By: Brandon Wolfe
As usual, a lot happened on ‘Crisis’ this week, while at the same time not much happened. The show is good at keeping the wheels spinning while never attaining any actual forward motion, like a car stuck in the mud.
Fred Dryer’s villainous CIA operative has made good on his threat to seize Meg (and Gillian Anderson’s hilariously crazed cry of “This can’t happen!” indicates that ‘Crisis’ has officially broken even her down to the level of horrific acting) and demands that Dunn and Finley hand Clarenbach over to him if they want Meg left alive. Clarenbach obviously bristles at this and announces to the agents that Gibson is the kidnapper and that all of this boils down to a war between Gibson and Director Widener, which Clarenbach as the pawn both of them seek. Dunn decides that she will go after Meg while Finley uses Clarenbach to go after Gibson. But Gibson, as always, has his own plan and reaches out to one of the parents, Jakob Vries (played by Arnold Vosloo, who has been in many things besides ‘The Mummy’, but just try to think of anything else when you look at him). Vries has a military background and is trained in retrieval missions such as this, so Gibson promises to release his daughter Emma if Vries can bring back Clarenbach, a mission that the all-business Vries accepts even as he recognizes it as one he will never come back from, death or jail being the only outcomes he sees.
Dunn reaches out to the FBI and obtains backing for her rescue mission. She arrives at the rendezvous point set up by Dryer’s nameless spook, with an agent acting as a Clarenbach decoy in the backseat. But Dryer’s crew quickly realizes that a ruse is afoot and Dunn is then presented with a woman’s body hanging from an overpass that she initially believes is Meg until a Gibson henchman approaches her to say that Meg is still alive and demands that Dunn come with him if she wants to see her sister again. Dunn is taken to where Meg is being held and is ordered by Dryer to give up Clarenbach’s location, and Dryer is prepared to beat, and then stab, Meg as much as possible to wrest that information from Dunn. Dunn finally caves when seeing her sister abused and agrees to call Finley to give up Clarenbach.
Finley, meanwhile, is able to determine that Clarenbach knows the location where the children are being held, but he will not give up that information unless Finley agrees to let him go afterward, which he agrees to do. On their way to the location, Finley and Clarenbach are besieged by a helicopter deployed by Vries, forcing them to flee on foot. Vries and his men manage to pin them down at a nearby abandoned warehouse (in shows like ‘Crisis’, there is always a nearby abandoned warehouse), so when Dunn calls Finley at Dryer’s behest, Finley gives Dryer their location to come and retrieve Clarenbach, hoping that the two factions will kill each other and allow Finley and Clarenbach to escape in the process. This almost works when a shootout commences between the two teams, until Vries manages to knock Finley out and grab Clarenbach, delivering him to Gibson and obtaining Emma’s freedom.
At the compound, Kyle, Beth Ann and Ian are still holed up in the room they fled to last week after Kyle shot and killed Hearst, something he’s still tortured about. The three of them find a phone in the room that magically allows them to listen in to the kidnapper command center, though it’s not made clear exactly what they have learned from their eavesdropping. Also, Amber is being protected by Aaron Nash, the teacher with whom she had been having an affair, but Coz finds their hiding spot, kills Aaron and takes Amber back into captivity. At least we got out of this subplot relatively easy this week, with only a relatively small amount of bad CW melodrama to digest.
‘Crisis’ moves a lot of pieces around this week, but remains stuck in the same holding pattern. Now that we’re inching toward the home stretch, it’s time for the show to bust open its premise instead of constantly repositioning furniture. And now that the show’s immediate forebear ‘24’ is back on the air, ‘Crisis’s pointlessness becomes that much more pronounced. I can’t say as I have much faith that ‘Crisis’ will, or even could, pull things together before it finishes its run, but I’m always open to being surprised.
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