagged by Homeland Security for being of Middle Eastern descent. Milo thinks that's ridiculous: "She's lived in this country since she was two years old. She's a registered Republican, for crying out loud." Buchanan says that it's out of their hands, and tells him to get back to work. Milo does, unhappily. His crusade against ethnic profiling will have to wait. For, like, eight minutes.
Believe it or not, this little run-in has actually galvanized Buchanan to do something about the situation: he picks up the phone to call his wife and complain about the security measures. This is the first Karen's heard of them. "They're not security measures," she says, pissed. "They're the paranoid delusions of Tom Lennox." Buchanan asks what she can do, and she offers to talk to the President about it. Buchanan nods like, "Oh, well, I guess that will have to do for now." Got to start somewhere, I suppose.
Walid's hanging with his new buddies in the joint, and they're telling him that a nuke went off in Valencia over an hour ago. Walid stays neutral as he asks how many were killed, but they don't know yet. The whole conversation is being monitored live by Sandra and Agent Blond in the surveillance room, of course. Walid asks how they're getting their info, and Salim asks why Walid is so curious. Walid makes some excuse about how what happens outside affects them inside: "We have to share everything we know." This weak argument convinces Salim to confess that one of the other guys in the circle -- a younger man named Heydar -- managed to smuggle in a cell phone. Heydar lifts the phone slightly out of his inside jacket pocket so that Walid can see where he keeps it. In the surveillance room, Sandra asks Agent Blond how Heydar could have managed that, and he plot-hole-plugs that security in this hastily-assembled facility is still kind of porous. That's a lot of words to come up with a standards-and-practices-friendly way of saying "up his ass." At this point, Sandra and Agent Blond actually agree on something: they need to get Heydar's phone. Sandra tells him to get Walid out after he gets the phone, but Agent Blond doesn't want to give up their valuable undercover contact. He gets on a walkie-talkie to request access to a cell-phone tower.
Down in the White House Bunker, Chad Lowe has finished his little project for Tom. He hands over a list of names of people he's pressured into agreeing to testify to something or other. Tom accepts the list and heads right over to Karen. "This isn't working for me," he whines. He basically tells her that he needs her out of there so that he can have full access to Wayne. Karen's like, "Not my problem, dude," and when Tom asks her to resign, she just laughs in his face: "What are you smoking?" Actually, that list in Tom's hand is a smoking gun, he says. He's found out that CTU-Seattle had Abu Fayed in custody fourteen months ago, and Buchanan signed for Fayed's release. Karen says that, at the time, there wasn't enough evidence to hold Fayed and the other "detainees" being held along with him. If that's the case, asks Tom, then why did Karen bury the file to protect her husband? Karen angrily insists that she did nothing wrong, but Tom says that no one will care, since Buchanan basically released a guy who ended up nuking L.A. He's got a point; there's no way to make that look good on a résumé. Karen gets in Tom's face, threatening him with the skeletons in his own closet. But he holds up his list of witnesses, saying that he's already got his proof; how long will it take to get hers? Karen calls Tom a son of a bitch, and he shrugs, "I never claimed otherwise." He says that it's not personal, and demands her resignation within the hour. It's 11:26:48.