Four new episodes this time, Jerry 2.0 (Jake’s younger brother drops out of college and comes to visit) Middleman (A mercenary comes to D.C. to capture a member of the nanite team), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Jake joins an elite military group to track down a stolen mini-nuke), and The Spy Who Really Liked Me (Jake faces a board of inquiry on charges of insubordination).

Overall I liked these episodes a bit more than the last few, Jake finally seems to be ‘getting’ the whole be a spy thing a bit better.

(spoiler)

In Jerry 2.0, Jake’s younger brother, Jerry, comes to visit and he acts like the stereotypical college dropout, with no concept of what the real world is like. When he gets mistaken for Jake and gets kidnapped by bad guys, needless to say that switches fast. Interesting however, because Jake and Sarah end up alone by candlelight, admit their feelings for each other, before being interrupted by Jerry calling with news that he rear-ended a police officer.

In Middleman, Diane starts going out with a hot-shot from the cryptography section, Steve Clemens (Warren Christie), and Jake (of course) starts feeling a little jealous. He gives Sarah a call and she invites him to a charity carnival, and when they arrive, they discover (Oh joy!) Diane and Steve are there as well. Jake recognizes a mercenary that is supposed to be in D.C. to kidnap or assassinate someone, and is forced to cut his date with Sarah short. The mercenary get the drop on him, but Steve shows up, presses the guy to a car, and holds a gun to his head. Once they get the guy back to the NSA, Kyle interrogates him, but gets nowhere. The next day when Sarah asks why Jake has been making excuses to end their dates, he tells her about the nanites (5$ says this is going to come back to haunt him), and she promptly slaps him and walks off.

Back at the NSA, the mercenary is found with a slit throat, and Steve and Diane are nowhere to be found. It turns out that the mercenary was there to capture a member of the nanite team, but failed and the person who hired him is now taking matters into his own hands, and attempting to kidnap Diane. Jake uses some nifty nano-powers to track down Steve to a boat with Diane and save the day.

Relationship-wise, we are seeing much more of Jake coming to his senses regarding Diane, and actually coming to her rescue. Of course he still needs to be a little clueless or else he wouldn’t be Jake (the episode ends in Diane and Jake playing Boggle and the only words Jake found was tush and tushie).

At the beginning of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, It is revealed that a mini-nuke has been stolen from an army base. Duarte is worried about Jake’s grandstanding and risking people’s lives, and so Jake is sent undercover to an army team known as “The Wolf Pack” one of which is believed to have stolen the nuke. The Wolf pack is basically a special forces of special forces team, who believe their teammates are the most important things, and who operate in a morally grey area. After a hard day of training, they haze him and leave him wearing nothing but duct tape suspended from a tree. He complains to the CO of the wolf pack who has him dig a dozen holes around the barracks, then has him fill them up again. Duarte tells Jake he needs to copy the communication logs off the Wolf Pack’s field laptops, for evidence of the theft. Jake uses nerve gas to knock the entire team out for the night, bury them up to their necks for the general to find, and copies the logs. Finally convinced that he’s one of the pack, the take him to a bar and give him an initiation, carving a wolf head info his arm. One of the group gets abducted by Duarte and taken to be interrogated, while Jake learns that the reason he was allowed into the group is that the wolf pack lost a member due to the orders of their CO. The kidnapped member knocks out and kidnaps Duarte, and takes him back to the barracks. Jake proves that he’s loyal to the Wolf Pack mainly because he figures that the group has a good reason for kidnapping Duarte, followed by shooting him in the stomach. Jake uses Duarte’s cell phone to send a message to HQ. The wolf pack heads out to transport the nuke out of the base, but Jake holds them at gunpoint for just a few moments, until backup arrives from HQ. Duarte makes it to the hospital and everyone is happy. Except the bad guys, but that’s okay.

In the last episode of the evening; The spy who really liked me (extra points for the bond reference in the title), is about a judiciary hearing to see if Jake should be charged with insubordination (YAY! Insubordination is FUN!) but the episode is about half flashbacks. The hearing consists of three NSA uppers; blone fairness girl, cynical nanite-racist (nanite-ist?), and quiet old guy. Throughout the hearing the uppers refuse to acknowledge fact the the US manufactures a deadly nerve gas called varcon, and any mention of it is stricken from the record. In the flashbacks, Jake and Duarte head to Santa Costa to retrieve some stolen vials of varcon. Just before leaving Jake asks Diane if the nanites could infect someone else via sex, to which Diane responds that she will need to do some tests before she can give a definite answer. Jake and Duarte get to Santa Costa, and kidnap a pair of people who they believe to be the buyer of the gas and the seller. Jake gets a call from Diane, confirming that it is safe for him to have sex, and, believing the mission to be over promptly goes downstairs and starts flirting. A girl named Angela follows him up to his room and after a bit of “fun” it is revealed that she was the one who stole the vials, and that she is ex-CIA. Jake manages to phone Duarte, who has since learned that the vials they found earlier were decoys, and gets a shoot to kill order. Angela gets the drop on Jake and leaves but he follows her by clinging to the underside of her Jeep for about 2.5 hours (at this point in the hearing cynical nanite-racist makes a crack under his breath along the lines of “imagine that kind of power in the hands of a REAL agent” to which Jake responds “yea, imagine that. Nano-hearing!” heh. He got owned!) He holds her at gunpoint until she confesses that she is in Santa Costa to assassinate the guy who used varcon gas to kill her sister who was vacationing there at the time. Said guy’s henchmen show up, and take them in. one of the three vials cracks and they escape, Jake promises her everything will be alright, that the NSA will take this guy in. The meet up with more henchmen at a roadblock, and threaten to crack open the other 2 vials. Suddenly Duarte shows up, and manages to bargain Jake’s release on the condition they take Angela. Back in the NSA hearing room Jake expresses his anger at the groups hypocrisy that they allow the bad guy, who is an ALLY of the US, to kill innocent US citizens but they let Angela rot in jail in another county. They get angry at him, and Jake does quite possibly the awesomist nano-thing I’ve seen yet: He access the stenographer’s computer, uploads the hearing’s transcript to an external server, and threatens to email it to the news sites. The uppers back off and promise to get Angela out of prison. Later the uppers make some suspicious comments about Jake, and if we see blone fairness girl in the future, I’d be worried.

Something I noticed for these last two episodes, they’re really similar. Jake disobeys orders, someone calls him on it, and everything turns out fine(-ish). The only difference is that in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”, Duarte and Beckett get mad at him for it, wheras in “The spy who really liked me” they defend him against their superiors when he disobeys orders. This may seem weird, but I think it’s mainly because they have enough of a moral compass that when hes ordered to kill someone and disobeys they don’t make as big a stink as when his insubordination was more grandstanding that put lives at risk.

More reviews soon,

Zettageek

PS sorry this got posted late, classes have started and I got a bit more swamped than i thought i would.

Please don’t make me commit seppku…