Underpants On The Outside

I’m a big fan of 24. Sure, the story is good, but 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, 1-2 PM: Jack’s in a chopper, but since they don’t know where the kidnapped CTU tech is, I have to imagine they’re just sort of tooling around.  This would be a good time for Jack to see all of the parts of L.A. that aren’t abandoned oil derricks, warehouses and sparsely used freeways.  Y’know…the real parts. 

Chloe calls up because she’s worried about the kidnapped guy, who used to be her husband.  Then she asks Jack, “What are they going to do to him?” which is probably the stupidest question Jack has heard in a long time.  Torture him. Duh.  Off camera, Jack asks Chloe how she manages to get work done with her head so far up her ass.  When he starts speculating about installing a laptop in her colon, she doesn’t want to ask if he’s kidding.  She puts Buchanan on the phone.

Buchanan tells Jack that his brother died, probably as a result of the interrogation.  The concern that passes over Jack’s face looks to be on par with those times when I wonder if I remembered to start the dishwasher when I left the house.  Then Jack acts in a decidedly non-Jack fashion, when he asks Buchanan to break the news to Jack’s ex and his illegitimate child.  Bad form, Jack.   It’s like you’ve forgotten who you are.  Your children may be illegitimate, but your kills aren’t.  Be proud of them. 

1:04: Thanks to CTU wizardry, Jack locates the car with the tech in it, driving unimpeded on “Los Angeles’s” city streets and freeways, but they lose him by stopping under an interchange and stealing a new car.  Jack gets unduly frustrated by the CTU Satellite’s inability to see through concrete, yelling “Damn it, Milo!” (one of the new attractive techs.)  Mary proposes a drinking game based on the times Jack yells “Damn it, —-!”  I decline, because I want to live. 

The pilot gets Jack on the ground, minutes too late to catch the bad guys (see: Hours of Incompetence) but just in time to meet up with a tac-team.   Of all of Jack’s compulsions, meeting up with tac-teams may be his most pervasive.  He leaves them scattered around L.A. the way I try and leave pens in every room in my apartment.  In a given season of 24 he’ll meet up with more tac-teams than bad guys.  That being said, I can’t imagine it’s a good thing for a tac-team to draw Bauer duty.  Each episode, the writers have to come up with a reason for Jack to leave a tac-team and a reason for him to need a new one.  He always needs a new one for one of two reasons: imminent danger, or he needs a ride.  One is life threatening, the other is demeaning because you have four combat-trained men chauffering a guy, with three of them squished in the back seat because Bauer always rides shotgun.   And while Jack may have had to leave his most recent tac-team because there was no room in the chopper, more often than not he leaves them because they’re dead.  Let’s see how this team does.

(One more thing: I think I’m going to start telling people I’ve appeared in an episode of 24 as a member of a tac-team.  Let’s see them prove me wrong.)

1:10 – 1:30: Some convoluted shit happens by which Jack figures out the address where the terrorists are hiding with the kidnapped tech.  They need him to reprogram the nukes, and to convince him…THEY PUT A HOLE IN HIS SHOULDER WITH A POWER DRILL.  Yee-owch.  The thing is, the guy has only Jack to blame.  As you’ll recall, these same terrorists tortured Jack back in hour one, and stabbed him in the shoulder with a knife.  Then he tore the throat out of one of them with his teeth and escaped.  Now they think they have to up the ante, and let me be clear, they used a drill bit so big I can’t even think of a household application for it.   He finally agrees to help them, and I can’t really fault him for that.

Now Jack is parked outside the building, but they don’t know which apartment the terrorists are in, so Jack triggers the fire alarm and monitors via satellite to see which apartment doesn’t empty.  Clever bastard.   He and the tac-team head up, and Jack’s got himself a mighty big shotgun for this little operation.   If those terrorists happen to have a grizzly bear on their side, Jack’s got it covered.

Boom boom boom, Jack’s got two kills.  The head terrorist escaped, but they found the tech.  Thank god, everythings oka-

“Mr. Bauer, you need to see this.”  Uh oh.  There’s one of those silver-grey suitcases.  Two things worry me about it.  One, it’s huge.  Two, there is no sexy model in a cocktail dress standing by waiting to open it.  I’d take the deal, Jack. 

No Deal for Jack, and he opens the case.  Roommate Kat asks, “Is he qualified to do this?”  She’s got a point, but me and Mary still scold her for asking any question about Jack that begins with the words “Is he qualified”.  The answer is yes.  Let him do your taxes, set up your wi-fi, whatever.  He’s qualified.

And yeah, it’s a nuclear bomb.  I know I just said he’s qualified, but…he knows you can’t interrogate these things, right?  There’s no room for error; it’s not like we’re still in Valencia.

1:50:  “CTU, this is Bauer.  We have a problem.”  Buchanan pisses himself.

On the front of the bomb is a threaded bolt, being turned by a motor.  As the bolt turns, the threads are moving two metal plates towards each other, and as Chloe explains, when the plates touch they will close the circuit that detonates the bomb.   Ah, the classic “Jack in the Box” trigger.  Dastardly clever; can’t imagine why the Russians lost the Cold War.  Why did we need a world class engineer to “reprogram” these?  I mean, it’s not like it’s some REALLY complicated piece of machinery, like a gramophone…

Normally, this problem could be easily solved by inserting a piece of insulation between the two plates, or removing them entirely.   But those clever terrorists hid the plates under…A CLEAR PLASTIC COVER!  How is Jack ever going to get out of this one???  Chloe tells him that there’s a block of dip switches, and if Jack flips numbers three and four, the case will open.  Okay, he could do that, or he could just slide the cover up and then it pulls right off.  Or at least, that’s how it works on my cell phone and every remote I’ve ever owned.  Or he could smash it with a rock. 

Uh-oh, Jack’s burn-scarred hand is shaking like crazy.  Something tells me CTU is going to have to crown a new Jenga champ this year.  Somehow he manages to steady it enough to flip switches three and four.  I think he silently threatened to cut it off.    Cut off his nose to spite his own face?  Are you kidding me?  Jack would subject it to levels of pain he can’t even describe.

Um…Chloe?  Nothing happened.  Whoops, apparently Chloe didn’t download the latest schematics.   She can rematrix the phone grid vectors and decrypt the bandwidth, but she somehow pulls up an outdated schematic of a clockwork bomb?  What’s next, she hasn’t installed Service Pack 2?  I’m starting to doubt my notes here. 

Turns out Jack was supposed to flip switches four and five.  Jack’s face says it all: You’re KILLING me here, Chloe.  And while Jack’s wrist deep in a game of Operation: Megaton edition, one of the tac-team agents radios in to tell him that they discovered the escape tunnel the terrorists took.  Little busy, agent No-Name.  What’s going on with CTU’s HR department?  I’m sure Jack realizes he didn’t follow the proper procedure when he fired Curtis; that’s no reason to saddle him with a bunch of new-hires and incompetents. 

1:56: In the nick of time, Jack hits the right switches, pops the plastic cover open and rips the metal plates apart.  Whew.  And now Jack can totally relax, because while the terrorists have more bombs, at least Jack has the engineer they need to reprogram them, right?  Right?  Oh, wait, the tech gave the terrorists a device that can do the reprogramming without him.

Jack (with his face TWISTED in rage):  “You gave them something that WORKED???”  and as he storms out, you can practically hear him muttering “you gotta be fucking kidding me!”  He’s heading back to CTU, and I suspect he’s got a .38 full of pink slips.

For the hour:

• Kills: 2
• Nuclear bombs disarmed: 1
• Complicated nuclear bombs disarmed: 0
• Tac-Teams Left: 1
• Tac-Teams Met: 1
• Incompetence: drowning in a sea of it.

Jack’s betting .500.  In baseball he’d be a star, but in nuclear terrorism…let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks just yet.  We got three more bombs out there.

My Day, 1-2 PM: I worked on 24, dining on Italian food that at best could be called mediocre.  But I don’t care; I’m driven.  I’m getting caught up today, damn it.  Three episodes.  Someone fire up a pot of coffee. 

• For the hour:
  Gastrointestinal discomfort: Not yet, but give it a while.