This brings us to our main theme for this review: Incompetence. This is something Rhonda helped me figure out. Everyone is incompetent. Always check your receipt at the grocery store because the clerk rings up the wrong things. Always check your order at a fast food joint because the surly teenager might have forget to put half your order in the bag. Your life insurance company keeps losing your paperwork. The cable company can't fix your cable problem and has to keep coming back. Everyone is incompetent. In this episode, we see some egregious examples of incompetence.
In the building where Curtis was conked on the head (and Marianne was blessedly returned to the Great Temp Agency In The Sky) Marwan talks with someone named Ali. (Ali looked way too much like Yakov Smirnov. I kept thinking, "Why are the Commies involved with this plot"?)
Ali works at a company called IDS Systems. (Ross Perot's company was called EDS. Is this another hint that the bad guys are evil rich white guys?) He tells Marwan that CTU is using a "Drinfeld Module" to resist their efforts. A Drinfeld Module is something from the world of complex math. I suspect someone was just trolling through the Net for cool-sounding terms.
Marwan goes upstairs to a cubicle farm to do his work. Why? Why would he sit in an open cube where anyone could walk by and peek over his shoulder and see what he's doing? Why not stay down on the deserted floor with Ali?
Also, folks at IDS seemed awfully chipper. I wasn't at work on 9/11, I was in Astrakhan, Russia. But, when I got back people said not very much work got done that day. People were mostly monitoring media reports. Here, six reactors are on the verge of melting down, one nearby already has, yet here people don't seem the least bit concerned that something very serious is in progress. You'd think people would be very aware of the reactor problem, which would make it even more dangerous for Marwan to be doing stuff related to reactors on a screen in plain public view.
We see that you just can't get good help these days, and the flunky bad guys tasked with getting rid of Curtis are incompetent. They were (essentially) told to kill Curtis, then get rid of the body. They didn't follow instructions. They were going to get rid of the body first. A mistake that cost them. Curtis regains consciousness, and does his Gymkata routine on them. (Curtis would've had a rather nasty bump on the back of his head/neck. Yet he comes to quickly enough and never seems to have any lingering effects of being knocked out stone cold.)
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