Alias season 2, episode 10
Original air date: January 05, 2003

When the CIA finds out that Marshall's been taken by Cuvee's evil dentist, they send men out to find them. They track him to a safehouse in London, but by the time they get there, the house has been cleared. Unfortunately, it's also been wired with C-4, and it explodes, killing all four agents. With such a loss of life, Kendall orders them not to continue looking for Marshall.

So, poor Marshall is left in the hands of the evil dentist, who pours half of an epoxy compound down Marshall's throat, threatening to pour the other half of the mixture in if Marshall doesn't tell him what he did with the files for Echelon. Marshall says he destroyed them, but he says that he has a photographic memory and can recreate them. He agrees to do so, under a threat to his mother if he doesn't cooperate.

Sloane also is rebuilding the files. Marshall emailed him a copy of the files from London before he destroyed them. A few of the data packets went missing from the email, and are now locked in a data facility in Ho Chi Minh City. Sloane sends Sydney and Dixon to recover the packets, knowing that if he can reconstruct the Echelon files, all he would need is an access point on a satellite to access the system. Sydney's countermission from the CIA is to slurp the packets onto a handheld device, then switch devices before she hands it back to SD-6, so that SD-6 will get corrupted files that can't be reconstructed. She locates the disk drive the packets are on, but the drive she needs is in for repair in a different part of the building. She radios to Dixon that she's going after it, but he says he's closer and can get it. They meet in the room with the disk drive, and Dixon slurps the packets onto his device before Sydney can get to it. Sloane now has what he needs to reconstruct an Echelon terminal, and Sydney estimates that it'll only take him about 36 hours to do so.

The CIA, running out of options, knows that they need to shut down the access point that Cuvee was using. Derevko says she can help them locate it, but she'd need complete access to their servers and satellites, no restrictions. Kendall absolutely refuses, saying that they have highly trained tech ops who can do the same thing. When tech ops finds a virus called "Quicksand" - Derevko said finding the access point was "like quicksand" - Kendall has no choice but to let Derevko at it.

Sydney and Dixon, coming off their "victory" in returning the data packets to Sloane, ask to be allowed to find Marshall. Sloane had refused to search for him, instead ordering a new tech analyst to be sent over, but when the SD-6 servers are attacked by a denial of service attack (someone keeps pinging them over and over), Dixon wonders aloud, "Who would be smart enough to hack in here, but not smart enough to cover his tracks?" They're able to trace the signal to Mexico City, and they head there to rescue Marshall, just as he's about to complete his work.

Meanwhile, the SD-6 investigator that Sloane has looking into Emily's death, continues to breathe down Jack's neck. She demands hard evidence that he was in Karachi, Istanbul, etc., as he claims to have been. The CIA forges credit card charges and fakes surveillance tapes as evidence, and she's almost satisfied. When she meets with Jack to deliver her final report on him, she says she wants to know two things: one, why did she find brain matter from Haladki (the CIA mole Jack killed at the end of Season 1) in a gun Jack had checked out from SD-6; and two, she wants to see Jack's cell phone memory card, which keeps a record of all the call placed from it. Vaughn and another agent are monitoring Jack's conversation, so while he stalls and explains to her that Haladki was a Derevko operative, the waiter, a CIA operative, takes Jack's cell phone from his pocket, delivers it to Vaughn, the other agent downloads some fake phone call data into the chip from Vaughn's phone, stamps Vaughn's chip with Jack's phone's serial number, switches the memory chips in their phones, and the waiter replaces the phone in Jack's pocket. The coast seems clear, except that as Jack hands the chip over to the investigator, the ink from the serial number stamp smears.

He's blown it on two fronts, now: the SD-6 investigator has caught him faking evidence, and the CIA knows that he killed Haladki.

Finally, Marshall completes his work and calls the evil dentist over to witness the execution of the program he's built: it's Pong. He's built a reincarnation of Pong, and he laughs in the guy's face. Just as they're about to kill him, though, Sydney busts in and rescues him. They're trapped and can't get to the extraction point, but Marshall reassures Sydney: the parachute he'd had sewn into his jacket for flying, since he's so fearful of flying; well, he had one sewn into the jacket he's currently wearing, too, so he activates it and they float down to the extraction point.

Marshall's welcomed home to SD-6 as a hero, but Sydney's miserable because the CIA has no reason to get him out of SD-6 now, and he's going to continue living a lie. Will's life, it seems, though, is starting to look up: his CIA psychological profile came out clean, so he's been hired as an analyst for the CIA to review classified documents and write reports about them. He's not so happy, though, when he learns from Francie that Sydney's unhappy over "some guy from work; Michael something." Will warns Vaughn that Sydney takes whatever it is they have between them very seriously, and that if Vaughn hurts her, he'll have to answer to Will.

Last but not least, Derevko's able to close the access point, just as Kendall's threatening her that "if this is just some trick..." and just as Sloane's completed the reconstruction of the Echelon terminal.