In the interest of full disclosure, this blog entry is not receiving the thorough once-over that I try to give the others. It’s Opening Day (go Cubs), and I am expecting my second child to arrive no later than Thursday. “24” is not really first and foremost in my thoughts at the moment. Hopefully I haven’t left you guys with a complete dud of a blog entry before I take a couple weeks off to spend some time with Lil Med #2. (Don’t worry, we’ll post a blog entry each Monday night if you good people still wish to come here and talk/vent about it.) I certainly don’t want to leave you with a dud after an episode as craptacular as the one they aired tonight.
In the opening scene, I was expecting my TV screen to implode, because Jon Voight started chewing up the scenery like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Jonas Pacino, hoo-ahhh! Fortunately, he toned it down for the rest of the episode…except when he confronted Starkwood’s CEO, at which point he morphed into Jonas DeNiro and used a decanter to beat the CEO to death, “Untouchables”-style. How that man thought he would live to tell the tale of anything he did after answering Jack’s call, I’ll never know. A call from Jack is like a call from Daveigh Chase in “The Ring.” Forty minutes…
I found the entire exchange between Hillary Clinton and her weasel news contact Ken to be one of the most unintentionally funny things in “24” history. For starters, Ken tries to blackmail Hillary into sleeping with him in order to kill a story he had already approved, and Hillary trumps him by using her camera phone to record the two of them having sex. To quote George Clooney in “Out of Sight,” this is the dumbest shakedown in the history of shakedowns. If he runs the news story, she has no choice but to leak the video, which will ruin both of them. Her idea for leverage wasn’t well thought out, if you axe me.
“Tell me, Doctor, when do I get to do some real acting?” “Trust me, Mr. Bauer, as soon as this wears off, your eyes will bulge like Arnold Schwarzenegger on Mars in ‘Total Recall.'” “Sweet.”
We have yet another Kim Bauer reference, which means she will absolutely be appearing before season’s end. I hope they show her looking like any of us would look if we received a call in the middle of the night saying our father was sick and needed our immediate help: hair pulled up under a baseball cap and wearing sweats. Of course, this is Kim Bauer we’re talking about, which means she’ll be decked out in Donna Karan. The doctor said that Jack would need an immediate family member to serve as a donor, and my clever wife beat me to the punch line: “What about his son?”
Oh, and how about the bug-eyed scene by Jack when the virus first took effect? “Look, ma, I’m acting!”
I’m not sure what to make of the standoff between Jonas and Madame Prez. Would she really back down? Was Jonas telling her that she can’t tell anyone what’s going on, or just that she can’t leak to the press what’s going on? I suppose, given that she has no idea that her own daughter is her biggest liability, she is right to be suspicious of her cabinet, but if she doesn’t give the Joint Chiefs a little something to nibble on, she’s going to lose their trust.
Lastly, there was Tony’s ability to float through a locked-down facility containing a bioweapon, shooting video of it on his phone, without drawing a single person’s attention. I can’t wait to see how he gets out of that. Or maybe he doesn’t, and this is the moment where he goes down brandishing an AK-47 and a flamethrower. Quick, where’s the hooker and the blow?
Our man Will Harris is interviewing Jacqueline Bauer herself on Tuesday April 7 at 1PM EST. If you have any questions for the lovely Annie Wersching, please post them here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to bed, since sleep is about to be a very scarce commodity in my life.
