S05E10 - Misdirection

"Misdirection" is the tenth episode of Season 5 of We Can Fix Pawbert.

Synopsis

The MV Frost Crown's arrival window passes with an empty harbor, revealing that Icener and eighty operatives scaled Grizzly Falls to enter Zootopia through Tundratown undetected. A coordinated weather wall attack kills dozens across the city, and Pawbert breaks his promise to Luther to run a community shelter for over two hundred evacuees.

Plot

The harbor ambush yields nothing. Luther and Bauer spend the night in a mobile command vehicle watching empty water, while Nick and Judy sit on their cruiser hood at the perimeter checkpoint, coffee going cold. The Frost Crown's forty-eight-hour arrival window closes without a single radar contact. Costa orders the teams to stand down and rotate for rest, and Luther acknowledges what they all suspect: Icener changed the plan, or the harbor was never the plan at all.

While ZSI stares at an empty harbor, the real operation unfolds at the Polar Straights. The MV Frost Crown sits at anchor near the base of Grizzly Falls—a three-hundred-foot frozen waterfall connecting the Straights to Tundratown's upper plateau. RIBs ferry operatives and climbing gear to the rocky shore. Eighty cold-weather operatives, equipped with crampons, ice axes, and ascenders, scale the frozen waterfall in teams of five. Icener himself crests the summit and surveys the sleeping city below. Roskova reports all teams accounted for with zero casualties. Icener orders the next phase to begin that night. Hours later, O'Brian discovers the vessel on coastal surveillance imagery in the Polar Straights—a channel nobody monitors because nothing strategic exists there. Costa immediately recognizes the implication: Icener is already inside the city. Bauer boards the abandoned Frost Crown, finding evacuated crew quarters, a decoy harbor tactical map left on the navigator's table, and dozens of anchor points drilled into the cliff face below. His conservative estimate—eighty operatives, already dispersed into Tundratown—confirms the scale of the misdirection.

At 0300, Icener orders simultaneous activation of every compromised weather wall station at full intensity. The CCC night shift—Buchanan, Dessler, and Almeida—watches the holographic map cascade from green to red across every district. Temperatures spike to lethal levels in Sahara Square, where a mouse couple at a late-night cafe collapse from heat stroke within seconds. In Tundratown, melting ice causes structural collapses in apartment buildings designed for permanent frost. Canal District pumps reverse, flooding basements and subway tunnels. Little Rodentia's micro-climate systems, calibrated to tolerances measured in fractions of degrees, fail catastrophically—an elderly mouse grandmother sits down in her favorite chair and closes her eyes for the last time. In the ZTA tunnels beneath Savanna Central, climate controls shatter a maintenance train's windows from thermal stress. Buchanan stares at the scope of the disaster and declares what everyone already knows: this is not malfunction—this is attack. He sounds the all-paws alert and escalates the CCC to CONDITION RED.

The alert hits Luther's phone first. He dresses one-handed while Costa briefs him on coordinated weather wall failures and mass casualties across all districts. Luther cups Pawbert's face in both paws and makes him promise not to leave the mansion, then tears out of the house with Nick and Judy. They hit gridlock almost immediately—the ZTA system is down, cars are abandoned, mammals flee on foot. Luther walks the remaining distance to the CCC while Nick and Judy divert toward Sahara Square, where mass casualty reports are pouring in from the Oasis Hotel. Costa arrives at the CCC to find O'Brian already working the problem, with Bauer stuck in Tundratown and Shaw still en route. Nick and Judy reach the Oasis Hotel to find bodies in the lobby—the HVAC system has been pumping superheated air into the building for thirty minutes. Nick carries seven children down superheated stairs with wet towels wrapped around his head; three of them were already dead when he reached them. Judy coordinates triage in the parking lot as ZFD arrives with cooling trucks, but the paramedics are running out of IV fluids and the cooling units are overloading.

At the mansion, Pawbert watches the city die from his window, IPAWS alerts flooding his phone with emergency banners. When neighbors begin arriving—the Dunphys supporting an elderly armadillo with heat stroke, the Delgados with their grandchildren fleeing a house turned oven—Pawbert opens the mansion as a shelter, treating the armadillo with cooling packs and bringing in anyone who needs safety. Then a text from Mika changes everything: Lane is overwhelmed at a Meadowlands community center with over two hundred evacuees and no one who knows how to run a shelter operation. Selma arrives to drive Pawbert there. Mrs. Dunphy, overhearing, takes charge of the mansion neighbors and tells him to go. Pawbert follows Selma out, knowing Luther will be furious.

At the community center, Lane is vibrating with anxiety and purpose, Brim clinging to his shoulder. Two hundred and seventeen mammals are crammed into a space designed for recreation classes. Pawbert draws on every skill he learned at ZRS—emergency response training, three simulations, one real deployment—to organize the chaos: separating by medical need, inventorying supplies, addressing the room with the calm authority of someone who has spent years helping mammals in crisis. When Luther calls to discover Pawbert has broken his promise, the conversation becomes their sharpest conflict of the season. Pawbert refuses to apologize—he cannot sit in a mansion while the city burns, and he is not asking Luther to protect him. Luther, watching death tolls climb on CCC screens, is terrified and furious. The call ends unresolved, with Luther's flat statement that they will talk about this later.

The death toll climbs through the night—nine, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-nine, thirty-eight. At Icener's safehouse, Roskova reports the damage: dozens dead, hundreds injured, every district affected. Icener orders a stand-down—authorization code Aurora. At the CCC, O'Brian's trace—which was narrowing the control signals to a Tundratown industrial location—collapses as the source goes silent. One by one, the red icons on the CCC map return to green. Shaw recognizes that Icener called off the attack in the middle of it, and Costa delivers the episode's thesis: Icener is not retreating. He is demonstrating that he can turn the system back on whenever he wants. At the Oasis Hotel, Nick sits on the curb, fur matted with sweat, paws burnt, unable to understand why Icener stopped when he was winning. At the community center, Pawbert tells Lane the truth: tonight was just the beginning. The attack stopped because Icener chose to stop it. The city begins to count its dead as the sun rises.

Key Moments

• The Frost Crown decoy is revealed—Icener's forces entered via Grizzly Falls while ZSI watched an empty harbor
• Eighty operatives scale the frozen waterfall in the pre-dawn darkness, with Icener himself cresting the summit
• Bauer boards the abandoned Frost Crown and finds anchor points drilled into the cliff face
• Icener orders simultaneous full-intensity activation of all compromised weather wall stations
• Buchanan declares CONDITION RED from the CCC night shift
• An elderly mouse grandmother in Little Rodentia sits in her favorite chair and closes her eyes
• Luther makes Pawbert promise to stay at the mansion, then leaves with Nick and Judy
• Nick carries children down superheated stairs at the Oasis Hotel—three already dead when he reached them
• Judy coordinates triage in the hotel parking lot as paramedics run out of supplies
• Pawbert opens the mansion to neighbors as an emergency shelter
• Pawbert breaks his promise and leaves for the community center to run the shelter operation
• Pawbert organizes 217 evacuees using his ZRS emergency response training
• Luther and Pawbert's phone call becomes their sharpest conflict over Pawbert's autonomy
• O'Brian nearly traces the control signals before Icener orders a stand-down
• Costa recognizes the attack as a demonstration—Icener can turn it back on whenever he wants
• Pawbert tells Lane that tonight was just the beginning

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Pawthorne Mansion — Emergency shelter for neighbors; Pawbert's starting location
• Zootopia Harbor — Mobile command vehicle; perimeter checkpoint; site of the failed ambush
• Polar Straights / Grizzly Falls — Frost Crown's true anchorage; operatives scale the frozen waterfall
• MV Frost Crown — Abandoned vessel; boarded by Bauer's CTU team
• Tundratown Safehouse — Icener's staging area; Roskova's network status briefing
• ZSI Headquarters / CCC — Crisis command center; escalated to CONDITION RED
• Sahara Square / Oasis Hotel — Mass casualty site; Nick and Judy's rescue operation
• Little Rodentia — Micro-climate failure; catastrophic for small mammals
• Canal District — Reversed pumps; flooding in basements and subway tunnels
• ZTA Tunnel Section 7 — Maintenance train trapped by climate failure
• Meadowlands Community Center — Evacuation shelter; 217 mammals; Pawbert's shelter operation

Items

• MV Frost Crown — Found empty at Polar Straights; crew evacuated; decoy harbor map left on bridge
• RIBs (Rigid Inflatable Boats) — Military-grade; transported operatives to base of Grizzly Falls
• Ice climbing gear — Crampons, ice axes, ascenders used for the Grizzly Falls ascent
• Anchor points — Drilled into the cliff face; evidence of the mass infiltration
• Harbor tactical map (decoy) — Left on Frost Crown bridge showing harbor approach routes
• Icener's network map — 83% coverage, 56 stations across the city
• IPAWS alerts — Emergency notifications flooding Pawbert's phone
• Cooling packs — Mansion first aid supplies; used on elderly armadillo with heat stroke

Notes

• The escalating death toll sequence (9, 13, 19, 22, 24, 29, 32, 38) mirrors the counting structure of "38 Planes" from the musical Come From Away, which counts up to 38 as the number of planes diverted to Gander, Newfoundland on September 11, 2001. Both sequences build tension through incremental counting and land on the same final number.
• This episode marks the season's dramatic turning point, shifting from investigation to open crisis.
• The death toll of 38 mammals makes this the largest mass casualty event in the series to this point.
• Pawbert's decision to break his promise and run the shelter establishes the central tension between his autonomy and Luther's protective instincts—a conflict that carries through the remainder of the season.
• The Dunphys and Delgados are named after families from Modern Family---the Dunphys (Phil and Claire) and the Delgado-Pritchetts (Jay married Gloria Delgado). All of the pack's Meadowlands neighbors are named after Modern Family characters.
• The CCC night shift characters (Buchanan, Dessler, Almeida) are named after characters from the television series 24, consistent with Bauer and O'Brian's origins.
• CCC escalates to CONDITION RED in this episode (previously CONDITION ORANGE since the Hyenahurst raid).
• The IPAWS alerts and radio emergency broadcasts in this episode are modeled after the real-world Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) used in the United States.