Season 7 – 24 – 5 am to 6 am


If you’re new to the blog, here’s what’s going on:

Each week that “24” airs, Dave Barry hosts a “live blog” of what’s happening on the show. Dave and the readers of the blog post funny comments about things they see in the show. While this is going on, I write a summary of the show with all my comments. I post that over on Dave’s blog, and here on my own.

Hope you like this week’s summary!

Previously on “24”, We found out that: Jonas forgot the first rule of witness protection – Never get into a car that’s wired for explosives, probably “accidentally” set there by Olivia; Jibraan gave a speech to a video camera that rivaled Janice’s acting ability; Tony must hate Subway sandwiches, because he wants to blow one up; Chloe discovered the S&H green stamps on the bank deposits looked fake; Jack was given forgiveness, but didn’t want it, so he’s about to trade it in for some revenge instead.

5:00 am – Evil woman is talking on the phone while a guy in an Intel Bunny Suit plays around with the canister. He tests it, even letting the smoke get all over him, and even though Evil woman isn’t wearing a bunny suit and anyone else would be running around screaming like a maniac, she doesn’t look very concerned.

5:02 am – Tony wires up Jibraan with a microphone. Jibraan gets his hopes up that he might be getting punked, but Tony pretty much shoots that down by being extra scary and threatening Jibraan’s brother. Tony tells Jibraan to go down into the subway while he watches from the van.

Meanwhile, Evil Woman is getting ready for a costume party by putting on 1960s hair, which makes her look like that great half of Sonny and Cher… yes, I’m speaking of Sonny Bono. She takes the canister, which probably hasn’t even been washed off, and puts it into a bag.

5:04 am – Jack questions Jibraan’s brother, who hasn’t read far enough into the script to know what’s going on, so that’s a dead end. The guy that got stabbed with the mirror shard still isn’t dead, but he looks like he’d be ready for a bit part in a remake of Dawn of the Dead. He won’t say anything about it, but Jack convinces him by pressing on his neck, which has to be the least violent thing Jack has ever done. The guy with the massive neck wound agrees to call Tony after Jack “convinces” him.

5:05 am – Renee calls FBI to get some technical things done, and accidentally calls Janice, who tries to be helpful. Renee needs a phone call traced, which Janice proceeds to send through the Google Translator filters to translate the call into Swahili, German, Japanese, French, back into German, Russian, French again, and then into English. Chloe suggests they just plug into a DMA node instead, making Janice actually realize she’s stupid. She even asks Chloe not to make her feel stupid, and Chloe agrees.

5:06 am – Jack makes the phone call to Tony, and listens in. The guy tells Tony that he’s pretty sure that when they wired the money to the Swiss bank accounts, one of the transactions didn’t work, because he just got an e-mail that said so. The e-mail was from someone who wanted to help him out with this by yodeling, offering him a Richola and a hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows, so he’s pretty sure it was indeed from a Swiss bank.

Tony had the phone fitted with an ACME encryption module so it’s tough to pin him down to more than a couple block radius. Chloe tells Jack it’s going to take her a while to figure things out, especially if Janice keeps interrupting by asking for help with her “computer thingie”.

5:10 am – Jibraan moves through the subway very slowly, like he’s up to something, which nobody notices because everyone that’s up for work at this hour is walking around the same way.

Jibraan makes a bold move, takes out his earpiece, and tries to get the ticket takers to call the police. The ticket takers both star singing “Roxanne”, and Jibraan tells them that’s not what he meant. They call a police officer over. Jibraan tries to explain the really cruddy day he’s been having so far, and the “officer” tells him to put the earpiece back in! He’s in on the plot with Tony! Jibraan can’t believe it. Tony tells him to continue with the ride to the subway station.

Commercial

5:17 am – Olivia gets a phone call from Aaron, telling her that Tim Woods is looking for her so she can be interviewed about Jonas being blown up. At first, she’s excited, until she realizes they not going to be asking her about how happy she is that Jonas is in a million pieces. Aaron wants to know where she is, since she’s not where she said she’d be. She tells him that after a big bombing like that, she realized she had to go run a few errands at five in the morning, which to her is a completely plausible story. Aaron’s pretty upset about this, since the Secret Service Union wasn’t informed of any of this, and they might threaten to strike because of it. Olivia assures him that everything will be OK, and she asks him to cover for her.

After she hangs up, Martin shows up from the bushes, which is apparently where he hangs out. Olivia tells him that she decided at the last minute not to go through with Jonas’ killing and didn’t transfer the money because she changed her mind, which is completely a woman’s prerogative. Martin tells her that he OKed the bombing anyway, because he knew she really, REALLY wanted it to happen. Martin also points out that she looked him straight in the eye (which is a good trick, since they were on the phone together), and told him that she wanted this thing done, and the odds were at least 60:40 she wouldn’t change her mind.

Martin points out that if Olivia continues to freak out, she’s going to look suspicious, mainly because she’s freaking out. Martin leaves, but reminds her that the guy who killed Jonas will want his money. The real stuff, not US dollars.

5:21 am – Kim’s at the airport with a flight delay, so she calls her husband who is completely awake at this unreasonable hour feeding their child who should also be asleep. Her husband tries to convince her to go to Jack, but she says she knows Jack doesn’t want to see her. The battery in her phone dies just as she notices a stalker in another part of the airport watching her.

5:22 am – Evil Woman approaches Jibraan in the subway car he’s riding. She sets the timer on the canister for 15:00 minutes, and leaves the bag on the subway car. She apparently believes two things: 1) that nobody is going to grab the free handbag just sitting there; 2) that nobody is going to completely freak out about an unattended bag in a public place.

5:24 am – Chloe gets the “everything is going great” flashing red screen, which she interprets to mean that she’s figured out where Tony is. He’s just three blocks away! Jack spots the black van which Tony is riding in, decides he doesn’t want a long car chase since they’re near the end of the season, and rams the van! Jack opens the van door. In one motion, he grabs Tony, pulls him out of the van, and chokes him until he’s unconscious, which takes all of about five seconds. Jack says he’ll search the van for the canister, which is fine with everyone else since none of them really wants to find a leaking gas canister.

5:29 am – Jack wants the computer Tony was holding reconstructed after Tony damaged it, so of course he calls Chloe. Chloe is tries to use her super tech powers to fix it remotely, but even she finds it difficult. Janice asks to see it, and it turns out this might be the single thing Janice is good at: Reconstructing PROM modules without file headers, which as any good computer scientist can tell you, is complete television computer mumbo jumbo.

5:30 am – Tony’s awake! Jack tells the cops guarding Tony to “walk away”. Jack says he wants to know where the canister is. He then proceeds to make up for a lot of lost hitting time by beating Tony nearly senseless, which on this show, which never made much sense anyway, is really saying something.

Jack wants to know why Tony betrayed him, and even threatens him with a guest appearance next season. Tony says he’s got nothing left to lose, so Jack should just shoot.

5:31 am – Janice thinks she’s working with some sort of Java Embedded profile because she thinks there were applets running on the thing. Renee, who might even know less about computers than Janice does, doesn’t see anything wrong with this. Janice thinks she’s found Jibraan. Her first clue was when Jibraan appear to go through a church cathedral at 30 miles per hour. She’s pretty convinced that Jibraan’s not part ghost, so he must be on the Metro subway.

Jack realizes that Tony must have been communicating with Jibraan, so he tells Chloe and Janice to look for the frequency that is strong enough to transmit into the subway. Janice says, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” and then does the unimaginable – She helps twice in a row! She found it!

5:32 am – Jack talks to Jibraan and tells him that he’s got a package. Jibraan is pretty sure that he knows what a package is, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have one of those. A guy on the subway eyes Jibraan suspiciously since he’s not using a Bluetooth headset and doesn’t appear to be a crazy hobo.

Jack tells him that it must be on the train some place. Finding it shouldn’t be a problem because there are only dozens of passengers, and there are quite a few cars to search. Jibraan realizes that the woman he saw with the weird hair might just be someone that’s involved with this whole thing, since she looked a lot like the woman that helped take his brother hostage.

Jack tells him to wait until everyone’s off the train. Jibraan finds the bomb. Jack tells him that he’s got to run out of the station with it. Jibraan is uncertain at first, but a bomb with a timer with less than a minute and a half on it has a way of motivating a person, so he takes off running.

He gets to the top of the escalator and see a police officer – with the suspicious guy on the train! The officer was in the midst of explaining to the guy that people in Washington talk to themselves all the time, when he realizes the guy might be on to something. Jibraan does what anyone else would do in a situation like this: he panics. He yells that he has a bomb, runs off and gets outside just as Jack arrives with a hazmat unit and a lot of police. Through some miracle, nobody shoots Jibraan and Jack is able to grab the canister. He dumps it off into the hazmat truck where it explodes behind some protective glass.

Jack comes out and thanks Jibraan for being so brave and for not getting shot. Jibraan just wants to see his brother, but he has to go off to make a statement to police – a statement other than “AAAA! I ALMOST DIED!”

Renee tries to convince Jack to take some more of his medicine since he doesn’t look all that well after beating up his former best friend, chasing down a bioweapon and nearly having it explode in his hands. Jack says that someone must have replaced his medicine with Folger’s crystals, because it’s not working for him.

Commercial

5:42 – At the airport, Kim tries not to notice the guy stalking her and moves to a seat next to some people headed out on the same flight she’s on. The lady is obviously insane because she asks Kim if she knows someone with the same name as my fourth grade teacher, which is clearly impossible. Kim tells the people she’s with that she’s pretty concerned about the guy, since he’s scary looking.

Jack makes a phone call. It turns out the stalker guy is the most inept surveillance guy in the FBI – he was watching Kim for Jack!

5:45 am – Evil woman is still wearing the disguise she should have dumped off long ago and makes a phone call. She tells the guy on the other end that the canister is gone, Tony is in custody and Jibraan is AOK. The guy is pretty upset, and wants Tony killed. She tells him that it shouldn’t be a problem, because Tony will be released from custody soon.

5:46 am – Back at the airport, the plane is about to board. The guy who was with Kim gets up to go get coffee, and Kim goes off to the bathroom. The really bad surveillance guy decides that since Kim headed off the bathroom, now would be a perfect time to do the same thing – except it wasn’t. The guy who went to get the coffee kills him in the bathroom! I bet this guy wasn’t even going to go get coffee.

Commercial

5:52 am – Olivia arrives at the White House, and apologizes to Aaron – she convinces him that all she needed to do was clear her head since she has been having a very, very bad day – unlike everyone else. She tells him that she’ll have the communications records that were requested by the Justice Department shortly.

Aaron calls Kanin and asks if he turned off the secret Nixon-era recording equipment or not. Turns out he hasn’t!

Meanwhile, Olivia transfers the money to the account of the guy who killed Jonas, ensuring he’ll be able to buy all the Dunkin’ Donuts he wants for quite some time.

5:54 am – At the FBI, Janice starts fishing around for an apology from Chloe, but Chloe won’t have any of it – she just transmits the picture to Jack. Jibraan identifies the woman in the picture.

5:55 am – The guy comes back with coffee, and uses secret code words to tell his female partner that he killed the guy in the bathroom.

Evil woman, who is STILL wearing that wig, calls Jack and sends him a link to the video of Kim sitting in the airport. There’s a camera in the guy’s bag. She tells him that unless he helps break Tony free, Kim is dead. She even tells him to keep the line open so she can listen in.

Jack gets in the van. Evil woman says that Jack better shoot anyone that gets in his way!

6:00 am – Time’s up!

NEXT TIME ON “24” – TWO HOUR FINALE! JACK PULLS A GUN ON RENEE! JACK IS IN PAIN! KIM GETS A PHONE CALL! SHOOTING! JACK WANTS TO DIE IN PEACE! SEE YOU NEXT TIME!