Episode Report Card Erin: C+ | 93 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Double Your Premiere, Double Your Fun
By Erin | Season 4 | Episode 2 | Aired on 2005.01.05
At the end of the day, as Marshall's heading to his car juggling all sorts of geek stuff, a couple of black cars screech up. A bunch of "federal agents" get out of the cars and arrest Marshall for misuse of company property or some such shit, but we already know this is just a trumped-up charge to get Marshall into the Apple Store. The next thing we see is Marshall being led into the Apple Store with a hood over his head as he blabbles about downloading maps or something. The agents park Marshall in front of the waiting group of Apple Store employees and remove his hood. He looks around. "Am I dead?" Hee. Syd just smiles and tells him he's been recruited to run the IT division of the Apple Store. Sloane walks up and manages to look menacing, even though he barely comes up to the shoulders of the rest of his team. Marshall sees him and hilariously leans into Syd. "Um, Syd?" he whispers. "Slooooanne is heeeere." Hee. "We know," says Syd with mock seriousness. Hee hee. This whole scene makes me laugh out loud. I don't care how contrived it is. It just tickles me. So, Marshall's hired! He hugs Syd and says, "We're back!" And how, brother.
And now we move on to London. We're going to do one of the standard Alias "we're on the mission already and we'll switch over to Marshall for comedy routines and techno-babble when absolutely necessary" scenes. Syd and Vaughn, clad all in black, are running across a rooftop. Marshall gets on the comm and congratulates them on…running across the roof really well? I don't know. "Stay focused," he says, obviously excited to be on another mission with his buds. "They're focused," says Dixon, obviously remembering how annoying Marshall can sometimes be. Okay, so, break-in time. Do I need to describe it? No. No, I don't. Suffice it to say, Syd blowtorches some hinge somewhere as Vaughn tries to bypass the security system to make the security cameras loop and Marshall talks him through it. Everything goes smoothly until the hinge that Syd's torching burns off and something clanks down into a vent. The security inside totally hears it and wants to check it out. But the monitors are showing the security desk guards that everything's cool near the sword, so the guards tell the other guard not to bother checking it out. Yeah. I don't know. There's forty-five minutes left to the episode and I'm really looking forward to the two billion commercial breaks that are peppered throughout the remaining portion.