Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Day 8: 6:00 AM — 7:00 AM
By M. Giant | Season 8 | Episode 15 | Aired on 04.05.2010
Hassan tries to appeal to Tarin, suggesting he stop the car. "Stand against me at home. Join the opposition. Fight me openly, honorably." Tarin points out that Hassan has already lost. Hassan guesses at the plan: "You'll put me on trial? Dark room and a video camera, I suppose. A man hiding behind a mask will read a list of my crimes and cut off my head with a sword? The world will be impressed." Tarin claims Hassan did worse, but Hassan says he did it to make the country stronger. "I wanted us to join the world. I wanted to have peace." "You wanted the cover of Time Magazine!" Tarin yells at him. "You think I don't know you, Omar? I watched over you day and night, remember? Watched over you while you betrayed your own wife with a Western whore. You care for nothing but yourself." Wow, judgy much? Hassan admits he's made mistakes, "but believing in peace was not one of them." "Think whatever you like," Tarin says. "You won't be around to find out." Hassan looks sad, and even a little teary. It's 6:36:48. Who knew he'd miss his Western whore so much?
6:41:04. Taylor waits pensively outside Ethan's office until he's wheeled out on a gurney, with an oxygen mask strapped to his face. She tells him he'll be treated on base, "but then I want you right back here," she says warmly. "That's an order." She makes the medics stop so she can lean in and say, "You have always been true to me, Ethan. I need you now. Hurry back." Maybe she's trying to motivate him to recover by appealing to his sense of duty, but jeez, lady, let the poor dude have some sick time. Maybe you could let him recover for at least as long as his heart attack lasted. Now Taylor has to deal with Dalia and Kayla Hassan, who have just arrived. Walker's in the room with them as Taylor greets them, and has to tell them that Hassan is "in the hands of the terrorists, but we're tracking him on satellite." She offers to let them watch in the Situation Room, and says she'll be right there as she sends them on ahead. So, everyone on the national security team is cool with her inviting the first family of the IRK into the Sit Room? I guess it doesn't count if it's not the real one. Before following them, she turns to Walker and says seriously, "I didn't expect to see you again, Ms. Walker." Walker looks a little nervous. "But in these last few hours I have learned how few people I can really trust. I am glad you're here." Walker looks a little surprised as she thanks her, but says she can do more at CTU. Taylor says her aide will get her a car, and she clasps Walker's hand gratefully before joining the Hassans in the Sit Room at 6:43:16. So even if Hastings does decide to go after her, that sounds like an implied presidential pardon to me. Not that those aren't passed out like candy on this show.
In the Sit Room, Taylor tells Dalia and Kayla that Kiefer's running the operation, and they're expecting an intercept in a few minutes. The big screen shows the feed from CTU, with a map of the island on one half of the screen and an overhead view of Amsterdam Avenue on the other. You see it like that, and it makes you wonder what they hell they're waiting for. Have an NYPD SWAT van T-bone the sucker and have done with it.
From the CTU floor, Cole reports to Kiefer that Hassan just crossed 130th. 37 short blocks in 20 minutes? Finally, rush-hour traffic comes into play on this show. Kiefer responds that he's on 110th and asks about the ambush. Cole's got it all under control; the bridges and tunnels are still closed, and as my Streetwise map tells me, there's not a whole lot of Manhattan left in that direction. He adds that the SUV will be there in eight minutes, and Chloe offers to futz with the traffic lights along the route to slow Tarin down even more. Can she make the lights go from red to infrared, which would mean back up a block? As Hastings leaves the floor to go update Taylor, Dana tells Cole that some potential technobabble problem requires her to go check out Chloe's trunk line patch-up. Even though Chloe says it's fine, Dana still needs her excuse to leave her desk, which she does. Chloe thinks it's a little weird, but Cole's glad she's on the case.
Dana lets herself into the server room at 6:45:06, and sits right down at a terminal. Soon she's got a map of Manhattan up on the screen, then turns around to see Arlo standing there. Oops, someone forgot to check that she was alone. "Arlo, what are you doing here?" she asks, quickly closing the window like when you hear your boss coming while you're reading this. He turns the question back around on her. She claims she was checking the trunk line, which he doesn't buy. He's also wondering why things keep going down. Dana patiently explains about the EMP. "It's a miracle we managed to get anything up and running as fast as we did." Yeah, I've been thinking that for a while too, but it hasn't gotten me anywhere. Arlo keeps quizzing her, and she says she was running a diagnostic on the trunk line. "Why were you looking at a map of Manhattan if you were running an internal diagnostic?" Arlo wonders. She claims she was just checking on the operation. "How I do my work is none of your business, Arlo," she adds, having put up with this a lot longer than she would have if she were innocent. Arlo says that since he's been covering for her all night, it kind of is. Dana gets up and offers to let him check himself. So he sits down at the terminal. She continues to technobabble at him while he taps away at the keyboard, continuing to ask her questions, and not buying a word of it. But since she's currently picking up a headset cord -- and we know what she can do with a cord -- it doesn't really seem to matter. At least not until he gets a call on his headset just as she's about to throw the cable down around his neck. Of course you can't garrote someone whose hand is up to his ear, and then you can't do it when he's on the phone with someone, so she holds off. It's Chloe, telling Arlo that Hastings wants him back on the floor. He gets up, saying, "I'll leave you to do...whatever you're doing." She gives him a dirty look and says, "Don't push it, Arlo." He leaves, never knowing about the rolled up cable she's now hiding behind her back. He probably would have been into it, though.
Finally, she can call Tarin. "CTU is following you," she hisses into her phone. Tarin freaks, wondering where they are. "They're all over you," she says, somehow making it sound hot. "There's an ambush set for 161st." Too bad Tarin isn't on his way to 160th. He's pissed that he's only hearing this now, and Dana tells him to chill. "We knew this might happen." She tells him to turn into a parking garage at 158th and 159th. "Is everyone ready for this?" Tarin asks. Dana says she'll tell Samir and it'll be up to him. "It's only a matter of time before this gets traced back to me. I need to get the hell out of here while I still can." Now that I can get behind. They hang up at 6:48:25.
6:52:43. The monitoring of the Hassan-mobile is in progress both at McGuire AFB and at CTU. Dana returns to the floor, presumably having been on the phone with Samir through the whole commercial break, and Cole whispers, "You took your time." She claims it got complicated, which, I'm sure it did, but assures him that the trunk line should hold up. Cole asks for an ETA on the ambush, and Chloe tells him four minutes. Kiefer's still five blocks behind and can't see the Hassan-mobile, but the TAC teams are in position. Kiefer hits the gas, and we get the barest glimpse of the Genesis nametag before it surges sexily though traffic. Buy one before it gets away!
Up ahead, Hassan hasn't failed to notice Tarin's increasingly panicked looks into his rearview mirror, and remarks, "We are being followed, aren't we?" He goads Tarin a bit, and tells him it's not too late to give himself up. Tarin just wants him to shut up, but Hassan won't. "You're on an island here. There's no way out. They'll find you." Tarin agrees with that. "But not soon enough." By now, Kiefer can see them, a block and a half ahead, as Tarin whips the wheel to the left. "Dammi