Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Can You Dig It
By M. Giant | Season 7 | Episode 5 | Aired on 01.19.2009
"You're really gonna kill me?" Walker asks Kiefer as he walks her across the dirt. "I'm not gonna beg for my life, Jack." He doesn't answer, not even to beg her to beg for her life. While Emerson and Litvak watch through the van's windshield, Kiefer leads her to the ditch next to a parked backhoe. "So everything you told me was a lie?" she asks. Kiefer says something that could either be in character or not: "I'm doing what I have to. I don't expect you to understand." She calls him a traitor and a murderer. Aw, don't be that way, Renee. He tells her to turn around, and she refuses. "You're gonna have to look at me when you pull that trigger," she says defiantly. He physically forces her to pivot and hisses something about trusting him enough to get her through this alive. Because now is the perfect time to have to win back her trust. After pushing her to a kneel and flamboyantly cocking the gun using all of both his arms, he aims and fires -- and the bullet grazes her neck. From the vantage point of the van, it looks like a fatal head shot -- or at least a TV-friendly version of one -- especially when she flops over in the dirt. Kiefer walks around, to see her looking up at him, and he kicks her so she rolls into the ditch, face up, her shirt already stained with blood from the cut in her neck. He grabs a handy sheet of plastic and throws it over her before returning to the van and handing the gun back to Emerson. "For a second there, I didn't think you were gonna do it," Emerson confesses coolly, and orders, "Now bury her." "We're on a timetable!" Kiefer protests. Emerson says they don't want anyone to find Walker's body before they're out of the country. Yes, because then people might start looking for them. Emerson tells Tony to help Kiefer, and they both walk over to the ditch and each grab a shovel from a nearby wheelbarrow. This abandoned construction site is really quite well equipped. Walker's still lying under the sheet, peering up at them through it like Laura Palmer, only bloodier. I trust Kiefer didn't nick her carotid with his little stunt, or he's going to feel kind of stupid in the next hour.
And it's splitscreen time. As the two ex-CTU men shovel dirt over the plastic that's covering a prone, bleeding Fed, Colonel Dubaku pouts in his command center, Matobo waits in the back of the van for his turn, Gedge manhandles a limp Henry to a sitting position on Sam's couch, Taylor clasps her hands as though praying for a director who can think of things for Presidents to actually do during these splitscreens already, and Moss looks impotently worried. This is all accompanied by creepy vocal/synth chords, like we're watching a black mass. By now, Tony and Kiefer have Walker covered up to her neck, and she stares wide-eyed at them through the plastic. Kiefer tosses the first load on her chin, and she blinks in suppressed panic, her face almost completely covered but for one eye. So you know what the very last shot will be: that one eye's view of a plastic-blurred Kiefer tossing that one last shovelful on, blacking out the camera just in time for a full-screen clock ticking silently to 1:00:00 PM. Oh, quit messing with the volume settings on the clock already, 24.