Here's the deal: Erin isn't here this week. After almost two seasons of recapping a show whose idea of "action" consists of having a character walk from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter, I was desperate to try something different. So desperate, in fact, that, in an ironic twist given the upcoming episode's subject material, I buried Erin alive and took over her recapping duties. She will be back week, provided that the ventilation system I installed in her coffin was working properly (I didn't have time to do a test run. Cross your fingers!). Also, I'll just say right now that I have not seen Kill Bill, Vol. 2, which apparently had a scene where the Bride was buried alive like Syd, so the golden opportunity to make comparisons between the two shall, sadly, slip through my fingers.
Havana! Trumpets play and colorfully-dressed ladies dance. One of them gets extra special camera attention. It's Sydney, not looking particularly Cuban, but trying her very hardest. It's conspicuous how little of her face we see in this scene, so I'm guessing that Jennifer Garner has a dance double. Syd salsas her way to a table of gentlemen and leads one of them to the floor. "You dance like an angel," he tells her en español. "Yet my feet touch the ground," el Syd responde. And then they get down to business: this guy is about to betray some folks, and Sydney is paying for his information with a cheap-looking tennis bracelet. Hey, some people are easily bought.
¡Bailamos! The guy tells Syd that his group is planning a large-scale attack on a civilian target. He doesn't know where, but there's a hard drive with all the information on it in a locker in Los Angeles, which Dixon is currently headed towards. He opens it according to the combination the guy gives to Syd, and takes the hard drive out. Mission accomplished, Syd clandestinely gives the guy her bracelet, and moves on to another dancer.
Welcome to Marshall's home life, which appears to totally suck. The baby is crying, the wife is nagging, and Marshall can't find his shoe. Carrie tells Marshall she thinks Mitch is sick, and can he hold him while she looks for a thermometer? Well, not really, because Sloane calls, all pissed off that Marshall is late for work. "Thank you Mr. Boss-Man," Marshall stutters, which is totally not suspicious. Fortunately, Carrie is too busy getting pissed off that her husband is leaving her with a sick kid to notice. Marshall says he's gotta go, and hands the baby off to her. Being a spy makes it easy to get out of annoying household chores!
No longer in her Cuban attire, Syd is on the phone with Vaughn, telling him what the guy, an agent for the "Third Faction," told her about the large-scale attack. Vaughn says the hard drive should give them all the information they need. Syd asks Vaughn if he has any idea "how hard it is to maintain cover while salsa dancing in three-inch heels." Vaughn immediately says he does, but would like Syd to keep that private. When did he become not frowny and serious all the time? They flirt and giggle about whether or not Vaughn likes to dance, and Vaughn offers to take Syd out dancing, but then her ride pulls up and they hang up. As Syd's ride pulls away, another car starts up and follows them, along with the Piano of Trouble.
Dixon brings the hard drive into the Apple Store and hands it off to Mr. Technoguy. Technoguy plugs it in and starts working.
Syd notices the car following her, then turns to see a red laser dot on the back of her driver's head. Either someone is waving around one of those obnoxious laser pointers, or that driver is about to have some problems. It turns out to be the latter. As her now driver-less car careens out of control and gets knocked around by the bad guys in their car, Syd makes a rather half-hearted attempt to escape, which is stopped when her car runs head-on into a parked one on the side of the road. The bad guys pull up and drag her out of her car and into theirs. That was much easier than they probably expected.
Back at Apple, that hard drive explodes in Mr. Technoguy's face. Dixon is first on the scene, where an ominous-looking white gas is spraying all over the place. Up, up, up, it goes into the vents. Alarms sound and multiple TV screens light up with a "biohazard" sign. I must admire Apple's preparedness in this situation. Most of the places I work can barely be bothered to make fire escape plans. Although, admittedly, I've never worked for a super-secret spy organization. I think. ["…" -- Sars] Sloane and Jack are woken up from their naps. Dixon yells for medical people to come help Technoguy, who has got some serious chemical burns going on on his arms. With the peeling flesh and the unconvincing ethnicity-switching, this is looking more and more like the episode of America's Top Model I just watched. As Sloane and Jack emerge from their offices, big, heavy doors close, and it kind of looks like the opening to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Or, as someone in the forums pointed out, Get Smart. If only we could have seen Jack accidentally get his nose closed in the door.
Dixon gives Technoguy some oxygen while Vaughn runs up with a yellow box full of syringes that apparently make you immune to nerve gas exposure. Suddenly, Dixon is starting to have breathing problems of his own. He staggers around and collapses. Weiss tries to help, but Vaughn tells him not to touch Dixon, who is now having a seizure. He and Nadia run up with syringes, and everyone injects themselves with them. Nadia's injection is especially dramatic, her arm loudly whipping through the air as she jams the needle into her leg. Chill, Nadia. Dixon's seizure subsides.
Syd finds herself on her knees in the middle of a graveyard. Her contact is right to her, thinking about how that tennis bracelet was not worth this, even if it was pretty. The men from the club are there, and their apparent leader, the blond, angry-looking guy, speaks to the double-crosser in what I'm guessing is German. As Syd looks on, the guy begs for another chance until German pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head, thus rendering him incapable of speech. Because he's DEAD. Syd sighs, because, what else are you going to do? German addresses Sydney, saying that he doesn't care who she is or who she's working for, -- who, by the way, will have its hands full with that hard drive he rigged. "Crap!" says Sydney's facial expression. German tells Syd that he needs his men to see what he does to his enemies. Syd takes the bad-ass approach and calmly asks if German's demonstration would be helped if she started crying and begging for her life. German's not having any of that, though, and says that the guy he just shot in the face was his friend: "I have something much worse planned for you." Jennifer Garner's "oh…shit" face here is pretty awesome.
I love this theme song.
Jack and Sloane discuss the status of the Apple Store. The situation is under control, but according to procedure, they're under lockdown quarantine until they get the green light from the hazardous material team. Jack says that their computer system may also have been compromised by the exploding hard drive. Sloane says he'll have Marshall run a diagnostic. Where is Marshall, anyway?
He's pulling his Mini Cooper into the parking garage. The garage is totally empty, and yet Marshall does not apparently park as close to the door as he can. His phone rings, and it's Sloane telling him some about "lock protocol four alpha charlie." Marshall whips his laptop open, which starts up immediately, unlike my laptop, which is constantly getting stuck in sleep mode, and says that their firewall network is secure and they haven't been hacked. He asks what's going on. Sloane tells him about the nerve agent, and that no one can go in or out of the Apple Store.
Nadia and Weiss run up and ask what is going on. Sloane says they were double-crossed. Nadia asks about Sydney. There's a pause as everyone realizes that they haven't heard from her in a while, and then Vaughn gives Syd a call.
In the darkness, a phone rings. Syd suddenly gasps for air, pulls her cell phone out of her pocket, and opens it. The light it casts takes us out of total blackness, but it's still pretty dark in there. Syd answers the phone, but Vaughn has already hung up. "One Missed Call," her cell phone screen says. Man, I hate it when I don't get to the cell phone in time, and then I have to wait for whoever to leave a message, and then listen to message and call him or her back. By the way, Syd's phone also says that she has four signal bars of reception and five battery bars remaining. And that Syd has a boring cell phone wallpaper. Personally, I have a picture of the fabulous Wonder Woman as mine. Syd uses the cell's back light to check out her surroundings. Basically, she's lying in a wooden box. Oh, and she's got company. He's not very social, however, seeing as he has been shot in the head. Syd starts to panic, and we see that she is, in fact, buried in the graveyard with the double-crosser. That wasn't very nice of those bad guys, although it was quite thrifty -- bury two for the price of one, use the savings to buy more nerve gas! Things look bad for Sydney, but good for anyone who wants to travel to Cuba and use his or her cell phone, which gets perfect reception even several feet underground.
The phone rings at Apple, and Syd's voice comes over the speakerphone. She tells them not to hook up that hard drive, but they tell her it's too late. Vaughn asks Syd where she is. "I'm not sure," says Syd, explaining that she was in a cemetery, got knocked out, and woke up in a coffin. That's supposed to be a coffin? It looks more like a shipping box. It doesn't even have, like, cushions like I thought coffins did. They could have at least put her in a coffin with cushions. Asking the inevitable question is Marshall, listening to the conversation from the parking garage: "Have you been buried?" "Yes!" whispers Syd. How does she know that? I mean, I'm sure she could take a pretty good educated guess about it, but it's not like she saw that revealing shot of a freshly-dug grave like we did. Jack tells Syd to stay calm. Weiss asks about her contact. "They shot him…he's…he's in the coffin with me," says Syd. "Ewwww," thinks Marshall. Nadia says something about sending some agents stationed in Cuba to get Syd, but Syd says that's a no go -- they're Black Ops, so only someone from the Apple Store can save her. Ain't no big thang, thinks Syd, knowing that hanging out in the coffin with the dead guy will be a bummer, but it'll work out when Vaughn comes to rescue her, all hot and sweaty from the digging. Back at the Apple Store, Nadia puts her head in her hands, and Vaughn explains that the Apple Store is quarantined. They can't even go to the Starbucks on the corner, let alone to Cuba. Sloane tells Syd that this should only last for another thirty-six hours. That's a lot of hours. Too many hours, in fact. Uh oh.
But wait! Marshall jumps on the line and says he can do it; he's not in lockdown with everyone else, after all. He asks Syd how many bars she has on her cell phone. She has four. Marshall says that's great; he can rig something up that will trace Syd's phone's distinctive radio frequency. Why not just track the GPS? Or maybe they're the same thing. Although you'd think Marshall would have a pre-built GPS tracker and not need to make one when he gets to Cuba. Marshall tells Syd to stay off the phone to conserve the battery. Sloane tells Marshall there will be a passport and visa waiting for him at the airport. Jack tells Marshall that there is no margin for error, as Syd's oxygen supply is limited. No pressure there, Marsh. Marshall determinedly says he can do this, and his Mini Cooper tears out of the parking garage. Syd says she's hanging up now. Jack, Vaughn, and Nadia all look upset about this. Sad violins play. Syd sobs.
When we return from break, Syd's face is still partially lit by the phone. She cries, not at all the bad-ass she was earlier in the show, then tries to bite through her bonds. I'll forgive Syd for the little freak-out there, because being buried alive has got to suck. I'm not claustrophobic, but I had an MRI once and found the experience easily panic-inducing after about fifteen minutes. And there weren't even any dead bodies around.
Dixon lies in the newly-constructed Apple Store ICU, his arms all bandaged up. As for Technoguy, we will never know if he survived, unless we see him again in a future episode. Sloane tells the group that ten containers of cyclo-sarin were stolen a week ago, and the Apple Store was hit with only a drop of that. The Third Faction could take out an entire city with what they have. Sloane orders the group to check all their sources to find out where the target is. While Sloane is still talking, Nadia starts whispering to Vaughn about Syd. "LOOK AT ME!" shouts Sloane, and Nadia and Vaughn quickly look up at him, all guilty. That used to happen to me all the time in high school. I wonder if Nadia and Vaughn will get a three-hour detention. When he's sure that everyone at the table has his complete and full attention, Drama Queen Sloane says that Marshall is on his way to Cuba, and they will get Syd out. "Make no mistake," he says, "Third Faction wants us on our heels. They think they can bomb our operation, they think they can bury our agents alive and they think that will stop us. Well, they're wrong. We have a job to do. Get to work. For homework tonight, please read pages 45 through 67 and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. Full sentences, please." That last part might have been my high school memories again.
Marshall appears to have traveled back to Cuba circa the 1950s, judging by these huge-ass boat cars everyone is driving. I knew APO had some very sophisticated gadgets, but I was not aware they had a time machine! This does not bode well for Syd. After all, everyone knows that "Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?" was a much harder game than "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" Do it, Rockapella! (And yes, I am aware that present-day Cuba may look exactly like this. But I like my time-traveling scenario better, so I'm sticking with it.) A fairly panicky (not that there's usually any other kind) Marshall throws his stuff down on a counter and asks the guy behind it if he has a screwdriver. The guy fires back some angry Spanish about how his store is not Marshall's personal workbench, and also, please stop making hand gestures at him. I hope no one ever takes this guy to a sign language spelling bee. "Okay, that can't be regular Spanish, that's way too fast," replies Marshall, who has apparently never watched Sabádo Gigante. An old lady behind the counter tells the store owner to let Marshall stay, because she enjoys watching him. Marshall says he's starting to feel freaked out, then asks store owner if he has a radio. Fortunately, "radio" in English is the same as "radio" in Spanish, thus temporarily removing that pesky language barrier, and the storeowner is happy to oblige Marshall. He walks off to get him a radio. Old Lady stares at Marshall. A chicken pecks loudly and rhythmically at the counter. Yes, there is a chicken sitting on the counter. ["It figures -- Erin takes a week off and they pick that episode to hand us both a huge hen shout-out." -- Sars] The storeowner returns with a radio from, like, the '40s. "Bueno," Marshall says.
Syd is still stuck in the coffin. She opens her cell phone and uses the back light to check out her surroundings again. If she's going to insist on draining her battery, she might as well play some games on her phone to pass the time. Hopefully, she downloaded Lemonade Tycoon or Mah Jongg, both of which promise to keep her entertained for hours. At least, they do for me when I'm stuck in airports. Maybe it's different when you're stuck in a coffin. Syd starts rifling through her dead companion's pockets, because if you're going to be trapped in a coffin with a dead guy, you might as well take advantage of it and steal his wallet and maybe make a couple extra dollars. Or she could take her bee-yoo-tiful bracelet back. Suddenly, Syd has an idea, and calls Vaughn. Vaughn puts her on speaker phone so all can listen. Syd, not sounding too good all of the sudden, says she has an idea: she can take a picture of the dead guy and send it to them, in the hopes of using it to get pictures of his companions. Wow. Third Faction managed to bury her alive with a working cell phone that has a camera? They are not going move upwards in the ranks of terrorist cells with that lack of attention to detail. Jack orders Syd to send the photo. Whoa, careful there, Syd: it can cost a lot to send a photo, depending on your cell phone plan. Is this really worth it? Apparently so, as Syd takes the picture and the Apple computers work to match it up. And then Syd starts repeating herself, because apparently one of the earliest symptoms of oxygen deprivation is that you get repetitive and boring. According to this, I know a lot of people who could use some more O2. Jack can't listen to this anymore, so he walks away. Wow, things are not going well if Jack is walking away from them.
Marshall has constructed his Sydtracker 2000 and is en route to her location. Jack calls and asks Marshall for an update. "It's really hot here and everyone keeps calling me chongo," Marshall responds, not having mastered the art of knowing when is a time to crack jokes and when totally isn't. Quick lesson for you, Marshall: a guy's daughter isn't dying? Crack jokes freely! Guy's daughter is dying? Don't crack jokes. Jack angrily asks Marshall for his location again, and Marshall reports that he's close to Syd. Jack pauses, then says they "don't have much time." Marshall starts yelling at his cab driver to turn right, but the guy ignores him. Marshall screams at him in Spanish a couple times, and the driver finally obliges him. We've gone from America's Top Model to The Amazing Race.
Back in the command room, Vaughn rubs his large forehead and tells Syd that Marshall is on his way, not really knowing what kind of an answer to expect from her. "We'll be dancing before you know it," he says. Syd asks if her feet will touch the ground, but her phone cuts out. It says "weak signal," so I'm not sure if her battery ran out or Cuba finally realized that having such awesome cell phone reception kind of contrasts with the classic cars and antique radios.
Marshall has made it to the cemetery. He reports that he just has to find out which grave Sydney is in. He runs.
Vaughn talks to Sydney. Unfortunately, we see a screenshot of her phone that says she has both a weak signal AND low battery.
With no radio frequency to track, the Sydtracker 2000 makes R2-D2 noises and fades out. "No!" Marshall says.
"Goodbye," Syd's phone politely says, and shuts down. Black. "Eep!" says Syd. Seriously.
Back from commercial, Marshall has looked around the cemetery and found seven fresh graves. Vaughn says he doesn't have time to dig them all up. Not to mention how unpleasant it would be to dig up the wrong one. Marshall looks up at sky and has an idea. As Marshall grabs a shovel he finds lying around the cemetery, Vaughn sits in front of a computer and calls up some satellite data. Marshall orders him to enter a code, but Vaughn protests that there's no prompt. "The prompt's implied!" says Marshall. "I'm supposed to just type it in?" Vaughn asks. "Yes! God, Vaughn, this is not hard!" snaps Marshall. Oh, burn on you, Vaughn! Finally, Vaughn gets the satellite visual. Marshall has him change the satellite view to a thermal one, which will detect body heat. And right now, the only body heat in that cemetery is coming from Marshall and Syd. Vaughn directs Marshall to move north. Marshall dashes away. "Your other north," says Vaughn. Now I'm having elementary school flashbacks. Marshall runs the other way. The little heat-filled Marshall satellite figure does as well.
Marshall finds the grave and starts digging. He is going to dig the hell out of that grave!
Elsewhere in the Apple Store, Jack watches the action live on his very own satellite thermal feed. Nadia comes up behind him. Ugh, I hate it when people watch TV over my shoulder.
Now stripped down to his undershirt, Marshall continues to dig furiously. He finally hits wood, and tears the coffin open. There's the dead guy, his face now no longer turned towards Sydney, so I guess she moved his head away from her at some point. Good call. to him is Syd, looking not very conscious. Marshall drags her out and checks to see if she's breathing. Mouth-to-mouth is performed. The Apple gang watches the action on the satellite feed. Vaughn wonders why Marshall is so close to his girlfriend. They will be having a talk about this when Marshall gets back. Suddenly, Syd chokes and coughs. Back at Apple, Vaughn reports that the Syd satellite figure is moving. Jack looks relieved and possibly tearful, in his way.
Syd and Marshall breathe heavily. Digging and coming back from the dead are real workouts, you know. "Thanks," Syd says. "You're welcome," says Marshall. Maria de los Reyes, who thought her visit to place flowers on her mother's grave would be routine and fairly uneventful, wonders if she should report this grave-robbing attempt turned rescue or just walk away and forget it ever happened.
Back in L.A., Sloane has called a meeting to discuss the Third Faction. Syd's picture has been identified, and they've got an ID on his boss, named "Ulrich." So that's where Skeet has been all this time! And here I thought his career had stalled, but he was really just focusing on heading his new terrorist cell. Syd and Marshall, in a car somewhere, are also listening and watching the meeting, and Syd says that Ulrich is the guy who buried her. Sloane says they believe he has the intel about the nerve gas target on his computer. But the Apple crew is still locked up. Which means it's up to Syd and Marshall to get to Ulrich's Berlin nightclub, steal his computer, and upload it to the Apple Store. Syd says the only problem with that plan is that Ulrich knows her face. She won't be able to get close to him. "Or we can send in someone else," Syd says, turning to Marshall. "I've never been to Berlin," says Marshall.
Berlin! Syd and Marshall have outfitted themselves in some hot leather, and Syd gives Marshall a last-minute tutorial on undercover technique. Maintain eye contact, don't show fear, and get this flash drive within two or three feet of Ulrich's computer, where it will automatically steal all of its information and send it to the Apple Store. Marshall isn't too thrilled about getting that close to Lars Ulrich. He's so angry looking in that "Enter Sandman" video. Plus, as Marshall points out, he did manage to bury Sydney alive. "Yeah, but he cheated. He hit me with a car first," Syd responds. Hopefully, Ulrich won't have any access to cars inside the nightclub and will thus be rendered defenseless. Sydney shows Marshall a cell phone that is also a gun with two bullets, and tells him to be careful when he loads it. Marshall points out that he knows how the gadgets work, being the person who built them all. "It's different in the field," says Syd. Marshall's real, non-gun-concealing cell phone rings, and Marshall interrupts his spy gadget teaching session to get it. It's the wife, and she's not pleased about Marshall being gone for so long. And the baby is still sick. Marshall asks Carrie to put Mitch on, then turns away from Syd to sing to him. To the tune of popular lullaby, "Hush, Little Baby," Marshall sings: "Hush, little Mitchell, don't you cry. Daddy's gonna teach you 'bout lanthanides." Syd snickers. Yes, Marshall sings lullabies about the periodic table. I'll give him credit, it would certainly put me to sleep. "Cerium's first, yes it leads the way. Hexagonal structure and it's iron gray. Praseodymium is and it looks like brass --" and then Carrie apparently comes back on the line to nag Marshall to come home already. Marshall says he'll be home by tonight. He promises. Carrie hangs up. Syd says Marshall will be home by tonight. Marshall leaves the van, turning back to Syd. She gives him a reassuring smile. Hey, if the wife makes him quit the spy business, Marshall can always fall back on his upcoming book, Marshall Goose's Nerdsery Rhymes, featuring children's favorites, "Jack and Jill Went Up The Hill (To Factor Quadratic Equations)" and "Three Blind Muons."
All that stuffy coffin suspense didn't show us enough boobies. Thankfully, Robert Urich's club has them in spades! Big, round spades with areolas. Marshall enters, looking kinda cool in his leather jacket. If he wears that home to his wife, she'll probably forgive him for being gone for the last three days. Suddenly, a woman walks up and tongue-rapes Marshall. "I think I just got hepatitis!" Marshall says when he manages to pull away from her. Probably herpes, too. The wife is not going to be quite so thrilled about that. He finds the back office, and reports that it is being guarded by a lot of men with a lot of guns. Syd tells him to go for it. Marshall takes a shot of something alcoholic-looking and walks towards the back office. In cool slow-motion, he maintains eye contact with all the guards.
Marshall is stopped at Ulrich's door. As instructed by Syd, Marshall says that Ulrich will want to see him, because Alex wasn't the only person who betrayed him. The guard consults with Ulrich over his walkie-talkie, then lets Marshall in. Marshall enters a well-appointed room with pretty wood panels. The guard pats him down, and lets him keeps his cigarette case and cell phone. That guard is so fired. The guard leaves the room, and Marshall thanks Ulrich for seeing him. Ulrich doesn't care for any of this preamble, and tells Marshall not to waste his precious time. Syd tells Marshall that Ulrich is a blowhard. With that, Marshall introduces himself to Ulrich: "Bristow. Jack Bristow." "That's-that's good," says Syd. In full Jack Bristow mode, Marshall continues that if he's wasting Ulrich's time by being polite, he can just leave right now. "Don't go overboard!" Syd warns. "Just don't call me when the Third Faction goes down in flames," says Marshall, really getting into this. "Don't mention Third Faction!" says Syd. Marshall's tough-guy smirk disappears. Syd might have warned Marshall about not mentioning the Third Faction, like, BEFORE he went inside the club.
Marshall takes a seat at Ulrich's desk. Syd reports that the cigarette case/flash drive isn't close enough to Ulrich's computer to get any information. Marshall takes out a cigarette and offers one to Ulrich, who refuses. Marshall slides the cigarette case along the desk, right to Ulrich's laptop. He lights his cigarette and coughs. Ulrich stares at him. Marshall says he has some "conversations on tape" that mention Ulrich. Syd tells Marshall to keep this going for two minutes so they can get all of the laptop information. Their conversation continues, with Syd feeding Marshall lines like that Letterman sketch, and Marshall spitting them back at Ulrich in his best Jack Bristow voice. Then the operation hits a snag -- Marshall says that the conversations are from Ulrich's third in command, who, it turns out, only speaks German. Ulrich spits some German at Marshall. Syd gives Marshall a German reply, but Marshall has other ideas. In English, he tells Ulrich that it's none of his business how he got the tapes. Also, he says in German, "I know enough [German] to deal with trash like you." I'll bet Marshall never thought that high school German class would ever come in handy in the real world. Good thing he had a better teacher than whoever taught him Spanish in college.
Vaughn reports that Ulrich's computer is protected by a firewall. Why didn't anyone think that that might happen? Shoot, I put a firewall on my computer, and it doesn't have any top-secret, city-destroying files on it. Ulrich tells Marshall to bring him the tapes and they will have a deal. Syd tells Marshall about the firewall. Vaughn tells the Syd that the firewall is in the basement, and it is "biometrically linked" to Ulrich, which means they'll have to get him down there to disable the firewall. Syd reports this to Marshall, and tells him to use his cell phone gun. Marshall tries to stall Ulrich as he fumbles around trying to load his phone. And then he accidentally fires it. Into Ulrich. "I think I just killed Ulrich!" Marshall says. We see Ulrich, looking very dead. On the bright side, they've already got a half-empty coffin and a perfectly good burial plot just waiting for someone to take advantage of them.
Marshall freaks out. Syd says she's on her way. Back at Apple, Jack walks up and asks what kind of biometric scanner the firewall has. "Retinal," says Vaughn. Jack immediately picks up an earpiece and tells Marshall that the mission is still salvageable: "Look around -- do you see any sort of cutting tool?" Oh, that's not good. Marshall eventually finds a letter-opener. "You have to cut out Ulrich's eyes," explains Jack. Marshall is not pleased about this, and he doesn't think he can do it. "Yes, you can. I can talk you through it," Jack says. Marshall takes a minute to wonder exactly how much first-hand experience Jack has with this sort of thing.
Syd walks into the club and starts beating the crap out of everyone.
Marshall's ready for surgery. Jack instructs him to go under the eye and sever the optic nerve. "The bundle is denser than you think it's going to be," says Jack, like, who would have expectations about the density of a bundle besides Jack? I mean, really. The nasty bits carefully obstructed from the audience's view, Marshall digs in. Soon, we hear nasty liquid sounds, and Marshall reports that the eye is "oozing everywhere." Ewww. Jack is wicked pissed, and says that the eye is now useless, and Marshall will have to go for the other one. "Approach the second one gently, like a soft-boiled egg," Jack says, with a funny Bob Ross edge to his voice. He tells Marshall to look around the office for any kind of "digging instrument," and Marshall comes up with a spork. Why does a high-class guy like Ulrich have a spork? And still in its wrapper, no less. Maybe he got it on the plane on his way from Cuba to Berlin. Marshall asks Jack if the spork will do. "What's a spork?" Jack says. Well, I guess we know which fast foods restaurants Jack doesn't frequent. He always struck me as a Burger King man, anyway. Marshall explains that a spork is a half-spoon, half-fork, all in one. "That will work," says Jack, looking pleased to have discovered a helpful new instrument for his own eye-removing activities. Marshall unwraps the spork and gets to work. He removes the eye, and dumps it in a glasses case. "Done!" Marshall reports triumphantly. Suddenly, a guard breaks into the room, gun in hand. He is quickly dispatched by Marshall and a fireplace poker. Now that Marshall has removed an eye, he can do anything! Syd runs in and instructs Marshall to follow her.
They've made it to the basement. Marshall hands Syd the newly ironic glasses-cum-eyeball case and tells her to deal with the retinal scanner because he doesn't really want to look at the eye anymore. Although he does have a peculiar craving for soft-boiled eggs all of the sudden. Syd disarms the firewall, but two guards are on their way. Marshall sets to work on the computer while Syd fends off the guards. She takes one out quickly, but then shouts that she has run out of bullets. The other guard comes to get her, secure in the knowledge that she can't fire back because he's a guy who takes people's words for it. Marshall tosses Syd the cell phone, and she uses its last bullet to take out the second guard. "I was wrong to be so trusting," he thinks with his last breath.
Vaughn reports that they have the bomb's location: Hong Kong. Why Hong Kong? Well, a group led by a guy who loves Taco Bell and KFC so much that he keeps emergency sporks in his desk just in case would probably not want to target anywhere with one of those fine eating establishments. Maybe Hong Kong is the last major city in the world without them. If this is true, I will never live in Hong Kong. A world without Burrito Supremes is a world I don't want to live in!
Back at Apple, Sloane reports that Hong Kong has recovered the bomb, and Ulrich's computer contained hundreds of Third Faction contacts in Europe and Asia, which APO will have to "confirm." Dixon arrives, his hands bandaged but otherwise looking fine, and takes a seat to get to work. Wow, he sure is dedicated. I burned my knuckle on the break room toaster oven once, and I used that injury to get out of typing for, like, two days.
It's raining in Los Angeles, which is pretty realistic, given that in the last three months, it rained here like every other day. Desert climate, my ass! Syd drops Marshall off at his house. Marshall wonders what he will tell Carrie about his change of clothes. Syd tells him to just say he has a change of clothes at the office. This is why Syd does the undercover missions and Marshall typically does not. "I hate lying to Carrie," Marshall says. Syd says Marshall could always tell her about how he cut a man's eyes out to save the world. Marshall says when you look at it that way, he'd rather keep it a secret. And, he clarifies, he didn't save the entire world, just Hong Kong. "You saved me," says Syd, implying that she is the world. Marshall invites her in for dinner, but Syd turns in him down. "I need to go wait at the train station," she says, "there's someone I need to see." "I know the feeling," says Marshall, "I'll see you tomorrow." Girl gets buried alive and no one even gives her a day off? That's not surprising, given Dixon's fast return to the job after spending time in the freaking ICU, but it sucks. Marshall walks to his house. Carrie greets him at the door with Mitch. Cute.
But it's not over yet! Vaughn finds Sydney at the train station. He gives her his hand and a smile. She takes it, and they dance. Why the train station? Well besides it being a reference to the first season, I'd have to guess that after spending all those hours in a tiny-ass coffin, Sydney wanted to hang out in the largest and most spacious building she could find.