Episode Report Card Gustave: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Find Kyle Singer!
By Gustave | Season 3 | Episode 5 | Aired on 11.24.2003
Back at Rancho Narcotico, Hector oversees the housekeeping staff as they set up for a party outside on the veranda. PoorMan'sAngelinaJolie enters. "You shouldn't be doing this," she says, referring to the "welcome home" party for Felipe Hartmano that is being prepared. Hector asks her what she means. "You've been running things," she replies. "Show Felipe that you're his partner…not his caterer." She exits, and Hector's cell phone rings. It's Crystal Gael with news: the prison riot is still going on, Hartmano is still alive, and CTU is thisclose to finding Kyle Singer. "If they do [find Kyle Singer]," says Crystal Gael, "they'll never let Hartmano go." "Then make sure they don't find Singer," says Hector. Crystal Gael promises to do the best he can. He observes Spawn over the surveillance cameras as she focuses on surveillance tapes of Kyle Singer in the Piquante Pickup. Once she concludes it's definitely Kyle, Adam the Woman Hater takes a look and notices a shiny object in the back that looks like a gun. "Someone's got him," concludes Spawn. Next they work on IDing the vehicle.
Back at the prison, Special Agent Charlie Brown and the warden are trying to get a shot of Kiefer and Hartmano on the prison surveillance cameras. First they find the room where they believe the hostages are being held, but unfortunately they are out of the camera range. "Pan the camera over," says Special Agent Charlie Brown. The warden warns that the prisoners might see the camera moving and realize they are being watched. Charlie maintains that they have no choice. The camera pans over to reveal the hostages, Kiefer and Hartmano among them. True to the warden's warning, the camera is noticed, and Mista Clean shoots it out of commission. "We've got to get in there before they start killing everyone," says Special Agent Charlie Brown.
Meanwhile, in the laundry room where the hostages are being held, Mista Clean and his cohort, a Poor Man's Martin Donovan, are arguing about what to do about the hostages. They prepare for sniper attack by pushing the furniture up against the windows because, according to Mista Clean, "that's what went down in Chino!" So then, for reasons unclear to me due to the fact that I can't understand half of what anyone is saying, and also that I never was educated in the ways and means of prison riot social custom, they decide to make the guards play Russian Roulette. I take it this was the purpose of the "viewer discretion" warning. Now I understand that strange things happen to the psyches of people in custody…even after they're released from said custody. The Jews in Auschwitz, for instance, initially resisted the Red Cross's attempts to free them, and some of them even picked up the abandoned uniforms of their Nazi captors and tried to order each other around. However, I can't really understand why these prisoners aren't just trying to get the fuck out of there instead of sticking around to play Russian Roulette. But then, I'm just a white boy from the suburbs. I mean, if you want to kill the guards, kill the guards. If not, why not keep them all alive so you can use them as hostages to buy your way out of there. But don't make a game out of it. Frankly, I suspect that this Russian Roulette game is there a) because it's much more suspenseful than a mass execution and b) they want to make us think, yet again, that they're actually going to kill Kiefer. They're not going to kill Kiefer. They're not. Oh sure, they'll do really crafty things like have Kiefer do interviews in which he hints darkly that his character might be killed off, but at the end of the day it's not going to happen. I mean, let's face it, they didn't have the guts to finish Palmer off last season. So don't even think about it.