Well, how about that: I get to use this title after all.
Some of you may recall that I wanted to use this title for an episode, any episode, and after Buffy iced Kevin and his psycho dirtbag friend in Hour 9, I figured that was my last chance, and Starbuck would go back to being the sniveling sissypants we’ve grown to loathe.
Fool.
I have to say, I did not see this coming. Of course, I feel like I should have, since her story line was beginning to run out of juice, but I never suspected that our small-time juvee felon would go so far over to the dark side. Let’s flash back to the moment where she’s tailed Kevin and dirtbag back to the lake. We thought she was unsure about what she wanted to do next. In retrospect, dirtbag is probably lucky that Buffy pulled the trigger.
What would be a neat touch is if we now caught a “Usual Suspects”-style glimpse of all of the strings she was pulling up to the moment where she strangled Jimmy James to death and stuffed him behind the paneling in Holding Room #2. (The stink will give her away eventually, yes?) Maybe there is security preventing people from entering the CTU tunnel, and Starbuck was the one that cleared Princess Jasmine’s entrance. Heck, maybe she remotely activated the EMP’s timer once the car came into range, since we’re still not sure of the weight-sensitive detonation theory espoused in last week’s comment section. Maybe she taught the snipers at the river how to jam the cell phone frequencies. But we’ll never see any of that, because of the show’s real-time format. Pity. We might learn all of those things – or none of them – but it won’t have that same punch as the ‘Verbal straightens out his foot’ shot. Damn it. (*takes drink, per “24” drinking game rules*)
I was about to say that CTU’s facial recognition software was going to play a part in identifying Starbuck as a terrorist sympathizer (if you can call them sympathetic), but something just hit me: ten bucks says she’s in that file of anti-IRK rebels that President Slumdog was supposed to hand over in the previous hour. We were led to believe CTU scanned through them all on the big screen, but perhaps not. We may not get our “Usual Suspects” moment, but there’s a good chance we’ll get our “No Way Out” moment, and soon. One thing’s for sure, and it is in stark contrast to my prediction of a noble death for poor Jenny: her story ends with Buffy pulling the trigger…but does she take out one of Bullz-Eye’s TV girlfriends (Chloe or Crazy Jackie) before she takes her last breath? You know my thoughts on Jackie’s life expectancy, so she’s the odds-on favorite. But there are times when I hate being right, and this is one of them.
“I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. When I said, ‘I’m really busy right now,’ I meant, ‘Bitch, I will cut you.'”
Lastly, I think we all owe Katee Sackhoff a formal apology for questioning her decision to take the role of Dana Walsh. She clearly knew something that we didn’t, and we should have given her the benefit of the doubt for making this her next role after “BSG.” In our defense, Ms. Sackhoff, you didn’t make it easy for us at first. Still, we said some things, and for that, we’re sorry.
Chloe, meanwhile, grows a pair so big she’ll need a wheelbarrow to carry them in, pulling a gun on an NSA engineer and telling him to step tha fuck off as she throws a Hail Mary in order to get coms up and save Jack. (Of course, Starbuck thought Chloe’s idea was a bad one, because she needed those servers down for as long as possible.) Bubba is now forever in her debt – her reply of “I’m not good with praise” would have produced a spit take, had I been drinking anything when she said it – which makes me wonder if Chloe is next in line to run CTU. She may still have that personality disorder, as Big Balls Bill Buchanan (RIP) once said, but she also has a good sense of right and wrong, and she knows that Jack is impervious to bullets…
…unless Fox cancels the show, a story that has been making the rounds lately due to the show’s increased budget and decreased ratings. Another rumor has the show relocating to NBC, and while they could use a show like “24,” I just don’t see a fit there. Maybe it’s a grudge fuck for Fox supposedly in talks to land Conan O’Brien. Either way, “24” will forever be a Fox show to me.
Speaking of Jack’s imperviousness, he and Buffy were in a shootout at the East River with a couple of red shirts that pulled a trick from Scott Smith’s book “The Ruins.” A character is on death’s door, but the vines leave him there to suffer, in order to force his girlfriend put him out of his misery. (Forget the movie – the book’s awesome. Brutal, but awesome.) Here, when one of the characters pulls what I call a Hudson (“Aliens” fans just nodded knowingly) and lies in the open, the snipers pull the brutally effective stunt of shooting Hudson repeatedly in order to flush their enemies out in an emotional rage. Both were exercises in mental torture, and both worked. Good thing that Jack and Buffy had a silent partner, one they didn’t even know about: Crazy Jackie, who comes out guns a-blazing in both the literal and euphemistic sense. Man, how did I not notice how, um, talented Jackie was last season? Damn things are just screaming at me now. And knowing that she will surely die before season’s end, I’m reminded of Cary Elwes’ great line in “The Princess Bride”: “‘Tis a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It’d be a pity to damage yours.”
Can’t think of a better ‘out’ line than that. See you next week! Once again, I give you the song “Starbucked” by the UK band Bond. You want to know how forgotten this band is? Not even the last.fm page that’s hosting this track has the album title right. It’s Bang Out of Order, not Band Out of Order. And there are over 90 copies available for a mere penny on Amazon. Click here to buy!
