Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Gassing The Gap
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 8 | Aired on 02.12.2006
At the parking lot, Curtis watches Kiefer and his two captors head towards the mall in their white maintenance jackets with embroidered badges, carrying large tool boxes (one of which no doubt contains the nerve gas canister) and what looks like a rolled-up blueprint of the mall. These guys sure came prepared for something they weren't even planning to do a couple of hours ago. I suppose that once you're in possession of twenty canisters of Sentox nerve gas, all the other little details just sort of fall into place. Don't believe me? Fifteen minutes ago they didn't have a working trigger to actually release the gas, and now they do, courtesy of CTU. It's 2:24:56.
Commercials. That kid whose parents have the SUV may be smirking about being the first to get picked up from school on a snow day now, but when it melts I bet there's a crunchy beating in store for him.
2:29:22. In the CTU Situation Room, Chloe has already hacked into the mall's video surveillance system, which allows her to put up real-time video of Kiefer and his captors on the big screen. Audrey says in his earpiece that they're still trying to reach Logan. Kiefer doesn't respond, keeping his cover intact while not having to talk to Audrey. It's win-win for him, really. He and the terrorists pass a birthday party of little kids, and Kiefer's briefly distracted by the sight of a child's helium balloon escaping towards the huge skylight above. I wonder briefly if he's trying to learn something about the mall's ventilation from watching the balloon's trajectory, but Henchman #2 prods him onward before he can go all Gabrielle on them. As far as I can tell, there are no zombies of any kind present. I'm just going to have to let it go.
They quickly reach the mall's back offices, where Kiefer is drafted to lure the one security guard in the entire mall out of the room full of video monitors. When the guard opens the inner door, the henchmen claim to be there for ventilation repair. This is the first the guard's heard of it, of course, so he asks for some paperwork. Henchman #2 reaches into his bag, all, "I've got your paperwork right here!" and he pulls out a silenced handgun, with which he plugs the guard twice in the chest. Although Kiefer's pissed, he stays silent, which seems a little out of character for the part he's playing. At 2:30:47, Henchman #1 walks around to a huge, exposed ventilation duct that passes through the area, which he and his partner agree will serve their purposes nicely. Henchman #2 whips out a cordless reciprocating saw, because, if you're going on a long sea voyage to "Central Asia" like these guys were planning to be doing as of this morning, you're going to need to pass the time with something. A deck of cards, a pair of dice, magazines, white maintenance jackets with embroidered badges, large toolboxes, blueprints of the Sunrise Hills Mall, and a cordless reciprocating saw. Add one packed cargo hold and you've got instant fun. Plus it comes in handy when your original plan goes south and your new itinerary includes slicing into a vent panel, as it does now. The sound of metal being cut is a lot noisier than an unsilenced gunshot would have been. And yet Kiefer is still going to be able to hear the entire discussion that's about to follow on his earpiece. That thing must have cost me more than a whole building in Chelsea.
CTU has gotten through to Logan. Formal as always, McGill introduces everyone in the room -- Buchanan, Audrey, Chloe, and Edgar -- before explaining that Kiefer's currently undercover with two terrorists who are about to release one canister of nerve gas into the mall. "Well, then arrest them. What's the problem?" Logan demands. McGill says the problem is that they don't want to blow Kiefer's cover and potentially lose the other nineteen canisters. Hence the need for an entire mall full of civilians to be exposed to a highly toxic agent, die horribly, and rise anew as shambling, flesh-eating allegories of insatiable American consumerism. Or maybe I'm adding that last part. Logan's next question for McGill is largely rhetorical: "Are you out of your mind?" Buchanan steps in here and admits that he had the same question, but having looked at their "updated scenarios," it's possible that if CTU doesn't find the remaining nineteen canisters, they could be deployed at crowded areas all over the country. "The loss of life could exceed hundreds of thousands of people," he concludes. He says it like it's a bad thing.