Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Wayne In Pain
By M. Giant | Season 6 | Episode 11 | Aired on 02.25.2007
In the briefing room, the rehearsal is about to begin, and Chad Lowe excuses himself to ostensibly go find Tom. Instead, he lurks outside the door, peering in the window as he runs his sweat-slicked fingers over the screen of the PDA. He hits enter, and what looks like a 4.12-second countdown begins. A red light on the Detonaphone starts blinking, just to let anyone who might be looking at it that it's about to explode. Chad Lowe waits for the boom.
Inside, the camera guy says that he's going to give Assad a seven-second countdown. Liquid starts dripping out of the bomb's speaker grille, attracting Assad's attention. Nice bomb-making, Carson. One job, he had. "What is this?" Assad wonders as the director's countdown stops at five. Spotting the Dictaphone, he hollers, "Bomb!,"and dives at Wayne, just like everyone else does. Wayne quickly turns to the door, and that's when the whole room seems to explode.
Chad Lowe just stands quietly outside the other door, which doesn't arouse the suspicions of the small army of Secret Service agents pushing him aside to enter the bomb site. An alarm is going off as Chad Lowe shrinks into his own splitscreen window. In other windows, Tom is still taped up, Fayed is still riding with his nukes, Chloe steals more glances across the CTU floor at Morris, Gredenko's men busy themselves preparing the drones, and Kiefer picks up a soft-sided briefcase preparatory to leaving Not Camp David.
The rubble of the briefing room is lit only by emergency lights and the flashlights of Secret Service personnel (one of which may have some of Tom's DNA on it). One guard turns over the bodies of Assad (dead or not?) and Wayne's Secret Service guy (ditto?) before finding Wayne bloody and facedown on the floor. "Citadel is down," he reports, as Chad Lowe slouches off looking pretty miserable for someone who just saved the country. He's clearly not thinking that anybody will ever thank him for this. It's 5:00:00.