Episode Report Card M. Giant: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT A Terrorist Walks into a Bar[ometric Pressure Chamber]
By M. Giant | Season 8 | Episode 10 | Aired on 03.01.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.With Farhad ready to turn himself in, everyone's in quite a tizzy. Hastings sacks up and tells Rob Weiss that the plan to pin the blame on Walker is off the table. President Taylor demands that President Hassan turn over files on any of his spies working in the U.S. so Farhad can identify the men who turned on him and now have the rods. Hassan is resistant to the idea, and even when he tries to comply, he gets tripped up by the successful escape of his ex-security chief, Tarin. And when Kiefer and CTU finally catch up to Farhad, they find him freshly shot and unable to tell them anything. Kiefer's solution is to pretend Farhad is still alive, in a bid to lure the terrorists into coming after him so they can catch them that way. The bad guys are ready to take the bait, but before they do, one of them calls his American mother to send her out of the city. And then he wears an explosive vest over to the hospital. CTU rookie Owen is the one unlucky enough to find himself in the bomber's path, and has to lead him to Farhad while Chloe tries to disarm the detonator remotely. Owen and Chloe and Arlo come through, and everybody lives, but the bomber escapes and locks himself into a hyperbaric chamber to await instructions to set off the bomb manually. He really doesn't want to be taken alive.
With a potential dirty bomb in play, Taylor agrees to an evacuation of the U.N., but Hassan won't until his daughter is found. He even calls his wife to enlist her aid in finding Kayla, and she seems ready to help.
And through all this, nobody at CTU even seems to miss Cole or Dana. But since they're stupid enough to be hiding bodies right now, one wonders how useful they'd be anyway.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The previouslies freeze-frames feature Cole Ortiz, Kayla Hassan, Farhad Hassan, Brian Hastings, and Jack Bauer, who wraps up the segment with a dramatic, "Deal."
At the U.N., Hassan's daughter Kayla walks with Nabeel, the shady guy Hassan put in charge of security when his original security chief, Tarin, proved to have an inconvenient conscience when it came to torturing innocent people's families for no reason. They're going to the room where Tarin is being held. Nabeel tells her she's got two minutes, and then Tarin will be transported to their embassy. Because in a universe where it takes but minutes to reconfigure servers and invent entirely new technologies, arranging for one dude to be driven across town apparently eats up more than an hour. Nabeel lets Kayla in, tells the guard in the room, Bashir, to clear out so they can have some privacy, and leaves the two of them alone in there. Idiot. Kayla tells Tarin that her father still thinks he's in on the conspiracy, even after learning about their relationship. Now on top of everything else, Tarin has to worry about his boss having learned that he's been shtupping his daughter. Tarin wants to tell her a secret of his own. Bashir, the guard who just left the room, is giving Tarin a handcuff key and has stashed a gun in the transport car. So that's what's taking so long. He asks Kayla to meet him at the Teodore Hotel after he escapes. Before she can answer, Nabeel comes back in, but as they get ready to move him, Kayla manages to sneak Tarin a nod. Hard to imagine what could go wrong.
Wherever Kevin and Nick died at the end of the last hour -- and I really hope it's not the Reservoir in Central Park now, given what's going to happen -- Cole is futilely doing CPR on Kevin. Dana, her once-perfect hair looking like she was dragged through a hedge backwards, tells him to take off. "It's my fault. I lied about everything. Who I am, what I've done." She plans to take the blame. Well, whoop-de-fuck, look who just figured out what the situation is. But now Cole picks up her torch of stupid from where it was just lying guttering on the ground and declares, "What's done is done. We're gonna clean this up and no one's ever gonna know what happened." Because that worked out so well for FPJ in I Know What You Did Last Summer. He says they need to strip down the van, and "dump the bodies in the swamp." Isn't there, like, a job they should be doing right now or something? Dana has a problem with Cole's plan, but Cole reminds her, "They're scum, Dana, and no one's gonna miss 'em." He asks if she wants to go to prison for the rest of her life for these two. Because if she does, she should by all means participate in covering up their deaths. Oh, wait, that's not what he means.
Meanwhile, back at the place where they used to work, Hastings is on the phone to President Taylor and Rob Weiss at the U.N. He explains how he's heard from Farhad Hassan, warning him that the terrorists want to use the rods to construct a dirty bomb. Taylor asks why they'd want to do that. "Between Hassan's crackdowns and CTU, we've backed them into a corner," Hastings analyzes. "This is their response." That'll learn them to try to stop terrorists. He explains where Farhad is, and that he's sent Kiefer to pick him up. He does not mention that he did so because his head of field ops has gone off the grid. He adds that the men after Farhad are "covert assets for the IRK," as Farhad mentioned in his original call. Hastings thinks that if CTU can get a hold of IRK intelligence files, Farhad will be able to help with identifying the bad guys. Rob doesn't think President Hassan will go for that, "especially in his current frame of mind. Hell, the man's gone off the deep end." True that, but Taylor hopes this will pull him out of it. She tells Rob to notify Hassan of the Farhad situation and tell him she needs to talk to him right away. And also to call Tim Woods at Homeland Security to prep for a potential attack. "Thank you, Mr. Hastings," she yells at the speakerphone on her way back to the Council Chamber. Rob is just about to end the call when Hastings pipes up again to ask if they're alone. Learning that they are, he declares he won't be charging Walker with anything. "We have a lot more to worry about than blaming Renee Walker," Hastings says, reasonably enough. In fact he just gets calmer the angrier Rob gets, as he explains that they're following a new lead now. But he may be overplaying it a little when he adds, "You want to replace me as head of CTU, be my guest. But until you do, stay the hell out of my way." Could Rob's enraged reaction when Hastings hangs up be driven by more than insubordination? Fortunately, there's enough other stuff going on this hour that we won't have much time to worry about that.
At 1:07:07, a convoy of CTUmobiles is en route. In the back of one of the SWAT vans, Kiefer sits next to the young, nervous-looking agent we've seen glimpses of over the past couple of hours, Agent Owen. Kiefer briefs the men, and tells the agent with the laptop that they'll need to be ready with the files CTU is going to be sending them ASAP. Just then Farhad himself calls, having been patched through by CTU. Kiefer has Owen put him on speaker, as Farhad asks how close they are. Kiefer says it'll be ten minutes, and asks if he's okay. Farhad says they're close, and begs him to hurry. Chill out, Farhad -- they aren't any closer than they were at the end of the last hour.