S03E06 - Dead or Alive

"Dead or Alive" is the sixth episode of Season 3 of We Can Fix Pawbert. It picks up at the breached wall of Zootopia Correctional moments after Claw and Present Danger, with Leodore Lionheart's convoy already on the access road and every responding unit pointed at the burning prison instead. Luther and Pawbert Lynxley go after it with no vehicle, no phone and no weapon.

Synopsis

At the breached outer wall of Zootopia Correctional Facility, Luther and Pawbert Lynxley watch Leodore Lionheart's convoy of marked transit authority vehicles pull away down the access road. With no vehicle and no phone, Luther hauls a passing kudu motorist out of his car and takes both the sedan and the driver's phone, and Pawbert sends the terrified civilian up the road on foot. Pawbert reaches Judy Hopps by phone, and she and Nick Wilde relay the escape to Chief Bogo, whose citywide bulletin never goes out because Lionheart's network already controls the emergency alert backbone. The car dies in a transit service tunnel. Luther and Pawbert continue on foot, threaten a maintenance crew into giving up the convoy's route, and take a service train. A rear guard ambushes them at a track junction and grazes Pawbert's shoulder before Luther puts all three down, and further along the line he disarms a young ZPD officer and takes his weapon. Nick drives their cruiser through a roadblock on the Sahara Square access road while Judy returns fire. From a decommissioned terminus called Dead End Station, Lionheart hijacks the city's emergency broadcast to blame Mayor Brian Winddancer for the crisis, incite fear of the returned reptile population, and call supporters to City Hall. Gary De'Snake and his family watch it from Reptile Ravine, and Winddancer's security detail moves him to a safe room. Lionheart boards a commandeered twelve-car train, and Luther and Pawbert leap onto its rear car as it pulls out.

Plot

At the breached outer wall of Zootopia Correctional, Luther and Pawbert watch three marked transit vehicles carry Leodore Lionheart down the access road while the first ZPD cruisers and ZFD tankers stage behind them at the burning prison. They are the only two mammals who saw which road the convoy took, and between them they have prison grays and nothing else. A civilian sedan slows on the road outside, its driver a middle-aged kudu staring at the smoke. Luther hauls him out by the collar and tells him flatly that he needs the car and the phone, then confirms it when the kudu says out loud that he is being carjacked. Pawbert catches up and tries to explain about the terrorist and the lives at stake. He sends the shaking mammal off past the bridge on foot, away from the escaping inmates, and apologizes before getting in.

Luther drives the commuter car harder than it was built for while Pawbert works out the unfamiliar phone and reaches Judy. He tells her the breach was engineered: guards on Lionheart's payroll, explosives set in the cell blocks and the outer perimeter, an extraction convoy waiting, and Luther inside in prison grays with nobody willing to listen to him. Nick patches the call through to Chief Bogo, who is already fielding a citywide emergency and puts the breach at three hundred inmates in the wind. Nick argues that Lionheart is the priority because he did not break out in order to run. Bogo orders a do-not-engage bulletin naming Luther on every channel, and a voice behind him reports that the alert net is refusing pushes and every bulletin is dying inside the precinct ring. Nick and Judy are on their own. Nick swings the cruiser out of the stream of emergency vehicles and reasons toward the kind of place a mammal picks when he wants no witnesses: somewhere forgotten. Judy names Dead End Station, and Nick fills in the rest, a terminus at the edge of Sahara Square with abandoned maintenance bays, no cameras and no foot traffic.

The sedan was never built for track beds. Its undercarriage scrapes and sparks along the raised sections until something snaps on a maintenance rail and the engine dies. Luther and Pawbert continue on foot through branching service corridors, Luther reading tire marks, oil stains and disturbed air that Pawbert cannot pick up at all. Three transit workers come the other way, a marmot, a porcupine and a beaver, frightened by the shaking tunnel and the silence on their radios. Luther identifies himself as ZSI. The beaver, who sees two blood-covered mammals in prison clothes telling him exactly the story an escaping convict would tell, refuses. Luther pins him to the wall by the throat and tells him what is heading for the city, and the beaver gives up the route: Platform 9, service trains, the main tunnel toward Sahara Square. Luther thanks him and walks away, adding the crew to the list of things he expects to answer for later.

Three maintenance trains sit on the service platform and only one still has power. Pawbert climbs into its control compartment and finds nothing clearly labeled, so he taps controls at random, trips a red warning light, and spins a lever until the train lurches forward hard enough to nearly strand Luther on the platform. He drives it along the service rails that run parallel to the main line, switching branches by the track schematic on the display, and takes Judy's callback on the stolen phone.

Manual switching forces a stop at a track junction, and Lionheart's rear guard is waiting there for exactly that: a coyote with a semi-automatic, a badger with a wrench, and a boar. The coyote fires three times, and the third shot cuts a furrow across Pawbert's shoulder. Luther closes the distance, wrenches the coyote's gun arm past its limit and loses the weapon down a drainage grate, throws the badger into the track, and takes a tusk to ribs already cracked from the prison before he finishes the boar with three headbutts to the snout. Pawbert's wound is a graze and nothing worse. Luther hauls the heavy track lever himself so Pawbert can keep pressure on it, then takes the controls.

At a second junction, closer to the surface, a young ZPD officer comes to investigate the unauthorized train movement. The antelope is fresh out of the academy, and he draws from a correct fifteen feet when a bleeding wolf in prison grays steps down. Luther's attempt to name ZSI and Director Ramshorn gets nowhere. He fakes compliance instead, lets the officer's confidence bring him in to eight feet, and moves. The panicked shot punches through the ceiling grate. Luther pins him, tells him to count to one hundred and then radio that Luther of ZSI, codename Rook, is in the transit system pursuing Lionheart, and leaves with the officer's service weapon, the first Luther has carried since the breach.

Nick and Judy find the Sahara Square access road blocked by two transit vehicles and three armed mammals, a jackal, a civet and a genet, none of them in transit uniforms. Nick drives at the gap. Judy returns fire through her window and drops the one shooter who stands his ground, and the cruiser grinds through between the vehicles with its mirror torn off and its windshield cracked. They dive into the tunnel access.

Lionheart's crew has a broadcast rig assembled in Dead End Station's abandoned maintenance bay. Four years of prison have put silver in his mane and changed nothing else about him. His panther aide reports the City Hall team in position and asks about the two Lynxleys who got out on their own, and Lionheart declines them: Milton bought his first campaign, the open door settles the account, and the family is finished. The transmission takes every ZNN display, every station monitor and every phone with emergency alerts enabled. At Precinct 1, Higgins shouts for the feed to be cut and Clawhauser cannot reach it. The seizure runs through the emergency alert backbone on a live service credential renewed for years under a retired technician's name, access Paddock kept from his municipal maintenance career and never gave up.

Lionheart blames Mayor Winddancer for a city of scandals, arrests and dead civilians, then recasts his own removal from office as punishment for keeping mammals safe. He tells the city that Winddancer reopened Reptile Ravine and let dangerous reptiles back in. Gary De'Snake watches from the family's rebuilt home there with his parents and his younger brother and sister, telling them it is a lie and knowing how little that is worth against a lie repeated loudly enough. His mother, who lived through the exile herself, coils around the youngest two, and his sister asks whether they will have to leave. At City Hall, Winddancer refuses to leave the monitor until his aides and a gray ZSI wolf on his security detail move him to the safe room. Lionheart calls the city to City Hall to remove the mayor, promises what a cornered lion does to anyone who tries to stop him, and tells his crew to take the train.

Luther and Pawbert come up out of the service tunnels behind Lionheart's position, at an angle the rear guards never covered, and take cover behind a dust-covered maintenance crane. What they can count from there is dozens: escaped prisoners, corrupt guards still in uniform, loyalists, all of them boarding the twelve cars of a commandeered Inner Loop train. Pawbert has heard the whole broadcast on the way in and knows the lie from the inside: his own family kept it by burying Reptile Ravine under Tundratown, and defending it nearly made him a murderer. Lionheart boards last. The two of them sprint the platform as the train pulls out, Luther catches the rear railing and drags himself up on cracked ribs, and with the gap already too wide he calls Pawbert into the jump and catches him by the forearm. They land together on the rear platform as the train runs into the tunnel. Lionheart does not know they are aboard.

Key Moments

• Luther pulls a kudu motorist out of his car on the road outside the prison and takes the sedan and the phone
• Pawbert apologizes to the civilian and sends him past the bridge on foot, away from the escaping inmates
• Pawbert calls Judy from the stolen phone and reports that Lionheart engineered the breach
• Bogo puts the breach at three hundred inmates in the wind and orders a do-not-engage bulletin naming Luther
• The bulletin dies inside the precinct ring because Lionheart's network already holds the emergency alert backbone
• Judy names Dead End Station and Nick identifies it as the only staging ground that fits
• The sedan's undercarriage tears out in the service tunnel and the pursuit continues on foot
• Luther pins a ZTA maintenance beaver to the tunnel wall to get the convoy's route
• Pawbert works out the unlabeled controls of a powered service train
• A rear guard ambushes them at a track junction and a bullet grazes Pawbert's shoulder
• Luther puts down all three attackers and pulls the track lever himself so Pawbert can keep pressure on the wound
• Luther fakes compliance to disarm a young ZPD antelope officer and takes his service weapon
• Nick drives the cruiser through an armed roadblock on the Sahara Square access road while Judy returns fire
• Lionheart writes the Lynxleys off, treating Milton's campaign money as a debt the open prison door has settled
• Lionheart hijacks the emergency alert backbone and puts his face on every screen in Zootopia
• Clawhauser traces the seizure to a service credential Paddock kept from his municipal maintenance career
• The broadcast turns on the reptile community, and Gary De'Snake's family watches it in Reptile Ravine
• Winddancer's aides and his ZSI security detail move him to the City Hall safe room
• Lionheart boards a commandeered twelve-car Inner Loop train with his army
• Luther catches the rear railing of the departing train and pulls Pawbert aboard mid-leap

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Zootopia Correctional Facility - The breached outer wall and the access road outside it
• ZTA tunnels - Service corridors, a maintenance platform, and two manual track junctions beneath the city
• Dead End Station - Decommissioned terminus at the edge of Sahara Square; Lionheart's staging ground
• Precinct 1 - The bullpen, locked out of its own alert system during the broadcast
• Reptile Ravine - Gary De'Snake's rebuilt family home
• City Hall - The mayor's office and the safe room

Items

• Kudu's sedan - Commandeered outside the prison; destroyed in the service tunnel when the undercarriage tears out on a maintenance rail
• Kudu's phone - Taken from the sedan's center console; Pawbert's only link to Nick and Judy
• Service train - One of three on the ZTA maintenance platform and the only one still powered; left in a side bay at Dead End
• ZPD service weapon - Taken from the antelope officer; the first weapon Luther has carried since the breach
• Lionheart's tablet - A final read-through of the manifesto before transmission
• Broadcast rig - Assembled in the Dead End maintenance bay; seizes ZNN displays, station monitors and emergency alerts citywide
• Inner Loop train - Twelve cars in official ZTA markings, commandeered to carry Lionheart's army to City Hall

Notes

• Leodore Lionheart speaks for the first time in this episode; he is seen without dialogue at the prison breach in the previous episode, and mentioned from "Fur Your Eyes Only" onward.
• Lionheart's populist rhetoric is recognizable political language designed to manufacture a movement.
• Dead End Station is an abandoned ZTA station at the edge of Sahara Square. No cameras, no foot traffic.
• The exchange when Pawbert starts the service train — Luther: "It would take a miracle to get this rust bucket moving." / Pawbert: "Well, hallelujah." — is a direct callback to the similar train escape scene between Nick and Judy in Zootopia (2016).
• The title references Dead or Alive (Jack Ryan/Tom Clancy). All Season 3 episode titles pun on James Bond, Jack Reacher, or Jack Ryan titles.