S05E21 - Final Position

"Final Position" is the twenty-first episode of Season 5 of We Can Fix Pawbert, and the largest crossover of the series. It follows the ambush at Pawthorne Mansion that left Luther and Pawbert Lynxley in Icener's custody. Drone overwatch finally locates them inside his fortified position at Reptile Ravine, and Costa commits every tactical asset in the city to going in after them.

Synopsis

Drone overwatch from Mr. Big's mansion, ZSI's command post since its headquarters collapsed, catches Luther and Pawbert being dragged into the lighthouse at Reptile Ravine. ZSI Director Costa already reads Icener's fortification as proof that The Root lies beneath it, and now the mammal carrying Milton's root code is inside with him. Costa mobilizes the largest police operation the city has staged: Reacher's team, Bauer's CTU, the BAU, Precincts 1, 7 and 99, Bogo on his cane at mobile command, and twelve of Fru Fru's polar bears committed in her father's name. Judy refuses to be held out of the assault, so Reacher takes her and Nick in behind him. The eastern and western teams open a lane at heavy cost, and the main entry breaches the lighthouse to find a shaft blasted through its foundation. Below it is The Root, Agnes De'Snake's buried control hub for every weather wall in Zootopia. Icener has his bears beat Luther to force the code out of Pawbert, who refuses even with a pistol at Luther's head. Pawbert then sees Agnes's original inscription faded into the console frame. He tries the city's modern motto, FOR_EVERYONE, is denied, then enters her founding wording, FOR_ALL. The failsafe drops every weather wall into emergency shutdown and revokes root access. Reacher, Nick and Judy breach the chamber. Icener drags Pawbert into the tunnels with Luther after him; Pawbert bites Icener's gun paw, and Luther kills him, then collapses into cardiac arrest with Nick doing compressions.

Plot

ZSI has been running its operation out of Mr. Big's mansion since its own headquarters came down, and Costa works the tactical map there with his arm still in a sling. Bauer coordinates what is left of CTU, O'Brian fights three daisy-chained laptops for a drone feed that keeps dropping, and Reacher's team gears up along the far wall. The BAU arrives unasked — Prentiss, Morgan, Rossi, JJ and Garcia, all of them running on nothing since their offices went down with the building — and Garcia reroutes the overwatch through the emergency services network until it holds. The stabilized feed shows a transport pulling up at the Reptile Ravine lighthouse and two bound figures being hauled out of it: a gray wolf and a lynx. Nick names them before the zoom finishes tightening. Costa reads the whole picture off that image. Icener has spent hours fortifying a ravine with no strategic value because The Root is under it, and the mammal carrying Milton's access code has just been carried inside.

The city mobilizes on a scale it has never attempted. At a parking structure south of Tundratown turned into a staging ground, Chief Bogo leans on the cane the station attack left him with and refuses Hoggbottom's advice to sit the operation out. Two of his people are down there, he tells her: one who has bled alongside his officers for years, and one who has saved the city more than once and earned the right to have them come for him. Grey brings Precinct 7 and asks for an assignment. At the mansion, Fru Fru arrives in black less than a day after her father's death and commits twelve of his polar bears under Koslov. Athena brings support units drawn from precincts across the city. When Costa refuses to put Judy and Nick on the main entry team, Judy overrides him outright, and Reacher takes Costa aside, then returns and sets his own terms: they stay behind him, they follow his lead, and their job when the breach comes is to find Luther and Pawbert.

Costa assigns four vectors. The eastern approach — Precinct 1 heavy units, Koslov's bears and officers from three supporting precincts — is to destroy the eastern defensive line. The western approach pairs BAU field agents with Precincts 1, 7, 4 and 8. Main entry belongs to Reacher's team and CTU, with Nick and Judy inside the column, and waits for the flanks to open a lane. Holt and the Nine-Nine seal the outer perimeter, arriving last and without any of their usual energy; Jake racks his slide and delivers a piece of borrowed bravado with no comedy left in it at all. Behind the assault line stand hundreds of vehicles and hundreds of mammals, medical staging at the rear with Station 118 among them — Chimney, Eddie, Buck and Hen waiting for casualties everyone expects. Bogo speaks once for everyone the crisis has already taken, and Costa gives the order to engage.

The perimeter erupts on the word. Koslov leads the polar bears into the eastern line, Higgins and Bloats take the first barricade apart between them, and Francine crushes a secondary emplacement. Raymond takes a round through the shoulder and keeps firing. A tapir officer from Precinct 3 goes down with a leg wound, and Bucheron drags him toward cover. On the west, Bradford blows the fence with a shaped charge and Chen is through the gap first, dropping two operatives before anyone else clears it. Morgan pushes in behind her with three ZPD officers, Prentiss covers JJ after a round goes through her arm, and Nolan takes grenade fragments and dresses them in the field rather than fall back. Athena anchors the flank. Fangmeyer absorbs rounds on his vest and stays up; Delgato puts down the operative who hit him.

With both flanks clear, three BearCats run the lane and plow through everything still standing in it. Reacher comes out of the lead vehicle at full mass and takes the lighthouse entrance apart, Neagley, O'Donnell and Dixon flowing in behind him. Bauer's operators flood the ground floor and clear it upward. Nick and Judy fight through the interior with none of their usual restraint, working through magazine changes without breaking stride. The building falls, and the tally comes in behind it: a polar bear named Nikolai dead, the Precinct 3 tapir dead, Chevre hauled out bleeding, Raymond, Nolan, JJ, Fangmeyer, Grizzoli and two CTU operators wounded across every team.

Searching the ground floor, Nick finds a shaft blasted straight through the lighthouse foundation, at least two hundred feet of it, with emergency lighting flickering somewhere far below. O'Brian confirms it appears on no city schematic in existence, and Costa tells them what it is. Reacher, Nick and Judy take Icener's rigged elevator platform down past modern concrete, nineteenth-century brick and carved stone into a passage network older than Zootopia, and start working through the operatives holding it.

In the chamber at the bottom, Icener stands behind Pawbert at a console of brass, steel and copper wired into modern displays — Agnes De'Snake's control hub for every weather wall in the city. Luther kneels nearby between two polar bears, beaten far past the state he was in at the mansion, his face swollen, his ribs broken and his shoulder wound reopened. Icener asks for the code with complete patience and answers each refusal with another blow to Luther. Pawbert has only Milton's code, BUILT_BY_LYNXLEY, and entering it hands Icener the power to kill millions.

Luther tells Pawbert to let him go. He says he loves him and is proud of him, that what Pawbert built for himself does not disappear if Luther dies, and that the codes in Icener's paws would be the end of everything. Pawbert refuses outright — not for Luther, not for anyone — and tells Icener he can kill them both and still get nothing. Icener pauses for the first time and says Pawbert's father would be proud of him. Pawbert answers that his father can rot, and it is in that moment that his eyes catch the console frame, where a century underground has worn an inscription down to three legible words: BUILT BY TWO. He recognizes it as the original that Ebenezer never bothered to replace, because only he and Agnes knew The Root existed, and Gary's account of Agnes's five founding words comes back to him. The failsafe is the half that has faded.

Icener shoots Luther through the thigh. Pawbert breaks, lunges, is thrown back, and goes to the console. He tries the modern city motto first, FOR_EVERYONE, and the terminal denies it — too late, too evolved, a hundred years past what Agnes would have written at the beginning. He enters FOR_ALL instead. Every weather wall station in Zootopia drops into emergency lockdown, frozen and inaccessible rather than destroyed, and the displays report a temporary shutdown requiring a manual reset with root access revoked. Pawbert, still crying, tells Icener that no code will work now — not Icener's, not his, not anyone's — and that the city survives. Icener throws him across the chamber, beats him, and raises his pistol to execute him. The door explodes inward.

Reacher leads the breach with Nick and Judy behind him. Nick drops one of the bears holding Luther and Judy kills the other, and Luther wrenches free, takes a dead bear's pistol and goes after Icener, who is already dragging Pawbert into a maintenance tunnel. Reacher's team clears the rest of the chamber, then fans out through the branching passages while Nick and Judy follow a blood trail south. Luther runs Icener to a dead end where the polar bear is holding Pawbert as a shield. Pawbert lunges for the gun paw, claws first and then teeth, and the shot goes wild, which buys Luther the second he needs to put his first round through Icener's shoulder. Icener tackles him and the pistol skids away into the dark. What follows costs both of them: Icener gets a paw around Luther's throat and lifts him off the ground, Pawbert goes at the polar bear's back a second time, and Luther rips the combat knife off Icener's own vest and drives it into the wrist at his throat. When the knife finally slips from his grip, Pawbert crawls to where the pistol landed and kicks it back to him. Luther then takes Icener apart shot by shot, knee and shoulder and knee, reciting the bill as he goes: Shaw dead, thousands of civilians dead, his home invaded, his family taken. Icener asks what he failed to understand, and Luther tells him it was family, then names what he is protecting: "My pack. MINE." He fires.

Luther drops the pistol and collapses, and Pawbert goes down under his weight trying to catch him. Nick and Judy arrive on the sound of the shots. Luther surfaces long enough to ask whether he got him, hears that he did, and closes his eyes. Nick finds him crashing, starts compressions on the tunnel floor and demands he stay. Judy calls their position off the junction markers and refuses the two-minute medical estimate. The episode ends with Nick still working, Pawbert holding Luther's paw, Judy shouting into the radio, and Icener's body cooling behind them.

Key Moments

• Drone overwatch captures Luther and Pawbert being dragged into the Reptile Ravine lighthouse, confirming The Root's location
• Bogo arrives on his cane and refuses to stay behind, declaring that Pawbert has earned the right to have them come for him
• Fru Fru commits twelve polar bears to the assault in her father's memory
• Judy demands main entry with Reacher's team, insisting Luther and Pawbert are pack
• Costa gives the order to engage — the largest police mobilization in Zootopia's history
• Koslov leads the polar bear charge on the eastern approach
• Nikolai is killed; the Precinct 3 tapir is killed; multiple officers wounded across every team
• Reacher's team and CTU breach the lighthouse; Nick and Judy fight through the interior
• Nick finds the shaft blasted through the lighthouse foundation, dropping two hundred feet into the tunnels
• Luther tells Pawbert to let him go, accepting death rather than let the codes fall to Icener
• Pawbert refuses to give Icener the codes, choosing principle over Luther's life
• Pawbert discovers Agnes's original inscription — BUILT BY TWO — etched into the console frame
• Pawbert enters the failsafe code FOR_ALL, dropping every weather wall into emergency shutdown and revoking root access
• Reacher, Nick, and Judy breach the underground control chamber
• Luther pursues Icener into the tunnels; Pawbert bites Icener's gun paw to buy Luther seconds
• Luther kills Icener after systematically disabling him, declaring his pack as his motivation
• Luther collapses and codes on the tunnel floor; Nick performs CPR while Pawbert holds his paw

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Mr. Big's Mansion — ZSI command center; Costa, Garcia, and O'Brian coordinate from the grand study
• Forward staging ground — Parking structure south of Tundratown; Bogo's mobile command
• Reptile Ravine — Outer perimeter (Nine-Nine containment), east approach, west approach, main entry
• Reptile Ravine Lighthouse — Icener's final stronghold; breached by main entry team
• The Root — Agnes De'Snake's control hub beneath the lighthouse; century-old chamber with the master console
• Tunnel network — Ancient passages beneath the lighthouse; dead end where Icener is killed

Items

• The Root — Agnes De'Snake's control hub beneath the lighthouse; the master system for every weather wall in Zootopia
• Console inscription: BUILT BY TWO — Agnes's original founding words etched into the console frame; the rest faded by a century underground
• Failsafe code: FOR_ALL — The ending of Agnes's founding inscription; drops every weather wall into a temporary shutdown requiring a manual reset, and revokes root access permanently
• Icener's combat knife — Pulled from his tactical vest by Luther during close-quarters combat; driven into Icener's wrist
• Luther's recovered pistol — Taken from a dead polar bear in the control chamber, lost in the fight, and kicked back to him by Pawbert; used to kill Icener
• Bogo's cane — First appearance on page, following the injury that ended his field career

End Credit Song

"Ne me quitte pas" (From 'Sans Attendre'), Céline Dion

The song is a plea to someone already leaving: don't leave me. It is the first non-English cue the series has used, and it scores one thing only. Luther kills Icener, asks whether he got him, and goes down on the tunnel floor. Nick works compressions in Luther's blood, Judy shouts coordinates into a radio and is promised a medical team in two minutes she says they do not have, and Pawbert holds a paw and begs. The series has a standing reason not to put music over a cliffhanger, which is that the tension should carry forward unbroken. This cue does not release it. Céline Dion sings the plea Pawbert is already making, and the credits become the rest of the vigil.

Notes

• The console inscription "BUILT BY TWO... FOR ALL" reveals Agnes's original vision: weather walls built by two species, for all mammals. The failsafe code is the phrase that closes her founding inscription, preserved because Ebenezer never bothered to replace the text in a chamber only he and Agnes knew about.
• Every tactical crossover team from the entire series participates in the final assault, making it a culmination of all alliances built across five seasons: Reacher's team, CTU, the BAU, Precinct 7, the Nine-Nine, Station 118, and Athena from ZPD special assignment.
• Judy's line "This cave is not a natural formation" is a Halo easter egg, quoting Cortana's observation upon discovering Forerunner structures in Halo: Combat Evolved.
• Jake's somber delivery of "Welcome to the party, pal" — a Die Hard reference — is played without comedy, marking how far the stakes have pushed even the Nine-Nine's most irrepressible member.
• Bauer's CTU operatives in the BearCat are named after characters from other procedural franchises: "Ryan" is a nod to Jack Ryan, "Gibbs," "DiNozzo," "McGee," and "David" are from NCIS, and "Bell" and "Zidan" are from FBI.
• The ZPD officers Morgan commands during the western approach — Deacon, Luca, and Street — are named after characters from S.W.A.T., the series Shemar Moore (Morgan's real-world actor on Criminal Minds) moved to after departing that show.
• The three BearCats leading the main entry assault mark the most prominent appearance of the vehicle in the series, following "Extraction" and "Licence to Claw". The real-world Lenco BearCat is a standard law enforcement armored vehicle; in a world of bears and cats, the name was a natural fit.
• Luther's relentless pursuit of Icener and Pawbert through the tunnel maze beneath the lighthouse is a homage to Pawbert's hedge maze scene in Zootopia 2, which itself referenced The Shining. In the film, Pawbert walks through a hedge maze with a limp and a "Kubrick stare" in direct homage to Jack Torrance stalking Danny through a snowy maze, with both characters even wearing green sweaters. Here, the homage is inverted: Luther stalks through an underground maze with the same predatory intensity captured in the extended tracking shot, but as the hero rather than the villain.