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 espaol. "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.
“ 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 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 "ohshit" face here is pretty awesome.