24 Body Count

So, I totally just realized that I never synopsized (is that even a word?!?) the 24 from two weeks ago, never mind the one that we finally just watched last night. While this is travesty fodder for me—what? I had to come up with two days of actual content as opposed to summarizing someone else’s work! That’s ok, I’ll just post from my phone about how tired/sick I am!—I’m sure the world at large didn’t care.

So if you’ve been waiting for me to get offa my ass and write it up, I’m sorry. I was vomiting, and then I was Spring Breaking. (Which, in the past, led to vomiting, ironically. Funny how parenting changes you.)

If you couldn’t care less that I’m falling down on the (made up) job, well, that’s ok, too. I cater to all kinds.

So, without further ado, my updates on the bloodbath that is 24.

Episode 11: 2 am to 3 am

• Well, I was right. Jack brought Whiny Teenager’s mom in. Damn. That’s pretty low. But it worked…eventually. Not so much in the ‘wait ‘till you get home!’ kind of way, but more in the ‘If you detonate this bomb and don’t help us, I’m going to make your mom suffer in a terrible, terrible way at great risk to myself just because that’s how I roll’ kind of way. Alas, it was all to no effect, because just as he was convinced that going straight and narrow was the thing to do, the terrorists who were watching him over the hospital cameras re-started his bomb jacket, this time in failsafe mode. His last contribution was to tell that, hey, the Middle Eastern President’s former head of security was the one who was going to make the nuclear destruction in NYC happen. You know, the one who is holed up in a hotel room with the Middle Eastern President’s daughter, doin’ the nasty? Guess that confirms my suspicions.

Meanwhile, The Girl Formerly Known as Hair Over Her Shoulder and Scooby head back to CTU to get back to work. Nope, no dead guy blood on my hands here! Just clickin’ my mouse and not making eye contact. Yup. Totally innocent. Oh, hey, but there’s this guy who wants to talk to her. Says he’s Ex-Boyfriend’s (the one she just helped kill) parole officer. Says Ex-Boyfriend called her phone. Says he wants to help keep Ex-Boyfriend out of trouble. D’oh. That’s got to be awkward.

Episode 12: 3 am to 4 am

• Former Head of Security takes out three NYPD officers who were too stupid to listen to Jack when he told them to stand down and wait for the CTU officers who were en route. Yeah, he realized that M.E.P.’s daughter knew that he was actually a bad guy and smuggled her out. That’s not really going to help him win over the in-laws, I don’t think.
• F.H.o.S. also shoots two more officers as he and M.E.P.’s daughter are getting into the cab being driven by one of the guys in on the nuclear plan. (Incidentally, racial profiling much? I mean really? An evil Middle Eastern guy driving the cab?)
• F.H.o.S. dies trying to help M.E.P.’s daughter escape. All blocked out because, of course, he didn’t die. It was a setup. He ‘let her loose,’ telling her to get herself to CTU ASAP because they were the only ones who could help her. Only, he forgot to tell her that there was a bomb in her car. Not a ‘boom, the city block blows up’ kind of bomb, but an EMP, which pretty much knocks out all the electricity within, say, an entire government agency. It only kills one person—the CTU agent who was trying to drive her car away once they had seen that it was in there—but it knocks plenty of people heels over head. Oh, yeah. It also pretty much shuts down all electrical…well, anything…at CTU. Double d’oh!

All the while, The Girl Formerly Known as Hair Over Her Shoulder is trying to shake Ex-Boyfriend’s parole officer who has managed to make his way into the CTU office during a national crisis. He’s just about got her ready to ‘fess up—she’s pretty much Lady Macbeth at this point—when the EMP goes off. Whew! Didn’t know how she was going to get out of that pickle! She’d better be grateful to the deus in that machina!

Total body count: Thirty-nine confirmed. Jack’s count for the entire season is seven. And he’s not had any kills in four episodes. Robert commented on the fact that in Episode 11, he was just standing around, waiting for results.

Man.

I mean, who knows? I’ve never done a count like this before. Maybe I should go back and rewatch all the old seasons and do a comparison. Maybe he had whole blocks of time where he was watching and waiting and not killing.

Maybe he’s not the violent one in the show.

Maybe we’ve all just been trained to think that since he’s such a badass in so many other ways.

Interesting.