Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT McKilled
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 13 | Aired on 03.12.2006
Bierko's hanging out at his bunker when one of his henchmen comes up to him, having just gotten off the phone. "The men are there and they need the schematics," the henchman says. Without a word, Bierko pulls out his own satellite phone and dials.
The call rings on a cell phone in someone's apartment, where a brunette is slinking into a rather unflattering lingerie ensemble. And no, before you ask, it's not Naked Mandy. This chick is quite strapping. Before she answers, the naked guy in her bed asks who it is, and she says it's "just a client." The client is Bierko, of course, and we learn from the conversation that her name is Collette, and she's apparently Bierko's source for the schematics that his men need. She looks at her laptop, which we can tell is connected to the World Wide Web by the map of the world currently displayed on it, and tells Bierko that it's going to be a few more minutes. He says he's paying her a lot of money, and she gives him some sass that strikes me as ill-advised when talking to someone who has seventeen canisters of nerve gas in his possession. And yet he looks chastened when he hangs up. At Collette's end of the line, she slinks over to the bed at 7:54:52, looking sad about her "difficult client." She straddles her boy toy, who fishes for clues about what she does, offering to "help." "You do help me," she says. They mack. Oh, come on. Who's helping whom?
CTU. Buchanan's on his phone, still in his office, but getting word that the air will soon be clear. He switches over on his call waiting, and it's Karen Hayes from Homeland Security on the other line, calling from a moving car. She asks him for a body count, and he estimates, "We'll need at least twenty in Comm, thirty-five in Tactical and other departments." That's when Hayes says she's on her way, which surprises Buchanan. And it's not a Christmas-morning kind of surprise, either.
After Hayes gets off the phone, she turns to the evil computer geek in the back seat of her car, who says that he's just finished reformatting all of CTU's servers from his laptop. "All of their tactical protocols will have to go through me," he boasts. Hayes reacts like this is good news, when all I want to do is punch him in the face. Evil Geek also asks whether Hayes minds if he replaces some CTU people with his own folks, and of course she doesn't, "after what these people have been through." It's amazing how little sympathy she's able to communicate with that line. And shouldn't the night shift be coming on soon anyway? Oh, never mind. Evil Geek frets evilly about the chain of command, and Hayes assures him that once they get there, she'll be in charge. "For all intents and purposes, CTU is no longer an operational entity. It's a building with workers who will report to us." And computers that'll be probably be useless after exposure to seal-eating nerve gas, and toxic residue all over everything, and dead people, and sticky puddles of Dannon Fruit-on-the-Bottom that they'll forever be slipping on. I can see why she's so keen to move in.