Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Got Your Gas Right Here
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 7 | Aired on 02.05.2006
Right now, Erwich is standing around in a park somewhere next to a parked van with his guys. One of his henchmen, who has less of a Russian accent than I do, is explaining that the arming mechanisms on the gas canisters have been tampered with, which means they have no way of using them. Okay, then! Great season! Good night, everybody! "Rossler will have a way," Erwich says. Stupid Erwich. The henchman argues that their real enemy is Russia, and they should be trying to get home (which in his case sounds like it's probably Ohio or something) instead of fucking with the U.S. Erwich responds to this thoughtful input by knocking the guy to the ground and pulling his gun on him. "Question my orders and I will kill you, do you understand?" So I'm sensing that this is more of a top-down organization. He says the ports have been closed and they're all fugitives now. "If we can't use the gas against Russia, we will use it against America." Yeah, I guess we're going with Erwich's plan, then.
McGill's on his way out of his stolen office at CTU when his cell phone rings. It's some skeleton in a blonde wig, calling from a pay phone. The pay phone even has graffiti on it so we know it's in an extra-bad bad neighborhood. McGill is obviously not happy to hear from this mystery woman today of all days -- isn't it always "today of all days" on this show? -- especially when she turns out to be asking for five hundred dollars. She claims to be "clean," and all I can say is it's a good thing she isn't trying to claim that in person, because, damn. She adds that she's trying to put her life back together, and asks if she can come over to CTU. When McGill says no, she snottily asks if he's afraid she'll embarrass him. "Yeah, I am," he duhs. Heh. She starts weeping desperately and threatening to hurt herself if he doesn't help her. Dear McGill: Don't help her. Tough love, M. Giant. She does make herself useful by working in the exposition that she's McGill's sister. Thanks for clearing that up. In regard to her connection with McGill, I had mentally narrowed the possibilities to her being a sibling, an ex-girlfriend, or McGill's boss at Division. McGill agrees to meet her in a parking lot across the street from CTU in twenty minutes. Good plan. Just call him McGullible.
He joins a briefing in the Situation Room, already in progress. At 1:08:02, Buchanan is explaining to the assembled randoms that Walt somehow found a moment to supply a schematic of one of the canisters. So clearly The Man wasn't keeping his operation on a "need-to-know" basis. Buchanan puts the diagram up on the screen and explains that the terrorists have been given invalid detonation codes. "Then these canisters are useless to them," Audrey concludes. That's a wrap! Let's hear it for Season Five, everybody! Buchanan says that's true, unless the terrorists can figure out how to reset the arming devices. Stupid Buchanan. McGill asks how they're doing on tracking the actual canisters, and Chloe says that she pulled Erwich's voiceprint off his call to Cummings, which they can supposedly use to intercept any call that Erwich makes from now on. I'm trying to decide if I have more trouble with the concept of an accurate voiceprint being taken through not one but two speakerphones, or the claim that it's technically (never mind legally) possible to then scan all phone traffic in real time looking for a match to that voiceprint. Since it's a tie, I'm going to just go with it. McGill says he hopes that works, and he takes over the display screen to put up a graphic showing that if the gas is released, each canister's kill zone could end up being one to three square miles. With twenty canisters, "We're talking about potential casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Possibly over a million." So the even worse news for McGill is that if the terrorists confine themselves to L.A., there's only a one in nine chance of one of those casualties being his sister.