Episode Report Card M. Giant: A- | 1 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 5 | Aired on January 21, 2007
It's 10:18:12 and the FayedMobile is keeping to back streets. He tells his driver, "Tell them we're safe. We're moving away from it now." Well, you were safe, until you made the driver do the phone calling. Fayed glances into the back, where several silver briefcases are peeking out from under a dark, heavy tarp. Nukes in a blanket!
Here's something I don't think I've seen before -- it's an actual exterior door that you can see from inside CTU, with sunlight shining through it and everything. Disorienting. Assad and the agents escorting him are buzzed into the outer security lobby, where Nadia and Buchanan are there waiting to meet him. Assad speaks to Buchanan: "I know that you see me as your enemy. But today, I assure you that I am not." He extends his hand in friendship. Buchanan just leaves him hanging, turning down the hall with a curt, "Follow me." Assad's thinking, I shook that skanky-ass, half-melted lump at the end of Kiefer's arm, and this Tim Gunn-haired dude's too good for me? Fuck this noise. But he follows anyway.
Inside the Situation Room, Chloe and Morris have just finished setting up a recording device for the meeting with Assad, which they've been doing since at least the act-in splitscreen. Morris wonders why Assad is getting the red carpet treatment, to Chloe's grim amusement. Meanwhile, Assad himself is being led across the floor, inviting stares from all the people who have spent years looking for him and now see him in person, just walking right in. Nobody leaps on him or wrestles him to the ground, which tells me that word travels a lot faster at CTU than it does in my office. Assad, Buchanan, and Nadia cross to the Situation Room, and the O'Brians leave them to it at 10:19:45.
Buchanan starts speaking in that formal way people have when they're initiating a recorded interview session, but things get informal quickly when Assad hears Buchanan tell the recorder that Fayed may have four more nukes. He's surprised at the news, and is quick to assure them that he came to the U.S. to stop Fayed, although he didn't know his old compadre had The Bomb. Buchanan says that he does, which means there has to be a trail of people who were involved in the planning. Assad says that was after he and Fayed split six months ago. Buchanan asks if Assad can think of a possible lead to Fayed, and Assad suggests "the source." He backstories that a year ago, he sent Fayed to negotiate with an ex-Soviet general for a cache of nuclear weapons, but Fayed wasn't able to close the deal at the time. Okay, hold it right there. I've been giving Assad the benefit of the doubt up until now (largely because he's a very handsome man and therefore entirely trustworthy), but does anyone else have a problem with this news that Fayed probably wouldn't even have nukes right now if Assad hadn't told him where to look? Apparently Buchanan doesn't. Assad says that the general's name was Dmitri Gredenko, but he doesn't know anything more about him than his name. Buchanan's going to have his people run with it anyway. It's 10:21:17. Not much of a cliffhanger, there, but I'll take commercials where I can get them.