By: Brandon Wolfe
Picking up the exact moment we left off last week, Finley and Dunn answer the cell phone conveniently left by Gibson for, I guess, this very occasion. Gibson, his voice disguised, is on the other end and Finley and Dunn attempt to reason with him. Finley asks about a Station Orange code he picked up earlier from the soldiers, which Gibson seems thrown by but makes a note of. Finley and Dunn then attempt to make a deal with Gibson: Stop using the parents to do his dirty work and use them instead. He agrees to this, and will call back later with their first assignment.
Finley and Dunn have trepidation about this arrangement, but agree that if one tells the other they’re crossing a line, they’ll stop. Before long, they are handed their initial set of marching orders and are ordered to retrieve a man who is being held at a certain location, for which they are provided an address and nothing further. On their way out, Dunn encounters her shifty ex, who is Amber’s father. Rather than expressing concern for his daughter’s safety, he wants money and wants to dip into Meg’s deep pockets to get it. Dunn blows this off for the time being, which is good because this is the exact sort of dumb “personal troubles intruding on the mission” subplot that ‘24’ liked to torture us with all the time.
Upon arriving at the location, Finley calls in some favors from the fire department and creates a cover story of a gas leak in the neighborhood that is necessitating house-to-house searches. He and Dunn approach the house designated by Gibson and encounter resistance from the team in residence, a CIA-sponsored group hired by Director Widener and led by a mysterious man played by Fred “Hunter” Dryer, when they demand to search the premises. With an assist from DC Metro Police, the agents gain full access to the house and find Jonas Clarenbach being held in the basement. They take him into custody and soon find themselves pursued by Dryer and his team.
Gibson has taken to yanking the hostages out of bed to repeat a mantra of who their parents are, what they do, and that they cannot find or save them, all as a means of breaking their spirit. In a free moment, a mean-girl classmate named Zoe approaches Beth Ann to let her know that whatever connection she is forging with Kyle is merely a result of the circumstances, and that once this is all over, he will resume not knowing that she exists. However, when Beth Ann approaches Kyle, he tells her that this is not true and that she is the best thing in his life. It’s all enough to make your eyes roll all the way out of your head, and it is very strange that ‘Crisis’ constantly feels the need to become a bad CW show during this leg of the story. Isn’t being a bad NBC show enough?
Koz, Gibson’s lead henchman, returns to where the two captured soldiers are being held. One of the soldiers, Thayer, is ordered to be sent to Gibson. When Thayer arrives, still unconscious, Gibson’s team finally decrypts that Station Orange code and learns that all the soldiers injected with the Advance Protocol drug have recently been given a new mission: hostage rescue. As if waiting for the most dramatically perfect cue, Thayer then springs to life and assaults Gibson and his men, grabbing a machine gun and shooting up the place for good measure. Koz sets out to retrieve him and is ordered by Gibson to take him alive. Thayer takes out a henchman in front of Kyle and Beth Ann, and Kyle picks up the fallen man’s gun. Thayer is ultimately cornered and out of bullets and is taken out by Koz, who is stunned by the sheer amount of bullets it takes to officially put the man down.
Before Thayer was taken down, however, he managed to set free Hearst, the innocent Secret Service agent held by the kidnappers to use as a fall guy. Hearst successfully gets his hands on Gibson and puts a gun to his head. But as he works his way out into the communal area of the compound, Hearst fails to realize that he is seen as a kidnapper by the hostages while Gibson is still perceived as being a hostage himself (one whose frequent disappearances from their ranks doesn’t seem to be suspicious to these kids, though in their defense, they are very preoccupied with dance parties and who the hot guy is talking to) and is shot and killed by Kyle, freeing Gibson.
Finley and Dunn manage to elude Dryer’s men and call Gibson to let them know that they have Clarenbach. But they also attempt to change the terms of their deal. They don’t want a single hostage released in exchange for Clarenbach, they want them all. But just then, Dryer calls Dunn and tells them to play ball or he will kill Meg, whom he’s already driving toward as he speaks.
It’s getting difficult to keep coming with new ways to say that ‘Crisis’ isn’t working. The show busies itself madly, but fails to engage us with any aspect of its story. It’s all blandly boilerplate, like a Diet ‘24’. In fact, it’s so much like ‘24’ that it continues to be jarring whenever we’re told that certain events occurred days ago in the show’s timeline, since ‘24’ always happened within the confines of a single day. It doesn’t feel like Finley and Dunn have stopped to sleep or change clothes this entire time, which would be par for the course for Jack Bauer, but is odd considering the events of this series have been going on for almost a week now.
So locked is ‘Crisis’ in its formula that Finley and Dunn’s ploy to get all the hostages released in one fell swoop was almost sort of enticing, had it worked. If ‘Crisis’ were to shift gears away from the kidnapping and take on another form, that could only help matters. Right now, it’s almost unbearably repetitive. I have no faith in this creative team that a format change will bear any more fruit than we’re currently getting, but at least it would be something different. Being bad in a new way is probably the best we can hope for from ‘Crisis’.
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