Underpants On The Outside

WAIT, THERE’S MORE!  LAST NIGHT WAS THE TWO-HOUR SEASON FINALE!

Jack’s day, 6-7 AM:

Let’s hear it for the last hour!  Except for the fact that I’m am exhausted!

So the President is about to leave in a chopper after being delayed by the First Ho.  Meanwhile, Jack cooks up some fake ID and lures one of the pilots out of the chopper, where Jack puts him in a sleeper hold and takes a flight suit and helmet.  Even though it’s 6:05 AM and pitch-black, Jack lowers the sun-visor on his helmet.   Y’know… so he’ll look inconspicuous.  It doesn’t compare to the hoodie/CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY, but Jack is the type of guy who makes do with what he has at hand.  Mary starts singing “I wear my sun…glasses at night” and I crack up.  Good to see she’s over her fear of Jack, who looks ridiculous in that get-up.

Once the President is onboard and they’re in the air, Jack pulls a gun on the other pilot and tells him “I can fly this myself, so you have two options, do what I say and live, or die for nothing.”  I don’t think Jack knows how to fly a helicopter, but I also don’t doubt that he could put his PDA on the dash and it would fly the thing for him.

Jack then goes back to the President, stun guns two secret service agents, handcuffs the President and tells the pilot to fly them to a nearby industrial complex.   As soon as they land, Jack stuns the other pilot.  Jack knows twenty ways to kill a man, but apparently he only knows three ways to incapacitate one.

Jack takes the President to a factory (abandoned, natch) and handcuffs the President to a pole.  He has ten minutes before secret service gets there.  It’s 6:14.  It’s 6:18 when we come back from commercial break.  Jack has wasted four minutes of interrogation time, but he set up a webcam.  The President is about to either confess or masturbate; I don’t know what kind of site Jack is running.

On camera, Jack tells the President that he will confess or Jack will kill him.   I don’t know if Jack understands how confessions are entered into evidence.  Jack tells the President about how he had to fake his own death and that it ruined his relationship with his daughter.  In other words, Jack has NOTHING TO LOSE.   Yak yak yak… look, the rest of the episode gets kinda lame.  I’m just going to sum it up.

The secret service arrests Jack, and it looks like the President is going to get away with it.  Except Jack planted a listening device on him that catches him admitting everything!  Brilliant!  Good thing for Jack the president hasn’t seen a movie in ten years; otherwise, he might have figured out what was going on. 

The ending was a bit anti-climactic, with Jack and Audrey reuniting outside the factory now that Jack has been cleared of any wrongdoing.  I’m a little pissed because it’s clear we’re never going to find out who the Bluetooth consortium is, but then we noticed that there were ten minutes left in the episode.  Right then, an Asian federal agent told Jack that there was a phone call from his daughter inside the factory. 

If it seems odd that I mention the agent’s ethnicity, it’s because it revealed absolutely everything.  During last season, Jack had to break into the Chinese embassy (for the good of the country, duh).  During the break-in, a Chinese diplomat was killed; not by Jack, but the Chinese blame him.  This was part of the reason why Jack had to fake his death and go into hiding.  Well, all throughout this season, people have been wondering “what about the Chinese?” and as soon as we saw the Asian agent, we knew something was about to go down.  See, in the world of 24, Americans are either white, black or Latino.  Everyone else is ethnic for a reason.

Sure enough, when Jack goes into the factory, he his drugged and kidnapped.  When we last see him, he has been beaten within an inch of his life, and is face to face with the Chinese ambassador on a boat in the middle of the ocean.  Obviously, they stepped away from that whole “real-time” gimmick at the end. 

For Jack’s last hour in the day:

• Kills:0
• KO’s: 4
• Presidencies ruined: 1
• Beatings: -1
• Kidnappings: -1
• Ho’s pimped: 0

While being kidnapped probably sucks no matter what kind of day you’ve had, it’s gotta suck for Jack just a bit more. 

My day, 6 – 7 AM:  Like I said, I didn’t sleep great.  While I was awake, I thought about next season of 24.  It’s obviously going to deal heavily with the Chinese, and I have mixed feelings about that.  I estimate that over the course of 24 hours there will be 18,000 hilarious but racially insensitive jokes, but I won’t be able to print them here because as much as I love saying the most inappropriate thing possible, that can turn awfully ugly fast on this internet thingamajig. 

I just know there’s going to be one episode where Jack is involved in a high-speed car chase with an Asian female, and five minutes from the end my head is going to explode.