Episode Report Card Manimal: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Devices and desires
By Manimal | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 12.01.2001
Sydney runs -- in her enormously tall heels, I might add -- and pulls out a big cable from her bag. She hooks it onto an iron railing as Ana and the henchmen start shooting. She jumps, making a huge, sweeping arc across the courtyard and then slamming into a building. That looked like a lot of fun, except for the part where you hit a building with your entire body. Sydney detaches the cord from her backpack and keeps on running as the henchmen continue shooting and following.
Los Angeles. Sydney enters her apartment. Surprisingly, it's actually locked. Also, I think it's the same apartment that Francie was cooking Thanksgiving dinner in, so now I really don't get the whole "You just moved in!" comment from last episode. Were they talking about Francie just moving in to Sydney's? Because it really doesn't seem that recent. Sydney drops her baggage and flops onto her couch with an expression of supreme gratitude. Francie pops out and says welcome back. Francie tells Sydney that she has good news: she went to her professor's office to drop off Sydney's paper and waited until the professor got there so she could hand it to her personally -- that really is very sweet -- but Sydney knows she's softening her up for bad news, although it turns out to be not that bad: Francie was making lemonade and spilled some on her mom's old book. Sydney says no big, and thanks her for handing in the paper. It's sweet, how nice they are to each other.
Later that night. Sydney settles in with aforementioned book and a big glass of red wine. She leafs through the part of the book where Francie spilled, and notices that the lemon juice has brought out some old, faded handwriting. Hey, we used to use that trick when I was a Girl Scout! Sydney takes a candle and carefully passes the flame under the markings to reveal a code.
Warehouse. Vaughn. Sydney. More test prepping. Sydney's coming in well under thirty for all the questions. Vaughn asks her if she's a double agent. She says flatly, "No. But my father is." Vaughn snorts and says her dad would be thrilled to hear her say that. Sydney says emphatically that she's not talking about his being a double-agent for the CIA, but for the KGB, twenty years ago, and how she used to think that Jack sending her mother, a teacher, first-editions of books they discovered in this bookstore in Prague was incredibly sweet until she discovered the codes in the book -- blocks of cipher text, Cyrillic letters, and more spy gobbledygook. Vaughn says he wants to see those books later, but for right now, she has to focus.