It might be an overstatement to say that this whole storyline has been an excuse to get to this scene, but this was what I started with when I decided to take all the narrative bits and pieces I hadn't found a place for yet and try to fit them into a single story. Hence the title, "Foreign Correspondence," actually: trying to find correspondence among all these foreign plot elements...
Mr. Crossley, though, he first got mentioned near the beginning of "Cradle to Grave," our seventeenth storyline. So he's been around awhile.
Twenty-Seven - Foreign Correspondence