So Kim Bauer is coming back. Jack’s nurse basically announces this to the TV viewers when she tells him he can try an experimental cure if they can find a “genetically capable” match. You’d have thought I’d be distraught by Kim Bauer news but the truth is I’m kind of excited. I have a fresh optimism for 24 after this episode. Ordinarily any ep which doesn’t feature Jack as the lead…well, it’s kind of like that “Paolo lies” episode of Lost from a few years back. Yet tonight we had Tony Almeida running to his full potential. We had Jon Voight flexing his villainous muscles. Heck, we even had a suddenly competent Olivia (yes, the same Olivia who only last week was inspiring my friend Charles to email the 24 writers that “there's a difference between a villain and somebody so annoying they make the show worse”).
Midnight strikes with Voight rolling in to come face-to-face with my boy Larry Moss. To refer to the stand-off between Voight and Moss as simple mismatch is an understatement on par with simply calling Anchorman funnier than Don’t Mess With the Zohan. To Moss’ credit, he manages to create a long enough diversion to allow Tony to slip into Starkwood undetected as the FBI retreats from the premises.
Jack links Tony up with Doug Knowles, last seen being verbally undressed two hours ago. Knowles stealths around with Tony but his key card won’t work. Back at the FBI, Agent Garaffalo – still on the show for some reason – needs more time to crack the code. Knowles decides to buy her time by showing himself to the approaching Starkwood security team, thus allowing Tony to again sneak into a Starkwood building undetected.
Inside, Tony receives word that he’s being tailed by eight men. He ducks into another warehouse-style room, waits for it, waits for it, waits for it and…suddenly morphs into Jack Bauer. In one fell motion, he jump kicks one bogey, strangles another and shoots the third. Wow. Even when Jack does that, I’m impressed. To see it from a guy who had a soul patch as of three years ago…I mean, banner work, Tony Almeida. I’d give that man a hug if I saw him on the street.
(and no, I don’t know where the other five Starkwood guys went. Remember: we give this show a leash. Work with me here)
Back in the general White House area, Olivia does her best to avoid winning a record sixth straight Sherry Palmer memorial “fast forward through all her scenes” award by actually helping the administration. Imagine that. Her reporter boyfriend has scoop on the WMD story and will run with it unless “Livvy” (really? That’s her nickname?) can convince him otherwise. She gives him the full story. He’s still not satisfied. He asks for a sexual favor. She obliges.
When they, um, finish up, he laughs at her and says he’s running the story anyway. Oh, but not so fast, slimy reporter man: Olivia has been recording their bedroom activity and threatens to release it if the WMD story ever runs. For the reporter, this would mean the end of his marriage. For Olivia, it would mean the end of her career. Apparently it doesn’t occur to him that Olivia would never, ever run that video and he obliges.
(by the way, through the magic of TiVO and a TV show that functions in real time we have an answer to the age old question “how long does blackmail sex with the president’s daughter take?” Your answer: 21 minutes, beginning to end)
Alas, the reporter’s error in judgment places only second-worst in the episode. Our grand prize winner is none other than Olivia’s mother, Alison. Congratulations, Ali! Sure, you’re the President of the United States, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ve taken a negotiations course. A little background on her victory:
Thanks to Tony (and his Sprint miracle phone that delivers pictures instantly instead of taking nine minutes for PIX messages the way mine does), the White House knows where the biological weapons are. Starkwood knows that the White House knows and counter-plans accordingly. With F-16s moving in on Starkwood HQ, Voight somehow sets up a proprietary phone line on which to chat with President Taylor and President Taylor alone.
That sets up the dialogue of the night: Random cabinet member: How did he set up a proprietary line? Tim (the guy who sounds like he’s from Brooklyn): We have no idea.
Perfect. Only way it could have been better would be if someone had asked “what’s a proprietary line?”
In another room Voight breaks it down: call off the F-16s or we launch these rockets at several cities along the Eastern seaboard. In a masterful scene, we see Voight flashing proof of the rockets’ existence, then turning the camera on himself in all his maniacal glory. He tells the president she has 30 seconds to call off the airstrike. When she calls it off, he tells her, he’ll come to the White House to discuss this in person. She does indeed decide to call off the strike, running back into the cabinet meeting insisting on an aborted mission sans any justification at all.
Now… I know it’s a lot easier to watch this situation in the third person than to have to make the decision yourself, but let’s think this through. You’ve said like 90 times this year that you won’t negotiate with terrorists. You have F-16s within two minutes of their target, with no idea if you’ll have a chance like this again. Theoretically your opposition has rockets ready to launch, yes, but you’ve already been duped at least once this year. How is aborting the air strike going to help the situation? So Voight has even more time to set up targets and plot an escape route? Egads. And this episode had been going so well.
Unanswered questions:
What is Voight’s end game? What does he want? My friend Chris and I spent a good three minutes debating this, without reaching any conclusion (note: we’re both really smart. That converts to at least 15 minutes in regular person time).
How is it that the president’s daughter – the acting secretary-of-state, mind you – has but a flip phone? I mean, not even a Blackberry?
How are scientists persuaded to build biological weapons, anyway? Lured by money? Power? Fame?
How much more money does the FBI have in the budget than CTU did? Back in the CTU era, Jack and co. had to rely on agents noticing coral snake tattoos on people’s arms. Now they have infrared and legit spy equipment? I guess these are the things you can afford when you don’t have to allocate 90% of your budget to “re-construction of facility following annual bombing.”
