This is getting ridiculous. Has President Buck Buck Brawwwwk ever said no to anyone’s idea? Besides his wife’s, that is?

First he lets Walt the Weasel talk him into shipping his wife off to the loony bin when she starts interfering with Walt’s misguided attempt at patriotism. Then he lets Mike Novick talk him into giving up the Russian president to a terrorist cell, a thread that will surely come back to haunt him. And now, he’s adopting Vice President Leland Palmer’s plan to declare martial freaking law in Los Angeles. Palmer’s not just a hawk: he’s a fucking velociraptor. Maybe Logan’s afraid that Palmer will eat him if he dares to stand up to him.

The rest of the episode took place inside the nerve gas-riddled CTU, and the gas is not content with this safe zone nonsense. It’s eating the sealing in those rooms, and they will all die, unless Samwise Gamgee gives himself up to disable a program on a computer in a contaminated zone. Doing so meant taking a security guard trapped in the safe zone with him, who had the best line when he found out how the whole thing happened: “So we’re all going to die because you were embarrassed?”

Note to self: if you can choose your cause of death, try to avoid syntox VX nerve gas. Nasty stuff, that. Samwise’s death scene was not pleasant. But in defense of Samwise, his death scene was much more realistic than Edgar’s.

Are Kim and Ponyboy gone for good? If so, that was the sorriest excuse for bringing Kim back to the show that I have ever seen. She comes back to get locked into a room for an hour and then leave? Lame. She tells Jack that she doesn’t blame him for all of the bad stuff that goes down when they’re together, but Kim, that’s exactly what you’re doing. She sounds brainwashed, and I’m disappointed that the writers did nothing with the whole Ponyboy-slept-with-his-patient angle. You think Jack wouldn’t have kicked his sorry ass all over the room? God, it was painful to watch how neutered Jack was. Oh, and Ponyboy, shave that ridiculous beard, stat. (There’s actually a reason for that facial hair. Go see these shots from that TV remake of “War of the Worlds,” you’ll see that Father Time has not been too kind to our Hitcher-happy friend. Did you know there was a video sequel of “The Hitcher” in 2003? And that it stars my beloved Kari Wuhrer? Sigh.)

Looks like Bill Buchanan is about to get the boot, again. This Karen Hayes from Homeland Security, who plans on gutting CTU like a fish, has bigger balls than Logan does. How soon before Jack goes rogue in order to Get The Job Done?

But back to the martial law thing. This is bound to blow up in Logan’s face. When you declare martial law before the public is aware of any known threat, you don’t look proactive; you look scared, and Velociraptor Palmer, if the musings of Marty and Mike are to be believed, is counting on that to ruin Logan and pave the way for his ascension to the Big Chair. The public is not going to cooperate with the clampdown – not only are they Americans, who were founded on the principle of revolution, but they’re Los Angeles residents; rioting is in their blood – and when the city of Los Angeles erupts in civil disobedience, Logan’s going to wish Marty had died along with the Suvarovs, just so he doesn’t have to hear her telling him “I told you so” for the next 40 years. Do you suppose that Leland Palmer is the phantom menace here, the other person in the President’s inner circle that is behind the day’s events? It’s as good a guess as any. I still like my Wayne Palmer angle, though.

Lastly, we send a sad farewell to Tony Almeida, who was about to kill Robocop, only to have Robocop kill him when Tony gave him a half-second window of opportunity. Tony’s dying thought surely must have been, “Man, Robocop moves pretty fast for a guy whose nervous system has supposedly shut down.”

Okay, one more last thought: Desmond, the possibly magical resident of “Lost,” has a great agent, landing him spots in two of the biggest shows on television. What next, a slot as a terminally ill patient on “House”? A three-episode arc on “Entourage”?