Episode Report Card M. Giant: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Tarin it Apart
By M. Giant | Season 8 | Episode 12 | Aired on 03.15.2010
Kayla pulls right up to the underground security entrance at CTU, with alarms going off everywhere. The uniformed guards scramble, telling Kayla to get out of the car at gunpoint. Hastings yells at Dana to call the bomb squad, and she picks up the security desk phone to do so. The uniformed guard looks inside the car Kayla just got out of and notices a fat cable running through the back seat and disappearing between the cushions, probably plugged into the cigarette lighter. "Hastings, Did you stop that car?" Kiefer says, "Not in time, Jack," Hastings responds. "Hold on, just hold on!: The back seat is lowered, revealing a very large cylindrical device in the trunk with a digital timer on it. The readout? 17 seconds and counting. So either the terrorists had her arrival at CTU timed down to the half-minute, or the timer was wired to a GPS that was programmed to start a short countdown when Kayla hit the tunnel entrance. I don't mind doing that work when the episode is this good. "It's an EMP!" Hastings yells, and runs back inside. Kiefer asks if they can shut down their systems to protect the drones, but Hastings says there's no time. The guard gets behind the wheel of the car to try and move it away in time, ignoring Hastings' order to get away from it. Everyone else runs away, and the guard looks up just as the timer hits zero. There's a blinding flash and a shockwave that first totals the car, then sends everyone tumbling to the floor. That covers the other guards still in the tunnel, Hastings, Dana and Kayla, and Prady. The glass of the security entrance (yet another bad idea) shatters. On the floor, every screen goes blank-white and every headset sends a painful scream into its wearer's ear. It's a chaotic scene, with the lights flashing in and out and nobody knowing what's happening and everyone screaming like they're on the fricking Poseidon while it's flipping over.
Okay, so now maybe you're feeling the need to go back through the episode and make sure everything still holds up, but I've already done that, and it does. That scene between Tarin and Samir, arguing in the bank vault? Obviously that was for Kayla's benefit, to get her to trust Tarin and feel more indebted to him so she would do what he said during her "escape," calling CTU instead of her father. Samir fired at least some real bullets during the fake escape, but obviously he was careful to miss. None of the plot points are driven by characters having to be stupid; Sergeant Amos notwithstanding, Tarin still could have escaped with Kayla, because that whole fiasco was more about cranking up the action than serving the plot, which I'm fine with. In fact, everyone else was at the top of their game. The terrorist plot doesn't hinge on CTU being able to find the hideout in time, as it sometimes has in the past, and I love their diabolically clever plan to play CTU and then knock them out with brute force. Obviously it's not something that could have been thrown together in the past few hours, but it's been increasingly clear during that time that Samir has been working on this for quite a while. Even the Dana storyline, which you know perfectly well how I feel about, was handled brilliantly, with the building suspense of the noose slowly tightening around her neck, while she finally got to show off some of those deception skills we've been hearing so much about. And the EMP attack is not only a shocker ending that's completely earned -- and I totally didn't see it coming, despite the promos flogging the twist all week -- it's just what the doctor ordered for Dana's particular situation. "Here you go, Mr. Prady, a thumb drive containing all the data you asked for. Hope you don't mind that it, and indeed all of the archives I pulled them from, are now completely blank through no fault of my own." And if all that's not enough to convince you I thought this was one of the best episodes of 24 ever, feel free to go back through this recap. You'll see that most of the jokes are about the characters, not the show itself. That right there is a recapper's stamp of quality. Well played, 24. Well played, indeed.