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24 Blog 9.12: I Love You Goodbye/People Who Died

24 9 12-1

Okay seriously, remind me to stop trying to anticipate the events of next week’s episode. I’m almost always wrong – they always play it more conservatively than I hope they will. I couldn’t help it, though: I was so excited about the idea of Audrey being a Doll that I let it cloud my judgment. Of course they’re not going to do that; the network has already played that card on another show. If they did it twice, they’d be a laughingstock. I see that now. Mistakes were made.

Either way, though, I knew that Audrey was going to die before the final clock ticked, and sure enough, she did, at the hands of the pesky, unaccounted-for second shooter. If memory serves, that is the first silent clock tick since Bill Buchanan. Even when the show went off the air in 2010, with Jack going off the grid and the show’s future uncertain, Jack’s exit didn’t merit a silent clock tick, something they wisely remedied here as he’s being transported by helicopter to some place where the inmates pray to a god that the Russians don’t believe in to be transferred to someplace less hellish. Like a Slovakian hostel.

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24 Blog 9.9: Catch Me Now I’m Falling

24 9 9-1

This is not hyperbole, though it might be forgetfulness: this might be Jack Bauer’s finest hour.

He saved Big Dick Heller by using a trick from the playbook of the 1994 movie “Speed,” which is to hack the camera feed and create a continuous loop that the terrorist won’t notice (until they do). Then he landed a helicopter on Mommie Dearest’s building, because stealth (which is to say, everyone in the building should have heard this coming). Then he rappelled down the building and worked his way into their fortress through the window.

That setup makes me want to write one of those click whore-type tag lines now. You know, the one that doesn’t tell you what happens next, but makes sure you know that you absolutely need to click on this link right now, dude! (You see these on Facebook 100 times a day.) I’m new at this, so here goes:

“This soldier is one step away from death. What happens next is amazing.”

How did I do? Don’t answer that, it’s a trick question: those tag lines all suck.

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24 Blog 9.7: Bombs Away

24 9 7-2

Tonight’s episode of “24” made up for the last couple of weeks in terms of Bullz-Eye’s “24” drinking game, which revolves around three lines of dialogue: “Dammit,” “We’re running out of time,” and “Put down / Lower your weapon.” (Yes, there are other, more in-depth drinking games for this show out there on the web, but Jesus, it’s Monday night, people.) By our count, there were at least three “Dammits” and one “We’re running out of time,” the latter of which is making its season debut, if I’m not mistaken. Either way, the show gave me a bit of a workout, as it were, so what follows might be a bit more incoherent than in previous weeks.

I’ll pause while you come up with your own joke here.

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24 Blog 9.3: The Angry Mob

24 9 3-1

“We are the angry mob, we read the papers every day / We like who we like, we hate who we hate, but we’re also easily swayed.”

Well, you’re a mob, so by definition, you’re prone to outrage and righteous indignation. As an added bonus, not having all of the facts makes it easier for your collective conscience to rationalize your behavior. “So tonight, you’ll sleep softly in your beds…”

The Kaiser Chiefs – writers of the above lyrics, and this week’s blog title – never really established more than a cult following here in the States – and that makes sense, given their overt “Britishness,” for lack of a better word – but damn, do I love those guys. And their new record, the politically charged Education, Education, Education and War, is their best in ages. All right, Shameless Plug of the Week ends here.

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24 Blog: 9.1/9.2 – Good Morning Britain

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Aaaaaaaaand we’re back! First, I’d like to thank Fox for giving me a four-year vacation from blogging “24.” It was much needed, long overdue, and I enjoyed every minute of it, but I am refreshed and ready for duty, sir. So, what are we doing this year?

Ah, of course: we’re doing the same damn thing, only in London.

To be fair, the setup for this season isn’t awful; it’s just not any different than any other season. Jack Bauer, a wanted man in three countries, is still carrying out his duties as a counter-terrorist agent, despite the fact that his own countrymen consider him a terrorist. They’ve done this before, you may remember, when he began a season undercover as an employee for a Mexican drug cartel. Wasn’t that adorable? At least this premise makes more sense. Jack has always fought to protect the best interests of the United States; he just didn’t have much of a filter when it came to interrogating anyone he considered an enemy of the state. Foreign, domestic, whatever. If you mess with the USA, you will answer to me.

And who is the president now? Why, none other than Big Dick Heller! This is a contrived move but a savvy one as well. He’s a much-loved supporting character by “24” fans, and as an added bonus, Jack’s involvement with Big Dick’s daughter Audrey led to her abduction and subsequent torture at the hands of the Chinese government. Audrey is now married to Big Dick’s chief of staff Mark Boudreau (official “24” nickname: Hercules, because yes, he was the voice of Hercules in the 1997 Disney movie), and he doesn’t want Jack’s name even mentioned in front of Audrey, for fear it will cause her to relapse into the catatonic state that she was in when we last saw her. But that’s all busy plot stuff. What is really happening here?

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“They said, ‘Hey, you’re blonde, awesome, when can you start?’ Easiest, audition, ever. Wait, is there a catch?”

Someone’s plotting to kill Big Dick on foreign soil, and they just did a test run on the murder weapon (a US drone, which is as heavy-handed as irony gets) by hijacking a drone pilot’s memory key and setting him up for the fall. Off-the-grid Jack intercepted intel that mentioned an assassination attempt on Big Dick, which is why he allowed himself to get caught by the CIA so he can break out Chloe, who’s gone all Wikileaks since we last saw her, and was being held in the CIA equivalent of Zed’s basement, only with torture instead of rape.

This might sound loyal or even romantic, but really, he broke her out because the person responsible for the drone strike is one of her now-former coworkers, who thankfully doesn’t live to the end credits of the second hour, for a couple of reasons. The guy is rightly paranoid about being afraid for his life since dead men collect no cash, yet he doesn’t suspect that the undersexed Russian Barbie doll he calls a girlfriend might be in fact an English assassin employed to kill him (hell, he didn’t even notice that she was wearing a wig). That needed to happen. Thank you, Fox. We may curse your name later but for now, we thank you. And bonus points for having her twist the knife in his head. That was a nice extra dose of nastiness.

Each blog post is based on a song title, and this week’s title comes courtesy of my lovely wife, after I complained that all of the songs with “London” in the title didn’t quite fit (I’m going to save those for later, with the hope that they might work out). The funny thing is that this song was co-written by Roddy Frame, who’s Scottish, but he has Mick Jones, a member of UK rock royalty, joining him, so it’s all good.

  

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