Underpants On The Outside

Last season, I got into 24 quite a bit. Most people I know say it’s the best show on television, and I have to admit, I see their point. I’m mostly impressed by how much Jack Bauer manages to squeeze into a day. To illustrate, I’m going to compare each hour of Jack’s day to the corresponding hour in my own day.

Nine PM sharp, I sat down on the couch, pencil and notebook ready. Unlike last week, I was sober, awake and prepared for The Jack Bauer Power Hour (as it’s known around Apartment 4). So naturally, Jack was hardly in the episode at all.

Jack’s day, 4-5 PM: When we first see Jack, he’s in the car, on the way to “Omnicron”, the company that manufactured the nerve gas. Apparently, the CEO or something is the guy who recruited Jack to CTU. Things turned sour when Jack led an internal investigation that implicated the guy. The CEO was never convicted, but he lost his job at CTU. We find all this out because Audrey gets Jack in an impromptu game of Twenty Questions, never noticing that Jack is answering her in one word sentences because he’s busy trying to fight terrorism.  I understand that this conversation was for the sake of the audience, but it reminded me of about a million conversations I’ve had with girlfriends over the years: I’m talking to her, I’ve got something else going on, she’s asking me non-stop questions, and sooner or later I end up yelling about something ridiculous. Jack: showed remarkable restraint; Me:yelled at Audrey on the TV.

Chloe hacks her way into Omnicron’s security system to get Jack in the building, and it takes all of 5 minutes. On any given day Chloe does a dozen or so things that all tie for 2nd Most Impressive Feats of Hacking I’ve Ever Seen. (Nothing will top Hugh Jackman hacking into the Department of Defense in sixty seconds while getting a BJ in “Swordfish”.) Just once I’d like there to be a scene where someone goes to ask Chloe a question just as she kicks her computer and yells, “God damn it! I hate Minesweeper!” I imagine that every successful act of terrorism could be linked to a day that Chloe was out sick.Jack goes to the CEO’s office, but there’s a secretary that must be dealt with. Jack goes into the hall, calls Audrey, and tells her to “lose the secretary”. Audrey accomplishes this by calling the secretary and improvising some nonsense about “coming down to accounting to look at some invoices.” I don’t know why Jack didn’t go with the ol’ favorite of torture/concussion. At the very least he could have asked Audrey to hack the secretary’s brain using only a Game Boy.

The secretary leaves, and Jack enters the CEO’s office, gun drawn, only to get stun-gunned in the neck. Does Jack always get this much abuse over the course of 24 hours? It seems like a lot, especially seeing as that things are bound to get more perilous in the second half of the day. Then the camera pans up to show the CEO, played by Peter Weller, as thousands of dudes across the country simultaneously ask, “Is that Robocop?” The Robocop sighting distracted us, so it took a good ten minutes before any of us started wondering why Robocop was standing behind his door with a stun gun. Keep in mind: the last thing his secretary said to him was “I have to go down to accounting.” I can’t think of a single way she could get through an average work day without being stunned at least seven or eight times.

Robocop wakes Jack up with some smelling salts. At gun point, Jack tells him about the nerve gas threat, and that the gas came from Omnicron. Robocop swears he had nothing to do with it. Of course not, that would violate all three of his Prime Directives! (Let’s count Robocop references; I’d like to get at least three in.) To get Jack to trust him, Robocop returns Jack’s gun to him, and says he’ll help Jack.

They head to a “bunker” on “the campus”, where the gas was produced. I don’t care if Jack is always able to drive from San Diego to San Francisco in an hour and a half; it only took him fifteen, twenty minutes tops to get to this “campus”. I’d like to think that there are laws against manufacturing nerve gas so close to a major metropolitan city. If not, someone should probably get on that. Let’s start a petition or something.

In the bunker, Robocop looks up some personnel files on who made the gas, and all the top people have died mysterious deaths. For some reason, he looks up the data using the keyboard, rather than using a six inch spike that sticks out of his wrist and is bizarrely compatible with police mainframes. (Reference #2) Jack asks if the files can be prepared for uploading or datamining or something, and Robocop mumbles something about “talking to IT” as he leaves the room. Did I mention the bunker has thick steel doors that lock? Yeah. Jack gets locked in, and Robocop leaves a bomb in there with him.

This being an obvious cliffhanger, I figured that the show would cut off right there. Instead, Jack pulls up a floor tile to reveal a small access area, which he hides inside just before the bomb goes off. Not only do we see the bomb go off, we even see Jack climb his way out of the rubble. I thought this was pretty cool of the writers. At the same time, add Robocop to the never-ending roster of terrorists. Boooo.

For the hour:

• Kills: 0
• Knockouts: -1
• Explosions survived: 1
• Explosions caused: 0
• Robocop references (by me): a disappointing 2

Jeez, that’s not a very impressive list, but as I said, most of the episode was off-Jack and therefore irrelevant for the purposes of The Underpants. I do want to mention two non-Jack issues. First, Curtis simultaneously exacted his revenge and conducted a proper arrest when he relieved the Hobbit of his command and placed him in “holding”. Well done, Curtis. Second, the preview of next week’s episode showed Kim Bauer, played by the scrumptious Elisha Cuthbert. 24 fans everywhere groaned, but me, I’m looking forward to the new and improved Kim Bauer Power Hour When She Hopefully Takes A Shower.

My day, 4-5 PM: Same ol’, same ol’. Worked on some Excel charts, answered some phones. Left work at 4:55. Things will pick up next week, when Jack enters the post-work hours.

• Charts started: 1
• Charts completed: 0
• Messages taken: 3 (estimated)
• Times I checked my email: 472 (exact figure)