Thursday, May 04, 2006

Season 5; Hour Twenty (2:00AM - 3:00AM)

Air Date: 1 May 2006
Reviewer: J

[
Editor’s Note: I wanted to take a moment to let our loyal readership know that D will be winding down his time as an official, on-staff reviewer in these final hours. Much like the cast of 24 in previous seasons, his contract has not been picked up for next season. No, that’s not true. The truth is, like all of us, he’s got a lot going on in life and as is often the case, it’s time for a change. I’m not going to let him get away from us that easily, though, so you may see him as a “Special Guest Star” next season, but he has made me promise that, as such, he will not be subjected to bullets to the throat or plunges off a ravine. Hey, D, no promises.

In light of this, I’d like to invite those of you who enjoy writing and think you could write for this site to send me an email at Webmaster@NotTheRock.com and I will get back to you with some questions and details around what it might entail. Professional experience is (clearly) not required, but being a smart-ass with attention to detail and a good work ethic is. Would you be obligated to write as many as me or D? Not necessarily. Email me and we’ll discuss. – J
]

It’s kind of hard for me to believe we’ve already reached May, the month in which 24 will again leave us for the summer. As I said above, D will also be leaving us as a regular cast member so be sure to tune in for his reviews of Hour 21 and Hour 23. And hey, read mine, too, while you’re at it.

Anyway, we’re down to the final five hours as we entered Monday night and they spent Hour Twenty focused on just a few places: the hi-kiefered plane, CTU/DHS, Camp David Palmer and Bill Buchanan’s Safe House and Nearby Safe Hotel. I want to bitch about the lack of Audrey, Henderson, Bierko, Curtis, Wayne, etc…. but I can’t because I really still enjoyed this hour. Sure, it wasn’t as crazy as some of the other ones and it didn’t end with a 19-way split screen because so much was hitting the fan, but they can’t all end that way so I liked this one, which is likely to have been our last “transitional” or sort of “filler” episode of the season.

As you’ll recall, last hour ended with Karen Hayes deciding to help Bill and Chloe and give them the heads up that Miles’ tactical team was on their way. Apparently, DHS tactical teams wear suits and trench coats rather than CTU body armor, like Curtis and CTU teams do. Interesting. [DHS is still relatively new; the body armor’s on back order…-D]

We also saw Jack sneak onto the diplomatic flight that is leaving at 2 AM from the same airport in which Jack blew up a tanker truck half an hour ago. I know Jack’s a master of stealth, but I would think security would be extra tight given that.

Anyway, Karen learns from Bill and Chloe what’s going on and spends most of the hour backing up their attempts to help Jack obtain this recording. I keep finding myself wondering why she’s making it harder on herself by not coming clean that she thinks she should back Jack, but I guess the main reason is that if Jack is wrong, she’ll look pretty bad for doubting the President, who is kind of everybody’s boss at this point. So she’s making the mistake of trying to back two horses. Or a horse and a donkey.

Buchanan sends Chloe through the alley and to a nearby hotel (perhaps Bill picks up young businessmen there or something) just as the Homeland Tic-Tac-Toe Team are arriving. Bill musses up his hair and removes his dress shirt, presumably to appear as though he’s been awakened by their presence, which would work fine if all the interior lights in his house weren’t already on and if he didn’t immediately yell a response when they began pounding on his door.

Chloe gets to the hotel with no problem – unlike CTU, which sets up “perimeters” that people always “slip through,” it looks like DHS has just decided to scrap the whole perimeter theory. [I liked Karen’s suspicious little bit of misdirection – ‘she’s got a car so she’s probably 15 miles out.’ Wouldn’t the DHS guys have seen her car in front of Bill’s house? - D]

The DHS guys stride around Bill’s house and one clicks on the monitor to his computer, which still has a recent screen up that Chloe was using. DHS agent #1 surmises, “only O’Brian could have accessed this.” Wow, that was some fast deduction. And hey, Bill, way to shut down your computer. That could have at least bought a few minutes of denial about knowing Chloe’s whereabouts. As it turns out, they arrest Bill at Karen’s request and bring him in. Back at CTU, Miles wants them to interrogate Bill on site but Karen declines that request and says he’ll be brought in. She really had no choice, given that she wants to back him up, but Miles spidey-sense is pinging.

On the plane, Jack appears relieved to know that either A) the luggage compartment is pressurized or B) this is a low-altitude flight. Either way, he’s alive and his cell phone works (I wonder if the captain has ordered they be turned off) and Chloe hooks him up with the info as to where the federal air marshal is sitting. Jack pops up into the main cabin through the cargo hatch, narrowly missing an opportunity to look up a flight attendant’s skirt. The guy playing the air marshal looks really familiar but I can’t place him and I’m too lazy to look him up. [I didn’t recognize him but apparently
he was in Oz which I only watched once.-D] But he strikes me as a guy who would make a good CTU agent.

It turns out that Mr. Marshal is actually not CTU material, as Jack sits down next to him under the pretense of his regular seat being near the galley (why not say near the shitter?) and that it was noisy. The air marshal is uninterested in small talk and his lack of suspicion proves dangerous as he is knocked out by a quick elbow from Jack. Summer project: I need to learn how to deliver knockout elbows without drawing blood.

Karen Hayes has proved to be more than just a bureaucrat as she has mad computer skillz, too, and is able to hook Chloe up with the plane manifest and other such things. Of course, Chloe is now in a hotel bar, which might be good to allow her to slug back some gin to stay calm. Predictably, there’s a creep there who approaches her. The storyline is pointless except for the amusement we get when Chloe invites him to sit down and then tasers him unconscious – the funny part was that just before she does that, he asks the model of her laptop and the geek in Chloe cannot resist answering him even when he’s unconscious. Good stuff.

Anyway, Chloe links a German national on the plane to Henderson (who is presumably soon to be back at CTU for the second time today, perhaps in a bed between Bierko and Audrey) and so Jack diplomatically approaches him. Hey, how else can you approach someone on a diplomatic flight? He gets “Hans” to come to the galley where he puts on the sleeper hold and whispers about the Defense Department’s budget statistics, thus getting Hans to nod off. He then dumps Hans down into the luggage compartment which will now double as the interrogation room of the plane.

Hans claims to be innocent and, at least at the moment, it appears he actually is. Meanwhile, the air marshal has come to and has locked Jack down in the luggage compartment and notified the captain, whose name is Cotter. As in “Welcome back,” I guess. Anyway, Captain Cotter begins to let the pressurized air out of the luggage hold, as per procedure, and starts turning around. Chloe also realizes that Hans, who she fingered to Jack a few minutes ago, was in customs for three hours and couldn’t have taken the handoff from Henderson. Oh, um, sorry about that, Hans. Here’s some Tylenol for the headache you probably have now.

Jack gets patched through to the cockpit through some myriad of techno gobbledy-gook by Chloe and Karen and he demands pressure be restored to the makeshift holding cell he has commandeered. For a guy locked in the belly of a plane, Jack is being awfully pushy. Captain Cotter listens but has no intention of helping out the guy who popped his air marshal in the chops and snuck onto a plane. And in the post-9/11 world, I think this is an accurate representation of our pilots, diplomatic flight or no.

Jack, though, gives us the best scene of the hour in my opinion, by basically throwing a tantrum of tantrums. Much like a child will break things or throw food, Jack decides to mess with something that will get the pilot’s attention. Not his trust, perhaps, but definitely his attention. Jack locates a panel that he can remove under which he finds a mess of cables. Being a pilot himself, Jack chooses the right cables and hangs on them with a belt. The cables turn out to evidently be the ones that adjust the flaps or shear or something. Whatever it is, it causes the plane to pitch (or yaw? I’m not a pilot) dramatically and the Captain knows exactly what Jack is doing. He finally agrees, based on this behavior, to let Jack up. Of course, Captain Cotter is no dummy and keeps the cabin door locked as Jack proceeds to search the passengers. The passengers, to their credit, keep their hands up as Jack orders despite it being 2:30 in the morning and undoubtedly time for some Zs.

As all this is happening, we are treated to some more scenes back at Not Camp David of Martha Logan being a wack-a-doo. Her crying and instability, while important to the plot I realize, are beginning to really wear on me. [This is where I caught some Zs…-D] Novick can tell something is up and he tries to get it out of both her and the President but they both rebuff his requests. So you’re caught up on that dynamic. In other news, Martha wants her “pills,” which are being withheld from her for reasons passing understanding. Hell, let her OD; problem solved, right Logan? I find it amusing that she takes her meds with a swig of wine. I also found it amusing that when she called Novick and asked him to come to her suite Novick looked like he would rather have his fingernails pulled out one by one. Again, more quality acting from the 24 cast.

On board the hi-kiefered plane, Captain Cotter is heading back to Van Nuys (and a good thing, too, since this plane was bound for Frankfurt and it would have been boring for Jack to be stuck on an airplane as the season ended) as per law, despite Jack’s protests that he needs time to find what he came for.

Meanwhile, Logan is a bit twitchy about this development and he calls Karen Hayes, who takes the call in the interrogation room with Buchanan, who is now at CTU. His appearance at CTU was outstanding, with him facing down Miles and calling him “a little kiss-ass.” Normally, I’d say that’s funny coming from Bill but Miles is such a slimeball I loved it. Miles, of course, tries to undermine Karen’s authority by calling Novick who is great in just being so tired of nitwits like Miles.


Anyway, as I said, there’s now a call from Novick and Logan to Karen Hayes, wherein Logan decisively says they need to take down Bauer, dead or alive. If the order isn’t crazy enough, Logan has aroused more suspicion by being decisive than anything else. And where is the Vice President? I thought he was involved in things today? Or is he still recovering from the exchange he witnessed two hours ago between Heller and Logan?

I have to say, I laughed at Karen’s responses during this hour when Miles filled her in on things like Chloe slipping away (a faux “damn!”) and when Bill called Miles a kiss-ass (“Don’t talk to my people that way, Bill!”). In the holding room, Karen fills Bill in on what’s going on and cuts the camera feed so nosy Miles can’t watch. Hey, Miles, why don’t you figure out where Chloe hid your keycard? I bet you’re “cold” right now.

Speaking of Chloe, she has figured out some more news for Jack. Not only did she have the wrong guy before, she had the wrong section of the plane. The guy tied closely to Henderson is the co-pilot, a guy named “Evans.” Dun-dun-dunnnnnnnnnnn!

Well, that’s not good. Jack gets himself patched through to the pilot only and tells him that the man he’s looking for is Evans. Captain Cotter thinks, yeah, right, what a convenient way to get into the cockpit. He ends the call and then his spidey-sense starts pinging and he asks Evans about how he got staffed on this flight at the last minute. Evans actually plays it pretty cool and we shouldn’t forget that they’re also on the way back to L.A., so the recording isn’t getting very far. Cotter does the old, “I gotta stretch my legs” routine and tries to bolt for the door, but Evans clobbers him with a flashlight. However, Jack hears the commotion and Cotter apparently was able to unlock the door. Jack busts in and kung-fu’s Evans to the floor. Um, excuse me, but who is flying this bird? I didn’t see anyone put it on autopilot. What a disaster that would be. No recording, no Jack, season’s over, goodnight. But you know that’s not what’ll happen.

Anyway, Evans is no hero and, unlike Henderson, is indeed afraid of what Jack might do to him so he dutifully hands over the recording as the hero music swells. Jack gives him to go-ahead to hop back into the saddle and land the bird.

Meanwhile, Martha Logan calls her husband in a drug induced stupor and tries to ask what the hell is going on until Chaz Logan hangs up on her to take a call from his new boyfriend, Dr. Graham Romano. Graham is still wearing his Bluetooth lookalike like a cyborg. Don’t you just hate the assholes who wear them in public, yammering on like they’re important? And in that scene last hour when all his minions had in their own Bluetooths (Blueteeth?), do you suppose they were actually conferenced in with one another despite being in the same room?

Anyway, Graham tells Logan his only option at this point is to have the plane shot down. I can’t wait to see how Logan makes this seem like a reasonable option, given that it’s full of diplomats and that it’s on its way back, as per procedures. It’s not like Jack has forced to pilots to take him to Bora Bora or something.

As always, we shall see.

Oh, hey, has anyone seen Wayne Palmer or Aaron Pierce?

Labels:

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This episode wasn't that great....more of a filler.

Sorry to see you go D. Good luck with all that real life stuff. :)

7:31 PM  
Blogger Phoenician said...

Nope. Last we heard Aaron was "Transfered to DC" (I hope in the worst case scenario that's what happened -- I NEED him in Day VI! Best Case scenario, you ask? He's locked up in some room at Camp DP and he'll eventually help Jack to kill/capture/but preferably kill Logan), and Wayne was supposed to be with Bill. I did wish DHS they found Wayne cleaning himself in the bathroom or something, to make Bill's 'innocence' a bit more far fetched.

Anyways, I loved this hour as well, BUT I still think 5.6 reigns this season. Jack's 'tantrum' was just amazing, and Chloe's resoultion for "I-know-where-you-can-get-some-free-bandwith-guy" was hilarious.

Oh how this season will end! Is there ANY possible way the fans can accept Logan as the President for another season after all this? I doubt it, and that's why I say he'll probably be killed or (most likely) captured and brought to prison. I only bring death as an option if Jack/Aaron ever get back to Camp DP, or if Martha does something crazy, ala Elizabeth Nash of Day I.

As for Henderson? I don't know now, but you know what I want to happen guys . . .

This was a great hour, and it was amazing that with so little characters involved in this hour so much still happened. Like you said, so many things WERE happening that it was releiving and just as exciting to concentrate on one thing in general, and that was Jack on the plane!

Great job J, and I look forward to both of your final reviews this season, as well as D's special guest appearances in the next!

Is it REALLY May already? Do I REALLY have to wait another SEVEN months for Day VI?

Yeah, I guess we all have to . . .

7:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Goodbye D!!! :''''(
You were always my favorite,thanks for all the humor and see you in the future!

12:18 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home