Warning: Spoilers ahead!!!! For God’s sake, stop reading right this second if you don’t want to know that two regular characters were killed in the first 10 minutes!!!!
Last year I groused about the finale of “24,” upset that they had an opportunity to make shocking television, but passed on it. My proposal: President Buck Buck Brawwwwwwk Logan looks for a scapegoat after the missile landed and took out a major metropolitan area (I chose Miami, for no reason in particular). Then, he would have David Palmer killed, and blame the whole thing on him. Instead, they chose to stop the missile while Logan decides to take out Jack, a futile endeavor if ever there was one. I like to think that my idea would have made television history…which is why no network would ever, ever do it. Make the president a terrorist? Shame on you.
But that’s not exactly what Logan would be. He’s simply an opportunist, using people who are of no use to him (Bauer, Palmer) as an alibi for his own incompetence. They painted him as a snake from word one, so why not explore just how snakelike he could be? After all, he wouldn’t be the first, nor the last, president to exploit his supreme authority in order to save his ass.
The producers of “24” went a good length to make amends for last season’s finale tonight. The last line in my last blog was, “Next year, guys, you better start killing people again.” It appears that they were taking notes. In the opening sequence, President Palmer is assassinated, and Michelle Dessler (whose hair was curly again, after a season of being inexplicably straight) is taken out by a car bomb, and Tony Almeida is hanging on for dear life after running to find out what happened to Michelle. What do they all have in common? They’re three out of the four people who know that Jack Bauer is indeed not dead. The fourth, Chloe, was about a second and a half from turning the key in her car’s door lock, but Edgar filled her in just in time. She eluded the goons that were monitoring her “accident,” and called Jack, whose name is now Frank, a guy who works on oil rigs somewhere in California.
From there, lots and lots of stuff goes down, but we ended up with a hostage situation at Ontario airport (the one near Ryan Atwood’s old house in Chino, not the one in Canada), a First Lady that may or may not be nuts (her condition is cruelly but effectively exploited by someone close to President Logan), and an airport employee who swallows a suicide pill instead of talking to Jack. The scenes for next week’s episode indicate that Jack’s slate is wiped clean, as he’s helping CTU as an insider on the whole hostage thing, but aren’t the Chinese going to come calling soon? After all, they want Jack’s head, and the second that Logan knows that Bauer is still alive, he’s going to hand Jack over on a plate with the finest meats and cheeses that Wisconsin has to offer.
One other absurdly early prediction: Mike Novick gets whacked, likely by Walt. You heard it here first. But right now, all I want to know is how anyone knew to set up Bauer for the deaths of Palmer and Dessler. There’s a rat here, but who is it? I have a dark horse candidate, but I’ll keep my mouth shut on it for now. After all, I thought Audrey was in cahoots with the baddies last year, and we saw how that worked out.
