Episode Report Card M. Giant: C+ | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT Glower, Cower, And Tower
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 6 | Aired on January 28, 2007
At the Anacostia Detention Facility's surveillance room, Agent Blond has just finished emailing photos of Walid's new buddies over to CTU so that they can do their cross-checking thing. Milo receives them at 11:19:45 and tells Morris to get to work on them. Morris agrees, as soon as he gets something he needs from Nadia first. Milo's surprised to hear that Nadia's falling behind, and goes over to her desk, where she's huffing and grumping at her screen in frustration. He asks her what the holdup is, but rather than telling him she's doing the best she can to protect a country that's tying her hands because it hates her, she just suggests that he go talk to Buchanan.
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.