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. 

Jack’s day, 4 - 5 AM:  Jack just got the recording of the President’s treason safely back at CTU, so he finally has a chance to relax.  All he has to do is have a quick conference call with the Attorney General, and then he could head home.  (two hours early, no less!)  There is absolutely nothing that could possibly go wrong.

If you had asked me at the beginning of the episode how I thought the episode might end, I probably would have given you the following odds:

Jack torturing/killing Robocop: 3-1
Jack torturing/killing the President: 5-2
Jack hijacking another plane: 20-1
Jack saying “I’m sorry” without following it with “but…” and a gunshot: 100-1
Jack heading towards a hijacked Russian submarine:  What???

Before his conference, Jack hands the recording to Chloe so she can datamine it or something.  Chloe is lucky she doesn’t work for my company, or Jack would have asked her to put it in a Powerpoint presentation with some Flash animation.

The problem is that there is a weasely CTU operative who figures he can kiss ass and get a promotion by destroying the recording.  He comes into the room while Chloe is adding some nice background music to the recording, talks to her briefly, and leaves.   As far as I can tell, nothing really happened.  I’m confused.

Right before the meeting, Chloe plays the recording, and it’s blank.  Jack starts yelling at Chloe.  Chloe’s life flashes in front of her eyes (in Divx format.)

When Jack realizes it was the Weasel, he goes to “talk” to him.   A security guard tries to stop him, and gets punched in the solar plexus.  I personally think that’s a dick move on Jack’s part.  Then he grabs the weasel by the throat, but when the Weasel says he’s been transferred to the White House, Jack lets him go.  What??? Do you know what Jack had to go through to get that thing???  He had to kill a bunch of people and hijack a plane.  Plus, he was punched in the throat and his (awful) girlfriend was stabbed.  But while the Weasel is straightening his tie, a well-intentioned security guard is lying on the ground sucking wind.  Can someone get Jack a cup of coffee? He is losing perspective. (He takes it black, two sugars, and judging by his recent behavior, God help you if you get that wrong.)

BTW, the Buzzkill is cruising around CTU like the only thing she’s got wrong with her is mussed hair.  Them brachial artery stabbings heal faster than hangnails, and definitely faster than a punch to the solar plexus.

Jack’s face is a torrent of emotion.  Clearly, this feeling of failure is unfamiliar to him, despite the fact that every so often he has one of those days where nothing goes right for what feels like twenty-three hours.  I believe Jack has some obvious and crippling father issues, and he is in the midst of a flashback of the time he didn’t know the answer to Final Jeopardy and his father punched him in the solar plexus.
But there’s no time for therapy; Jack finds out that one of the terrorists he captured earlier escaped.  Four AM is officially amateur hour at CTU.  This is the guy who tried to sabotage the natural gas plant like seven or eight generations of terrorists ago.  What the hell is going on? 

This new-old terrorist kinda looks like Sting, and even though he was in custody ten minutes ago, he already has a nefarious plan of terror and mayhem.  It doesn’t need to be said that he’ll be able to adequately prepare it… oh yeah…within the hour.

Well, if Jack’s going to find him in time, he’s going to need help from Robocop, who was working with Sting earlier today.  Come to think of it, Robocop has had an awfully busy day today too. 

CTU management wants to give a deal to Robocop.  Jack is disgusted, but he agrees.  He and Robocop engage in a seriously intense stare-down.  Me and my brother always settle these kind of issues with healthy rounds of rock-paper-scissors, but that might be due to our lack of weapons training.

For the first time, Jack hears that there might be someone even higher than the President pulling the string.  Robocop doesn’t exactly call them “the Bluetooth consortium”, but we know who he’s talking about.  Jack looks flabbergasted.  Wait till you see these guys, Jack.  Their secret headquarters looks like the inside of an airport bar.

Jack wants Sting’s head on a plate.  Is Jack getting Biblical?  That’s the spirit.  (HAH!)

They think they’ve located a guy who can lead them to Sting.   But they need to get to him in person, because his computer is protected by a “Phoenix shield”.  As much as I like it because it sounds like a Magic spell, we are talking some serious mumbo-jumbo.  I hope somewhere, thousands of Microsoft tech support employees are on the phone trying to explain that they have no idea what a phoenix shield is.  And while we’re on the subject, how did the Weasel erase the recording?  He didn’t even do anything; he just stood by the recording for a while.  The least they could have done is tell me he used a pocket sized electromagnet, even though a) those things take a little while to whip up, and b) I’d like to imagine that Chloe can detect electromagnetic fields by smell.   C’mon, guys, give me something.

On the way to the guy’s house, Jack threatens Robocop like eight times, but it really loses its punch after the first few.  Remember, wherever we are, we’re ending up on a Russian submarine.  Take a second and TRY to figure out how that’s possible.  When your nose starts bleeding, remember to tilt your head back.

When they get to the guy’s house, Robocop tells the guy that CTU is waiting outside.  Then he tells the guy that he needs to put his files on a disk and destroy the hard drive.  Well, that’s what he means; what he says is a bunch of nonsense about crashing files and burning caches and flip-flopping the jibber jabber.  It would have been better if he had just run in and said “Alt-F4, now!”  So much for that phoenix shield.

Jack and Curtis hear Robocop selling them out, so they bust into the joint.  Curtis gets shot in the shoulder, grimaces like it’s a Charlie-horse.  Robocop tells Jack he was tricking the guy into decrypting his files, and Jack screwed it up.   Ever since they let Robocop out of holding, he’s been running the show, and Jack has been nothing but a torrent of empty death threats.   

Still, Chloe is able to get some information out of the files, and they are specs on a Russian sub, docked in Los Angeles because, y’know… that makes it really convenient.  Sting apparently has one canister of nerve gas left, which he’s going to use on the sub so he can then use the sub’s weaponry to blow up… something.  If they said what his target was, we missed it because we kept rewinding and asking ourselves “what the hell is going on?”

So Jack calls the commanding officer of the sub and warns him.  The officer then opens the outside hatch to take a look around, but Sting and some sidekicks are waiting, and they shoot him.  As they drop the nerve gas into the sub and kill its crew, I wonder “how long were they standing there?”   I know they didn’t have a long time to plan this, but as far as I can tell, their plan required someone to open the hatch from the inside.  That’s really not such a good plan.

When the hour comes to a close, Jack is on a helicopter heading towards the sub, and Sting is on the bridge.

For the hour:

• Kills: 0
• KO’s: 0
• Strangleholds: .5 (it looked really weak)
• Solar Plexus punches: 1 (but it’s nothing Jack should be proud of)

What a disappointing Jack hour.  I get the sneaking suspicion the writers forgot the show was called 24, not 21.  When they realized they were three episodes short, they took next season’s plot (“Terrorist steals a Russian sub”), tacked it on the end, and told some poor writing intern to “make it work.”
 
My day 4 - 5 AM: Tossed and turned.  How am I supposed to sleep soundly when the nation’s security is in the hands of a man who is so obviously losing his A-game???

For the hour:

• Times I got up to pee: 1