James Brown. You gotta love him.
Ah, it was only a matter of time before the infamous bridge episode appeared. Very little actually happened this week; the terrorists tried to detonate one canister of the nerve gas in a mall, supposedly to test the remote detonators. Of course, the people sent to collect Rossler (our mysterious Russian from last week), who ultimately collect Bauer due to Rossler’s permanent unavailability, conveniently do not know what Rossler looks like, and are completely okay with Rossler’s flawless American accent. Jack, of course, disobeys the coerced order of the President to dispense the gas – he may be a ruthless government agent, but even Jack has his own sense of right and wrong, however morally ambiguous it can be at any given time – and saves the lives of about 900 people in the process…though he ultimately loses the trail of Goodbye Yellow Brick Tie and the canisters after killing one of his henchmen and tailing the other, who kills himself on command before he can be forced to talk. Of course, witnessing the hostile shoot himself in the head should have been enough to make Jack think that maybe they were being watched. But no, the truck carrying all of the remaining canisters drives away, in full view of CTU…from the other side of the street. Sweet Jesus.
Samwise Gamgee, meanwhile, is acting like an injured, cornered animal. I suppose getting beaten up by his sister’s pimp will do that to a person. To make up for his shortcomings, he barks at anyone who dares to cross him, though God love Audrey for having the balls to stand up to both him and Buchanan and force them both to look at the mall scenario from a more humanistic perspective. God knows, that’s more thought than President Buck Buck Brawwwwwwk put into it. How many bucks (wow, I just accidentally made a funny here: President Buck Buck Brawwwwwwk tried to pass the buck…ah, never mind) did he try to pass this week? “This is your call, CTU.” (Uh, no, Mr. President, legally, it’s not). “Mike, what do you think I should do?” The man is the poster boy for CYA.
And that is going to be his undoing, because if they go in the direction they appear to be going, Mike Novick is about to show his inner Anakin Skywalker. Novick has always been a guy who was willing to make a tough decision when he had to, but always had the best interests of the country, if not the presidency, at heart. This season, however, he seems to be much more morally compromised, suggesting that Logan cover up Cumming’s “suicide” (I think we all know that Walt the Weasel didn’t really kill himself) and now going along with the decision to release nerve gas in a mall? That’s not Novick at all. He may be a shady double-dealer, but he’s not a murderer…or is he?
The one great bit came when the righteous First Lady Martha (please, please tell me they’ll take the gloves off her soon) had her first helping of humble pie in dealing with the widow of Walt the Weasel. She had fully planned on telling the woman everything, and then changed her mind at the last minute, presumably because she finally realized how freaking crazy it would sound if she told a woman who’s just been told that her husband killed himself that her loving husband was also a traitor and a conspirator in the assassination of former President David Palmer. She’d react the same way any of us would: “Are you kidding me?” Marty may have thought that she sold out, but in truth, she did the only thing she could have done in that situation.
There is talk that “24” will soon become a feature film, and while in most instances that is a bad thing, I think it would be a very, very good thing here. Forget that Johnny Depp real-time mess that was “Nick of Time,” if you even saw it. I think that moving the premise of “24” to the silver screen will enable the producers to leapfrog some of the things that hold the show back….such as episodes like this one. Oh no, there has to be a major, tense moment at the top of every hour? Life just doesn’t work like that, kids. And making a movie of “24”: would skirt past that predictability instantly. Problems could happen at any time, which would keep the viewer constantly on guard. As it is, we always know that something bad is going to happen at the top of every hour, and no matter how drastic it is, it loses its impact since we can see the conflict coming down Broadway. I love “24,” but I’d be lying if I said that its trappings weren’t becoming a big, big hindrance.
