Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Putting the "Dent" in "President"
By M. Giant | Season 4 | Episode 16 | Aired on 04.03.2005
It's 10:06:02, and the stolen stealth fighter is just leaving the ground at some isolated Air Force base that's surrounded by mountains, but is still less than a half hour away from wherever in Los Angeles Poor Man's Eric Stoltz met up with ImhoTerror. Man, the only thing that scene accomplished was to fuck up the timeline. Poor Man's Eric Stoltz converses briefly with the control tower, which doesn't appear to find anything amiss. Even when Poor Man's Eric Stoltz's jacked-up in-flight cell phone/walkie-talkie thingy rings and he picks it up, saying, "I'm in the air. I should reach the target in 45 minutes." "Target!? What target?" says nobody at the control tower. ImhoTerror asks Poor Man's Eric Stoltz about his roommate's hidden hard drive, but Poor Man's Eric Stoltz doesn't know anything about it. As ImhoTerror is on the phone, he paces past the spot where he had Kiefer chained to the wall. And, in turn, past the exposed phone wires which are still sparking sporadically. ImhoTerror hangs up and leans in for a closer look, then backs off, looking around wide-eyed. Okay, I'm pretty much overlooking all of the stealth-fighter-related implausibilities in this episode that were pointed out by the Eagle-Eyed Forum Posters -- the fact that they don't generally carry air-to-air missiles, are not completely invisible at close range, give away their position when they "paint" a target with active radar, and are slower than a 747 -- but I can't let this go, especially now that it's a plot point rather than an exaggerated effect to clue in the audience: Phone lines don't spark. To prove it, I went down to my basement, stripped a couple of phone wires bare, and stuck them in my mouth, and all that happened is that now phone solicitors bug me telepathically. But ImhoTerror, instead of wondering why his phone lines carry enough juice to allow him to make calls to the damn future, seems to figure out that this is something Kiefer did to give away his position. Which means it's time to go. But rather than ordering an evacuation, he walks right past his minions working around him. He reaches into a hidden junction box, where he flips a switch that lights up a bunch of red LEDs. Then he takes out a small garage-door opener remote and takes it away with him.
And then the goons who took TerrorTeen show up with the kid. No, actually, they don't, and they never do. There's no reason they shouldn't be back before CTU had time to find the place and get there, unless they drove in the opposite direction until they'd disabled the trackers. And they drove in that direction reallyreallyfast. It'll be interesting to see how they get TerrorTeen back in the story after this. If they do. They'll probably just meet up with ImhoTerror at the next scheduled dark alley or abandoned building, acting like that was the plan all along. ["As annoyed as I tend to be when 24 storylines get dropped, I wouldn't have a problem with TerrorTeen getting Poochied right out of the season." -- Sars]