S05E17 - All Paws

"All Paws" is the seventeenth episode of Season 5 of We Can Fix Pawbert. It picks up on the night of the Rainforest District fire in "Inferno", with the pack still raw from it and Icener cut off from Milton behind ZSI's protection. His answer is ZSI Headquarters itself, and the assault arrives the next morning with the pack scattered across four floors of the building.

Synopsis

Mikhail Icener briefs his commanders in a Tundratown warehouse, ordering charges planted on the structural supports of ZSI Headquarters and warning that many of them will die. The next morning dozens of operatives hit every entrance at once. Bauer and the lobby guards fight back while the lockdown seals the stairwells and strands the pack on separate floors: Pawbert in the Crisis Coordination Center two sub-levels down, Luther and field agent Shaw in a conference room, Judy alone in a break room, Nick in a corridor between them. Operatives die planting explosives, and enough charges detonate to blow the lobby's support columns. The tower lurches into a hard lean and holds. Pawbert drags signals analyst O'Brian clear of a falling slab and leads the surviving operators up a half-collapsed north stairwell, but a second collapse cuts off the Reptile Station operator and the Little Rodentia coordinator. A hippo agent loses his grip, slides into the window Judy is pressed against, and falls four stories when it shatters. A loading-dock collapse pins Luther, Shaw, and Bauer until rescue teams dig them out. Survivors scatter across four staging areas, and the pack searches until it reunites. Director Costa takes the count with his arm in a sling: twenty-three ZSI personnel dead, fifteen unaccounted for, thirty of Icener's operatives killed, three of them commanders. Roskova asks how many more he will spend. Icener says as many as it takes, but his certainty is gone and she leaves doubting him.

Plot

On the night of the Rainforest District fire, Icener assembles his commanders in a Tundratown warehouse around a rotating model of ZSI Headquarters. He tells them the assault will kill many of them, then gives the order: charges on the structural supports, a collapse rather than a firefight, because the building is what keeps Milton beyond his reach. The commanders are polar bears, wolverines, snow leopards, arctic foxes and tundra tigers who crossed an ocean on his word, and one of them speaks for the rest in accepting it. Roskova holds her composure at his shoulder, but the casualty estimates keep pulling her eye, and the mammal giving the order is no longer quite the one she followed out of Vladifrostok.

Morning finds the pack spread across four levels of the building. Pawbert works old Lynxley Holdings records in the Crisis Coordination Center two sub-levels down, hunting anything in the corporate language that points toward The Root. Luther and Shaw lay out Tundratown deployments in a third-floor conference room. Nick and Judy take coffee in the fourth-floor break room until Nick goes down to the fox-scaled restrooms on Level 2. In the lobby, Bauer runs deployment schedules past a security officer and satisfies himself that nothing can get through the checkpoint.

Minutes later vehicles stop hard on the street outside and dozens of armed operatives hit every entrance at once, from the front doors to the loading dock. Every metal detector in the lobby goes off together, the glass comes apart, and Bauer takes cover behind a pillar with the guards falling around him. The breach triggers the building's automatic lockdown, which seals every stairwell. Shaw opens the conference room door with a command override, but Judy is ZPD and holds no ZSI access, and Nick finds the Level 2 stairwell sealed with two floors between him and her. The radios go to static almost immediately.

Luther and Shaw force their way down to the lobby on command overrides and find a killing floor. Bauer shows them what the operatives are actually doing: abandoning cover to fix explosive packages to the structural columns, taking rounds rather than stopping. For every one killed, another reaches a column. A wounded polar bear makes the entrance with a detonator and triggers it, and enough of the charges blow the lobby's spine. The blast throws all three of them. Then the floor tilts as half the foundation gives way, and the whole tower leans over and holds.

Two sub-levels down the floor stays flat, but the ceiling begins to fracture and Costa calls the evacuation. O'Brian is still pulling data onto a portable drive when a slab cracks above her console; Pawbert crosses the room, hauls the raccoon off her station, and the concrete comes down on her workstation a moment later, a shard of it opening a cut above her ear. Costa's own arm is crushed under a fallen console until two operators drag him free. With the main exit and the emergency exit both buried, Pawbert takes the survivors up the half-collapsed north stairwell. The Reptile Station gecko cannot move fast enough behind him, and the Little Rodentia mouse is stranded with her ramps destroyed and full-scale debris in front of her. A second section of ceiling comes down between them and Pawbert, and he climbs out without them.

On Level 4 the tilt throws Judy across the break room and into a window over a four-story drop. The pane holds because she is a rabbit. A hippo agent loses his grip on a filing cabinet, slides into the same glass beside her, and goes through it. Her radio is somewhere across the room, cracked against a wall, and she has to climb out paw over paw: window frame to bolted table leg to counter lip, with everything unbolted already piled at the low end or gone through the gap. The building's shift has opened a gap in the stairwell frame, and she squeezes through it and starts down toward Nick.

Nick's route up is buried under a collapsed ceiling section, and an elk agent tells him the upper floors are evacuating separately, so he goes down with the Level 2 group and out the west side. Luther, Shaw and Bauer find the south entrance blocked and reroute through the loading dock on the east, and the dock comes down behind them and seals them into a debris pocket. USAR arrives in the largest rescue deployment in the city's history, with sniffer wolves working the perimeter, rhinos and elephants on the heavy squad, and ferrets and weasels staged for confined space. A sniffer wolf calls the scent signatures at the east dock, a rhino braces a falling beam while an elephant clears debris, and the three of them come out one at a time. A medic then holds Luther for an assessment he fights the whole way through.

Pawbert brings his group out at the north entrance, reports the two trapped operators to a medic, and learns only that USAR is staging on a collapse at the east side. With survivors scattered across four staging areas, the searching runs in circles. McHorn, a ZPD officer on the south perimeter, sends Judy toward the west; a responder sends Nick toward the south; an impassable southwest corner sends them around the building in opposite directions, and they pass within ten feet of each other on the crowded north face before Nick stops and turns. Judy starts shaking once she is still, and tells him about the hippo who went through the glass she had been pressed against, and about the look Athena described in Bobby, which she says she had not understood until today. The overseas vacation Nick promised her becomes something she now insists on. Luther breaks away from medical with the rescue tags still on his wrist and runs for the north staging area while Pawbert pushes toward the east, and they see each other through a gap in the crowd.

The pack finds each other at the north staging area, all four alive, Shaw newly bandaged and Costa on his feet with his arm in a sling. Bauer gives the count: twenty-three ZSI personnel confirmed dead, fifteen unaccounted for, the two Crisis Coordination Center operators among them. O'Brian tells Pawbert what ten more seconds at her console would have cost her. Asked what the day cost Icener, Bauer puts his losses at thirty confirmed, more than a quarter of a force built from the mammals who crossed with him and from six years of workers seeded quietly into the city. Costa says he spent them like currency. Shaw reads the whole assault as retaliation for being cut off from Milton and from the codes, and Costa orders the agency to prepare for a desperate enemy.

That night the warehouse is emptier. Roskova brings Icener the confirmed count and the three commanders inside it, Vostokoff, Dreykov and Oksana, and tells him they threw their people away for one building. He answers that they knew the cost. She asks whether he did, and then how many more he will spend. He says as many as it takes, but his paw hovers over Vladifrostok on the map without touching it and his orders come slower than they used to. She turns and leaves, and the doubt on her face is the first she has let herself feel since Vladifrostok.

Key Moments

• Icener briefs his commanders on a suicide assault against ZSI headquarters, acknowledging it will be fatal for many
• The pack is separated across four floors when the security lockdown engages during the assault
• Bauer holds the lobby, engaging dozens of operatives while they plant charges on structural columns
• Luther, Shaw, and Bauer fight to stop the charge-planting but cannot prevent enough detonations
• The building lurches into a permanent lean when the lobby's support columns blow
• Pawbert saves O'Brian by yanking her away from her console moments before a concrete slab crushes it
• Pawbert leads CCC survivors through the north stairwell, taking command of the evacuation
• A second ceiling collapse cuts off the Reptile Station gecko and the Little Rodentia mouse; Pawbert has to climb out without them
• A hippo agent falls to his death through a shattered Level 4 window, moments after Judy was pressed against that same glass
• Judy squeezes through a warped stairwell frame using her rabbit size to escape Level 4
• Luther, Shaw, and Bauer are trapped in a loading dock debris pocket and extracted by USAR
• Nick and Judy reunite outside the perimeter; Judy invokes Athena's words about Bobby
• Luther and Pawbert find each other between staging areas after each feared the other was dead
• Twenty-three ZSI personnel confirmed dead; fifteen unaccounted for, including the two CCC operators
• Icener loses thirty operatives, three of them commanders — more than a quarter of his force
• Costa sustains a broken arm; continues issuing orders on his feet with his arm in a sling
• Roskova confronts Icener about spending their people; doubt visibly crosses her face

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• ZSI Headquarters — Crisis Coordination Center (Sub-Level 2), lobby, conference room (Level 3), break room (Level 4), Level 2 corridor, north stairwell, loading dock
• ZSI Headquarters exterior — north, south, east, and west perimeters; four separate staging areas; USAR staging; medical tents
• Tundratown — Icener's staging warehouse

Items

• Explosive charges — Planted on ZSI headquarters structural columns by Icener's operatives
• Detonator — Used by a wounded polar bear operative to trigger the charges
• O'Brian's data drive — Downloaded during the attack; saved when Pawbert pulls her from her station
• USAR tags — Search and rescue identification on Luther's wrist after extraction

Notes

• The gecko and mouse operators being cut off highlights how small mammals face unique dangers in structural collapses. They physically cannot navigate debris that larger mammals can climb.
• Pawbert saving O'Brian reverses the protection dynamic that defined his early arc: the former victim is now the one pulling others from danger and commanding evacuations.
• The episode uses split-screen simultaneity extensively: first showing four quadrants of routine morning operations, then four experiences of the same catastrophe, then parallel reunion sequences.
• Judy's survival is species-dependent: the glass held because a rabbit weighs far less than the hippo who shattered it moments later.
• Icener loses more than a quarter of his operational force in a single assault.