Okay, Dada fans, I know it’s “Dizz Knee Land,” no need to harass me.
It’s a pity I’ve already deleted tonight’s episode from my DVR, because when Novick and the President are discussing the pros and cons of changing the route of the Russian president’s motorcade, I would swear that Logan, in his most manic fit of indecision yet, literally clucks like a chicken. “Should we alert the Secret Service?” Novick asks him. “Yes! No! Wait! Buck Buck Brawwwwwk!” Logan stammers, even though his decision to allow the Warlock to bomb the motorcade means that he’s sending his wife to her grave. I would love to know of one president who has ever dreamt of doing such a thing. Well, besides Clinton, that is.
Even funnier is that he wasn’t even the episode’s biggest wacko. Samwise Gamgee locked up Buchanan last week, and this week he fires Sandra Bullock (IT drone Carrie, who’s a dead ringer for Miss “Speed”) for, well, doing her job. He then yells, loudly and nonstop, at Audrey, Chloe, Curtis and Edgar when they try to alert him to the possibility that, hello, the Russian president’s motorcade is about to get attacked. Curtis finally loses patience with how Samwise is running CTU into the ground, and invokes Section 112 (mental incapacity, blah blah blah). And even that isn’t enough to shut Samwise up, who orders the guards to shoot Curtis, the field agent. The guards, knowing exactly how a gunfight with Curtis is going to go down, say, “What would you like us to do, Mr. Curtis?” Smart men, those guards. Buchanan is back in charge, but Samwise is not done by any means, you can bet on it.
I totally want to play Texas Holdem with Marty Logan. She bluffs in the limo at first when Chicken Little calls her and demands that she tell the Suvarovs that she has to get out of the car to attend to some other matters. But after a while, when they continue to drive, she totally plays her hand, knocking on the glass and asking Agent Aaron Pierce, the human Labrador retriever, if there have been any changes to the schedule. Agent Pierce assures her that everything’s fine, but you can bet your sweet bippy that moment of unguarded terror did not escape her Russian “friends”. Expect the Russian president to declare the treaty null and void before too long, and that is what frustrates me the most. Logan should have known – and if it escaped his grasp, Novick should have at least brought it up – that if the Russian president is killed on American soil, the Russians will declare war on the United States. Try explaining that to the American public. “Sorry, guys, I thought that if I allowed the Ruskie vodka swilling atheist to get whacked, I could save some American lives. My bad.” There is just no way of dressing the truth up in that one.
One very telling moment about who the show’s most important characters really are: when the Suvarov’s car took the hit with the missile, Buffybot and I said, “Oh, no, Aaron!” That’s right, we weren’t at all concerned about the First Lady, who in Hour 1 was our favorite character on the show. But you can’t kill the dog, damn it. The producers of “24” clearly know how well loved Pierce is, because Old Yeller then goes on to waste all of the baddies by himself (curious that they only had one missile to launch at the car). How sad it will be, then, when Old Yeller commits some other heroic act in order to defend the people he loves, only to become rabid and force his “family” to put him down.
All this, and I still haven’t mentioned Robocop’s introduction as Christopher Henderson, a former CTU bigwig and current link to the nerve gas. Uncanny, isn’t it, that his instincts haven’t left him at all when his secretary has to unexpectedly leave her post (he waits behind his door and zaps Jack the second he walks in) and he instantly comes up with a way to kill Jack out of sight. As soon as I heard the word “bunker,” I thought, “Bunker not good. Jack die.” Well, anyone but Jack and Keith Richards, anyway.
For those who don’t watch the scenes for next week, for God’s sake, stop reading now! Okay, are we all here? Good. Kim finally comes back, even though IMDb thinks she’s been in nearly every episode this season, and it appears that Tony wakes up from his brush with death. My question is: where is that canister of gas released? They imply that it’s in CTU, but this is Fox, people. When they would advertise “Melrose Place,” they’d say, “One of these characters will die,” when what they meant was, “One of these characters will dye…their hair another color.” You can never, ever take their sneak previews at face value.
