By Elaine B
Lesson Learned: Slower poisons are sometimes best.
In what may be a first for 24, someone actually stopped moving long enough to take a shower. Of course, it was evil Tony, who is not in a mad scramble to save the country any longer so he has the time to wash up. Still, it was a shower so brief would have made environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. proud. But since Tony was sharing the bathroom with the guy he killed, he may have wanted to cut it short.
Hodges is still alive, due to a quick-thinking FBI agent who pulled some of the fast-acting pill out of his mouth. Jack guesses why Hodges tried to kill himself, something he needn’t have done because Hodges (only slightly more delusional than usual) asks everyone guarding him to help him kill himself so he can save his wife and children. Jack goes to the hospital and makes him an offer – the government will say he is dead and to put him in witness protection. This would be a fate slightly worse than hell for a man like Hodges, but he does love his family a lot. Unfortunately, he can’t tell them very much because he and his co-conspirators only communicated via computer. But he can provide a general notion of what the group wanted to achieve — create more terrorist attacks they can blame on others, then offer to protect people so they will opt for a private military – which convinces Jack that the next attack will occur soon and in the DC area and a patsy is going to carry it out. He tells the president that the best course is to start up the CTU servers and use them to monitor potential suspects. Pres. Taylor agrees.
Somewhere across town, Tony and hot accomplice (nameless, so far, so I’ll just call her “HA”) are consulting with the rest of the conspirators on whether to continue the attacks Hodges started and use the weapon soon. The lead bad guy, Alan Wilson, has concerns but agrees after HA texts, “do it for me” (and some say romance is dead). The group immediately settles on an unwilling victim to carry out the attack, a soft-spoken Muslim named Jibraan Al-Zarian (played by Omid Abtaki, who also appeared in Day 4) who they will try to pressure into working for them.
Once permission to open the CTU servers is given, Jack asks Chloe to come down and help the FBI learn the system. Morris reasonably points out that last time Chloe signed on down there, they arrested her, which is not enough to override her response to a call for help from Jack.
The CTU servers are apparently as advanced as the system Lucius Fox built for Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight. No sooner does the CTU symbol appear on the monitors – and didn’t you expect to see a brilliant Pulp Fiction briefcase blast of light come from it? — than Janis Gold begins to complain that it is against the law to spy on Americans. Get real, Janis. This is what military types call a “24-type scenario” — suspend laws, deal with crisis, go back to the laws — so go with the flow or go home and take a shower. Actually, this may have been the silliest moment in 24 history, with Gold’s comment inserted only so the series’ creators have yet another chance to drive the message that in an emergency a government does what it’s gotta do.
I think the 24 creators are aware that this is a politically charged show. They are walking a fine line between some viewers’ embrace of liberalism and disillusionment with the war and the conservative base they seemed to be playing to a few years ago. So, red or blue, there will be something in 24 for you. This led me to take a bit of time to google the political leanings of 24 viewers. Sadly, I found nothing but the odd revelation that South Park is the mainstay of conservative viewers and, even more oddly, Deadliest Catch is the show that attracts the largest liberal following. I also found an interesting Time Magazine article that says this of Jack’s politics, “Jack Bauerism, if you will, is not so much in between left and right as it is outside them, impatient with both ACLU niceties and Bushian moral absolutes.” The Time article was speaking of Day 6, but Day 7 seems to drive this point even harder. And in an era when Texans can joke of seceding from the Union and Blackwater is blackballed by the government it used to serve, Jack Bauerism had never been more relevant.
Next: Pull out the tissue box as Chloe learns that Jack is dying. And, no surprise, Olivia Taylor acts on her own agenda to try to bring down Hodges.
©2009 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Ray Mickshaw/FOX