Underpants On The Outside

I’m a big fan of 24. Sure, the story is good [Ed note: not last year!], but I’m mostly impressed by how much Jack Bauer manages to squeeze into a day. To illustrate, I compare each hour of Jack’s day to the corresponding hour in my own day.

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these recaps, and there’s at least one of you (Tooth Fairy) who doesn’t watch the show at all, so just as a reminder, Jack and his crew of ne’er-do-wells have trapped the prime minister from fictional African-country-stereotype Sangala in a panic room in the embassy.  Jack and Tony are undercover, but ostensibly their hope is to deliver the prime minister to evil Colonel Unpronounceable, (whose name is actually quite pronounceable, but we never see him often enough for me to remember it.)  Colonel What’s-his-face also has the CIP device which allows him to hack into any part of the U.S. infrastructure.  The goal of all this is to keep the U.S. from interfering in the Sangalan civil war, though honestly, I think he’s setting his sights low.  If I was in his position, I’d at least challenge the city of Dallas to the biggest game of Red Light/Green Light ever.

Jack’s Day, Noon – 1PM: Son of a bitch motherfucker!  My DVR dropped the last episode due to eighteen straight hours of Inauguration coverage.  Not a great first impression, President Obama.  I’m going to HOPE you CHANGE your behavior and never make that happen again.  (Though I may be willing to make an exception in four years, depending on how things go.)

12:02: Counterfeit Bill sends a military task force to stop Jack’s crew, while Emerson kicks the crap out of a guard to try and gain access to the room. Clearly he’s never seen Panic Room, because he struggles with the idea that the door REALLY can’t be opened from the outside.  Still, this guy needs a nickname, and from his propensity towards punching as a means of venting frustration, combined with the British accent we have yet to hear, this guy is going to be Union Jack. That is an incredibly intellectual joke.

12:04:  Counterfeit Bill finds out that the FBI is going to be sued thanks to the torturrific methods of the Redhead.  He calls her for an explanation, and before she can finish he cuts her off: “So you tortured him.”  She tries to explain how Jack fooled her and how she’s determined to make this right, but Counterfeit doesn’t care.  I’m not even kidding, if you replace “tortured” with “fucked,” you have almost the exact conversation I had with my first girlfriend when she told me she had cheated on me.  Good times.

Also, from the Redhead’s insistence that she’s going to fix this, you can bet the mortgage that she is going to fuck things up much worse.

12:06:  Jack’s team cuts the power, so the prime minister can’t call out.  They want him to give up info on his freedom fighters back in Sangala.  We discover that his biggest concern is that they capture his wife: he’s willing to be tortured himself, but if they torture her, he’ll break like a wet paper bag.  It’s a really shitty situation, if you think about it. If they torture his wife and he tells them what they want, odds are he’ll be killed anyway, and he’s sold out your countrymen and principles.  If he doesn’t give up the info, his wife gets tortured, and probably dies with a very low opinion of her marriage to him.  What might be the worst possible outcome is for him to decide that he won’t break no matter what they do to his wife, and then after an hour or two of some good torturing, Jack Bauer comes in and saves her.  There’s no way that wouldn’t come up in every argument they would ever have.  In fact, they wouldn’t have arguments anymore, because argument implies that he has a chance of winning.

12:07:  Union Jack threatens to kill a guard unless the prime minister comes out.  There’s absolutely no way this should work – in that situation, dying is that guy’s job.  Yet the prime minister seems to be in turmoil.  No one with a panic room should have this much concern for others. If Jack could just find a cute kitten to threaten, the prime minister would surely surrender.

12:08:  Just before Union Jack goes through with it, the guard’s phone rings.  The caller ID says “FBI.”  This may seem preposterous to some (like me), but now when the guard doesn’t pick up they know he’s screening their call.  He must be with some other law enforcement agency – that bastard!

12:09:   The Jacks know they don’t have a lot of time before the FBI shoes up.  Original Jack says that they have 15 minutes, because the FBI is 21 miles away, with traffic. Everyone accepts this, even though the feds would have to travel 80 mph, IN TRAFFIC. For the first time ever, Jack has mathematically exposed the fraud behind space-time in 24.

12:10:   It would appear Jack HAS seen Panic Room.  He finds the ventilation system, and proposes smoking them out with ammonium dystrate gas (?) made from household products.  Tony points out that might kill the prime minister and his wife.  Tony shares my concern that Jack forgot they’re undercover.

12:15:  Jack gets to work.  A henchman points out that the FBI could be there any minute.  Someone get this guy a watch – they’re still ten minutes away!

12:16:  Jack’s death gas starts going to work.  Union Jack tells the prime minister that they’ll die if they don’t come out.  They start coughing, to let the viewers at home know that this is true.

12:18: The redhead arrives.  What’s the opposite of saving the day?  Whatever it is, she’s about to do that.

12:20:  The prime minister and his wife tell each other that they love each other, just as they’re about to die.  Wait… he doesn’t want to see his wife tortured… but he’s willing to let her die of strangulation? The PM has very weird priorities.  Doesn’t matter, though, because his wife opens the door, saving them while betraying everything they stand for.  But hey, she apologizes afterwards. That’s two more kills that Jack DOESN’T have.

Then the Redhead calls in from the embassy.  She is told that SWAT is five minutes away, meaning Jack called it to a minute.  Then she gets captured, and Counterfeit Bill starts flailing about even worse than actual Bill did.  Union Jack is going to kill her, but Jack and Tony convince him to hang on to her for a while.  Then Jack gives her a pat down like she’s hidden very tiny guns along the insides of her thighs and the underside of her breasts.  The Redhead tells Jack not to touch her, and he fires back, “Shut up or I will shut you up.”  I can only imagine how uncomfortable Tony is.  They stick her in the truck with the prime minister, and pull out before SWAT can show up.

12:23  The Redhead can’t believe she trusted Jack. She calls him a lying son of a bitch.  Jack gets a cold look.  Remember when I said I could only imagine how uncomfortable Tony was?  I don’t need to imagine anymore – he looks like Mommy and Daddy are fighting and he wishes he could just go to his room…

12:33:  When Counterfeit hears that Redhead is kidnapped, he orders that every agency knows that retrieving her is the top priority.  Remember: the previous priorities were “Sangala” and “The United States.” That’s leadership.  I can’t imagine what he’s going to do when the Redhead inevitably humps Jack.  He’ll want to try and drown his troubles, but he looks like the type of guy who only drinks Amstel.

12:35: They kept the Redhead alive to find out how much the FBI knew, but Union Jack has a source in the FBI that tells him that there isn’t anything to worry about.   He decides to have her killed, and the van heads to an abandoned construction site to dump the body. Tony and Jack look like neither of them can figure out how this thing spun so far out of control.  I know that look.  Once I was in Egypt, and I tried to buy some weed.  (I was in a bad place, personally.)  Next thing I know, I’m in a car, driving god-only-knows-where in a foreign country with people I’ve never met to conduct a transaction that, if we were caught, could probably get my hand chopped off. That’s the look.

12:40-54: Counterfit Bill flips out.  Nothing else really happens.  Blessed, blessed nothing.  I mean, stuff happens, but nothing that interests me yet.  Hopefully they swing through a Burger King or something and Jack gets his blood sugar back to up to “deadly.”

12:55:  Union Jack sends Jack and Tony to kill the Redhead.  Apparently I’m not the only person annoyed that Jack hasn’t killed anyone.  Jack hauls the Redhead out of the van.  When she walks slowly, he tells her she can walk or he can drag her.  She asks him if he’s really going to kill her, and he says nothing.  She assures him that she isn’t going to beg for her life.  I just wonder if she’s going to pipe down anytime soon.

Nope. She calls him a traitor and a murderer.  He tells her to turn around, then over her shoulder he tells her to trust him if she wants to get through this alive.  Then from the van’s perspective, we see Jack shoot her and she collapses.  Jack wouldn’t be up to some kind of tomfoolery, would he???  He WOULD! From a different angle we see that only one side of her neck is bleeding, and Jack tosses her in a ditch, laying a plastic sheet over her.  Only Jack would regard shooting someone in the neck and then rolling their body in ditch “saving their life.”

Unfortunately Union Jack will be having none of this nonsense.  He tells Jack and Tony to bury her. If only Tony would say “Ruh-roh, Raggy!” in his best Scooby-Doo voice – that’d be hilarious.

12:59:  The Redhead pleads silently with her eyes from under the sheet, as Jack puts a shovelful of dirt on her face.  Moop moop.

For the hour:

• Kills: 0.  But he really came close that time.  None of them would have been people he wanted to kill, but it’s a start…
• Knockouts: 0. Though he almost knocked out an elderly man and his wife…
• Any kind of success: 0.  I mean… maybe you give him points for getting the prime minister out of the panic room, but I think he’d know they were pity points.

All I can say is that if Jack still manages to bang the Redhead (and I’ve got a lot of money riding on that outcome) it could be the single greatest achievement in fictional sexual history.

Zach’s Day, 12-1 PM: I’m afraid I have to speculate.  Where my previous jobs had plenty of downtime for me to record the minutiae of an hour, it’s hard when you work for the Magic Kingdom.  They know everything.

Still, it’s not too hard to imagine that we had lunch.  We are very well-known for our cafeteria, and it would be a lie for me to downplay how awesome it is.  The only problem as that it made a mockery of my recently-canceled WeightWatchers membership.

So for this lunch hour, I’ll make an educated guess.

For the hour:

• Animals: 2.  All of Noah’s arc has passed through the Magic Kingdom kitchens at some point.
• Vegetables: 3.  One of them was definitely beets.  I eat beets every single day.  I am old and boring.
• Desserts: 1.
• WeightWatchers points consumed: 17. For perspetive, my daily WeightWatchers budget was 26 points.

The diabolical food staff has even started leaving the leftover desserts near my desk. To paraphrase and slightly alter a Chris Rock bit: if desserts chase me… I can’t run that fast.