Episode Report Card Pablo G: B+ | 25 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Natural Election
By Pablo G | Season 2 | Episode 21 | Aired on 05.12.2013
It's the five-hour mark of the power outage according to a special news report that Nolan, Ems and Aiden are watching on Nolan's NolSat-connected laptop. The news anchor says authorities are baffled about what could've caused all networks and power grids to simultaneously go down in New York City. Nolan's like, duh... Carrion. But they haven't quite figured out how Carrion was triggered without the Falcon. It's kind of a blonde moment for Nolan that he didn't immediately realize that he and Aiden initiated Carrion by following the Falcon's path to draining the Graysons' Amanda Clarke Foundation bank account. Everything they've done up until this point implicates Aiden. Ems is livid. She orders Aiden to go dark -- go off the grid. Emanda: "I'm not going to sit back and watch the Initiative turn you into their next David Clarke!" Ems punctuates this with a stare-down.
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Later that night, Victoria leads Jack through a deserted Grayson Manor armed with a flashlight. They head straight for Conrad's home office desk so Victoria can crack open the safe for Jack. Victoria rolls her eyes when the first thing she sees inside is a gun. She pops back up from squatting and points the gun at Jack, which understandably disturbs him because it would be entirely in her character to double cross him here on the spot, but it's just the Queen being careless. They'll hang on to the gun in case Conrad shows up. Jack squats down to the safe and starts rifling through manila folders. He tosses a few behind him without looking at what they are. Victoria notices one has Jack's name on it, so she stashes it away without him noticing. There's no computer in the safe, but Jack comes across the folder for Amanda Clarke. Victoria admits she was keeping that file because of Amily's vendetta against her, inviting Jack to look in it and/or keep it. She asks if she can talk to Ashley about the laptop, causing Jack to accidentally implicate Ash's involvement in his plans when he casually writes off the possibility that she might know where the laptop is. He tries to play it off, but Victoria has already filed away that tidbit for later. Jack's fed up with their search. They're out of time. He declares that the audio recording of Conrad's conversation with Nate Ryan will have to be enough. Jack's going to take it to the press, unleashing it during Conrad's speech this afternoon. He invites Victoria not to miss it.
Back at Nolcorp, Ems and Nolan try to figure out a way they can buy Aiden some time before the feds come after him. Nolan gets the idea that he can tap into Carrion with the satellite to track the progress of the investigation, but when he attempts it, he finds that the Falcon has blocked access. There's a callback to the cute animation of a literal falcon from Nolan's initial hacking invitation to Edith, only this time the falcon dodges his arrow and rips off Nolan's cartoon head. It's going to take some time for Nolan to get past the block, so Emanda decides she wants to seek out Takeda to see if he's got any intel on what the Initiative is up to. Knowing that Aiden and Takeda have been at odds, Nolan volunteers to come with Ems while the Carrion diagnostic runs on autopilot.