Episode Report Card Erin: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT When Good Sketches Go Bad
By Erin | Season 1 | Episode 15 | Aired on 03.02.2002
Getting on with it, Marshall then informs everyone that Sark likely spends lots of time in Ireland; specifically, Galway. Of course, it actually takes Marshall about THREE YEARS to spit this out, but I thought I'd save us all the time and agony it would take to recap the entirety of his epic poem. Then Sloane delivers a mini-speech in which, even though I've rewound the tape a dozen times now, I can't clearly make out more than four identifiable words. He names locations, some boat, some plane, and then Galway, Ireland. I'm surmising that this involves Sark somehow, but I honestly don't know. Sydney, obviously realizing that I'm completely in the dark over here, says, "So they're handing over Rambaldi's manuscript in Tunisia?" Thanks, Syd. I owe you one.
Uncle Arvin tells Syd that her mission is to intercept the handover of the manuscript and bring it back to the U.S. He goes on to instruct Syd that she should review the mission details, go over op-tech with Marshall, and get her bags packed because she's leaving tonight.
Home Of The Subterranean Lovesick Blues. Agent Amorous is asking Sydney if some device looks familiar to her. She recognizes it as the same kind of camera she left behind in Argentina. Guess what? It actually IS the camera she left behind in Argentina; the CIA sent a team to retrieve it last week. Even though Syd only nabbed a few shots of the Rambaldi book, the CIA managed to learn quite a bit about it. "Like what?" asks Syd. Vaughn launches into this rather bizarre story about his crazy Aunt Trish who speaks to the dead and worships crop circles. Oh, that Vaughn! He's a wacky one! Syd pretends to be mildly amused while Vaughn continues that the whole Rambaldi tale sounds like a yarn that Crazy Aunt Trish might spin. Whatever. If this show starts to go all X-Files on me, I'm gonna hunt down J.J. Abrams myself and show him the business end of my right paratrooper boot.
Captain Tangent finally gets to the friggin' point. In a nutshell, Rambaldi was a sixteenth-century inventor who seemed to have an almost psychic vision of technology. The Rambaldi manuscript seems to be some sort of instruction manual; a manual to what exactly, no one seems to know. Agent Amorous pulls out a translation of one of the pages and points out a passage that refers to the "one hundred segments." Syd's all, what the hell does that mean? Vaughn's all, we don't know, cuz it continues on a page that we don't have. Syd's counter-mission, if she chooses to accept it, is to get the Rambaldi book, photograph the pages, and deliver the original book to SD-6 and the photos to the CIA.