S05E10 - Misdirection

"Misdirection" is the tenth episode of Season 5 of We Can Fix Pawbert. It picks up on the harbor trap set at the close of "Departure", with ZSI holding every approach to Zootopia Harbor on the strength of a shipping schedule the pack's heist recovered. The MV Frost Crown's arrival window has already passed, and the mammals watching the water are starting to ask why.

Synopsis

ZSI's harbor trap comes up empty. Luther Pawthorne and CTU commander Bauer watch Zootopia Harbor all night as the Frost Crown's arrival window passes, and at dawn Director Costa stands the teams down. The ship is anchored at the base of Grizzly Falls in the Polar Straights instead, where eighty of Mikhail Icener's operatives ice-climb the frozen waterfall into Tundratown and Icener reaches Zootopia himself for the first time. Signals analyst O'Brian spots the vessel on surveillance that evening; Bauer's boarding team finds it abandoned, a decoy harbor map face-up on the bridge and anchor bolts drilled into the cliff below. From a Tundratown safehouse Icener orders Roskova's infiltration network to full intensity, and at three in the morning every compromised weather-wall station activates at once. Sahara Square superheats, Tundratown thaws, the Canal District floods, Little Rodentia's micro-climate collapses, and the CCC declares Condition RED. Luther leaves for headquarters after making Pawbert promise to stay home. Nick and Judy work the mass-casualty scene at the Oasis Hotel, where Nick carries seven children down superheated stairs and three are already dead. Pawbert shelters his neighbors at the mansion, then breaks the promise and runs a Meadowlands community center alongside Lane, where two hundred and thirty-one evacuees pass through and none dies. A phone call with Luther becomes an argument over who decides what Pawbert can risk. Icener orders a stand-down before dawn with thirty-eight confirmed dead, and Costa concludes he stopped by choice and can restart whenever he wants.

Plot

Luther and Bauer hold the mobile command vehicle at Zootopia Harbor through the night. Every water approach and access road is covered, and the monitors show nothing at all. The forty-eight-hour window the heist data promised closed two hours ago, and Luther says what the empty water means: either Icener changed the plan, or the harbor was never the plan. At the perimeter checkpoint, Nick and Judy wait out the same nothing on a cruiser hood with coffee neither of them wants. By dawn Director Costa has heard enough and stands the teams down, ordering four-hour rest cycles and fresh eyes on the problem by noon.

The Frost Crown is anchored in the Polar Straights, the arctic water past Tundratown where Grizzly Falls drops three hundred feet from the plateau into the sea. Climate control keeps the waterfall frozen for the tourists, and that is precisely what the ship came for. RIBs run from the davits to the rocky shore without lights, ferrying operatives and ice gear until the base of the falls is a staging area. Eighty of Icener's mammals climb the frozen face in roped teams of five, following fixed lines set by the lead climbers, and once the lines are in place the follow-on teams need fifteen minutes for what the first took forty. Icener hauls himself over the edge last and stands on Zootopia soil for the first time, looking down at a sleeping city. Roskova reports every team accounted for and no casualties on the ascent, and he orders the next phase for that same night.

By that evening O'Brian is eleven hours into running coastal surveillance through pattern recognition, and she freezes an image of a vessel riding at anchor in water nobody bothers to monitor. The registry comes back MV Frost Crown, Vladifrostok, and Costa understands before she finishes reading it out. Bauer takes a boarding team onto the ship and finds it evacuated rather than abandoned: half-eaten meals, cold coffee, stripped bunks, personal effects left where they fell. On the bridge lies a tactical map of the harbor approaches, spread face-up where no boarding party could miss it, the last piece of a setup that already included a stolen schedule and a berth nobody was ever coming to. From the deck his team spots anchor bolts drilled into the cliff below and rope fragments scattered on the rocks. Bauer counts them and gives Costa a conservative number. Eighty operatives, already inside the city.

At a safehouse in Tundratown's industrial fringe, Roskova lays out what years of patient infiltration bought: eighty-three percent coverage, fifty-six stations, every device ready. Icener ends the probing phase and orders full intensity, all of it simultaneous, that same night, and tells her to let the city sleep one last time. At exactly three in the morning the CCC map goes from green to red district by district faster than the night shift can clear the alerts. A young rabbit in Meadowlands wakes to frost forming on the inside of her window. In Sahara Square the temperature climbs past one hundred twenty degrees and a mouse couple collapse at their micro-scale table before anyone can reach them. Tundratown goes from ten below to forty above in under a minute until ceilings built for permanent frost come down in meltwater. Canal District pumps reverse into basements and subway tunnels, a maintenance train's windows shatter inward from thermal stress in Tunnel Section 7, and Little Rodentia, calibrated to fractions of a degree, fails the way a system with no margin always fails. Buchanan, the night supervisor, names it as an attack rather than a malfunction and puts the CCC on Condition RED.

The alert reaches Luther's phone at the mansion, and he is dressed and geared inside a minute while Costa briefs him on fifty-plus compromised stations and casualties already reported. He takes Pawbert's face in both paws and asks him to promise not to leave the house, and gets the promise. Nick and Judy meet him at the stairs, and he sends them to their precinct, where every officer is being called in. The three of them get as far as the main artery before gridlock stops them cold, with the ZTA dead and trains stranded in tunnels, so they leave the car in the road and split on foot, Luther southwest for the CCC and Nick and Judy southeast for Sahara Square. Costa reaches headquarters to find half his people stuck across the city, fifty-three stations malfunctioning, remote access locked out, and manual local overrides the only way back in, with nowhere near enough mammals to work them. O'Brian offers the alternative: trace the control signal and shut down the source instead of the stations.

Nick and Judy commandeer an abandoned cruiser and reach the Oasis Hotel, where the HVAC has been pumping superheated air through a budget hotel for half an hour. There are bodies in the lobby and mammals still dragging themselves toward the doors. With wet towels for protection and nothing else, Nick works the upper floors and carries seven children down the stairs; three of them were already dead when he reached them. Judy runs the parking lot, where ZFD has built a field hospital out of whatever could be scraped together and is already out of IV fluids and short of cooling units.

Pawbert watches the city come apart from the mansion window with IPAWS alerts stacking up on his phone, until movement outside catches him. His neighbors the Dunphys are in the street between the estates, holding up an elderly armadillo in heat stroke. He is across the lawn before he decides to be. The mansion runs on backup climate control independent of the city grid, so he opens it: cooling packs on the armadillo's pulse points, cold water and wet towels for the Delgado grandchildren, then anyone else the enclave sends, until twenty-two neighbors are sheltering in his home. Mika texts that Lane is organizing a community center in Meadowlands and that Selma can drive him there. Pawbert weighs the promise he made against a night that has grown much larger than the promise. Mrs. Dunphy settles it by taking over the mansion herself and telling him to go.

The community center holds two hundred mammals and rising, on yoga mats and folding chairs, with Lane running it on nerve alone and Brim clinging to his shoulder. Pawbert has the training Lane does not, three simulations and one real deployment through ZRS, and he uses it: separate by need, inventory what is on site, then work out what can still be brought in. When Luther calls, Pawbert answers rather than let it ring out. The argument that follows is the one they have never had aloud. Luther was counting on him being safe; Pawbert tells him the decision belongs to him, and that he is not asking to be protected. Neither backs down. They say they love each other and agree to finish it later.

On the CCC board the confirmed dead climb through the night to thirty-eight, with the night still running. O'Brian narrows the control signals to Tundratown and asks for a few more minutes, and she does not get them. Satisfied that the response has been entirely reactive, Icener has Roskova issue a stand-down under the authorization code Aurora, and every station goes dormant at once. The red icons turn green, O'Brian's trace dies with the signal, and Costa reads the stop for what it is: Icener is not retreating, he is demonstrating that he can turn it back on whenever he likes. Nick sits on the curb outside the hotel with burnt paws and no answer to why they quit while they were winning. At dawn Lane counts two hundred and thirty-one mammals processed through the shelter and not one lost, and Pawbert tells him the attack ended because Icener chose to end it, and that it is not over.

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 last
• 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
• Gridlock strands all three on the highway and they continue on foot in two directions
• Nick carries seven 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 twenty-two neighbors as an emergency shelter
• Pawbert breaks his promise and leaves with Selma for the community center
• Pawbert takes over the shelter operation using his ZRS emergency response training
• Luther and Pawbert's phone call turns into an argument over who decides what Pawbert can risk
• 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
• Two hundred and thirty-one evacuees pass through the community center by dawn and none is lost
• Pawbert tells Lane that tonight was just the beginning

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Pawthorne Mansion — Emergency shelter for twenty-two 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 in the industrial fringe; Icener's staging area and network 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; two hundred and thirty-one evacuees processed by dawn

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.
• Pawbert's decision to break his promise and run the shelter establishes the central tension between his autonomy and Luther's protective instincts.
• 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.
• 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.