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”: Jonas was offered a red pill, but instead of freeing himself from the 24 Matrix, it nearly killed him; Tony shot himself, since there wasn’t anyone else around to shoot and he got bored; Renee was very distraught about Larry’s death, and stared off into space to emphasize her grief; Jack figured out that Tony isn’t acting in the government’s best interest, mainly because Tony told him so; Kim listened to Jack, for once, but at exactly the wrong time; Jack’s reaction to Tony’s revelation is to fall down to the ground and try to break dance, which wasn’t nearly as cool as Jack had hoped.
3:00 am – Jack’s in an ambulance, getting some medication for the seriously bad break dancing he was doing, and is able to mumble enough to tell Renee that Tony has to be stopped. Renee thinks he said, “Tony has the mops”. After calling Home Depot, she realizes he means, “be stopped”.
Renee radios agent about Tony. Agents near Tony misinterpret this and play “catch the bullet” with Tony, and lose. Since they’re unlikely to rise from the dead (and even if they did, they’d just shamble), Tony takes their car.
At this point, Jack is awake enough to tell Renee that he made a big mistake about Tony: He’s Evil Tony, not Good Tony. Jack tells her they need to call Mrs. President, so she can worry about what’s going to happen too.
3:06 am – Tony, fresh from his confession to Jack and mini killing spree, is tired, so he goes to a motel for some rest. Unfortunately, there’s a guy in the room who wants to talk to Tony about the canister and money, and Tony just wants to rest. The guy asks for proof that Tony wired the money to his account, and Tony gives him a small piece of paper with a fortune on one side, and the account number on the other. He throws Tony a bag, after checking the account has the money in it.
Tony sees that the bag contains a phone book that is completely unlike a canister, and turns around to see the guy pointing a gun at him.
If the guy had only read the fortune: “Things aren’t going to work out well for you”, he would have realized his double cross wasn’t going to work. Tony uses his slick Phonebook-Fu moves, gets the gun away, and chokes him with a handy shower curtain, which will likely be an extra charge when he checks out in the morning.
3:08 am – At the White House, Mrs. President gets information from Agent Tim about Jonas’ incredibly bad ability to tell the difference between poison and cold medications. Jonas is likely to pull through.
Jack and Renee call to apologize about the whole “Evil Tony” thing. Mrs. President tells them about Jonas’ botched suicide attempt. Jack thinks they can convince him to help them because A) it’ll get him out of the show contract faster and B) they can fake his death to fool the people he was working for. Jack thinks Jonas will go for this because he got cheated out of his 401(k) plan.
3:10 am – A woman meets Tony at the motel room, sees the dead guy in the bathroom, and tells Tony that it completely ruins “the mood”. She wants to take the canister to make more, and Tony really wants to use the canister kill more people today because he’s in an incredibly bad mood about the shower curtain.
Commercial
3:16 am – Olivia arrives to see Mrs. President. Mrs. President hands Olivia a yellow “Get out of jail free” card, and Olivia doesn’t want to have a thing to do with it. Mrs. President says that this isn’t easy for her, but she signed on to be Mrs. President in “24”, and she’s going to see this through to the end. She orders Olivia to draft an agreement.
3:19 am – The woman with Tony is on a mysterious conference call with twelve people sitting in dark rooms, so you know they’re bad. She tries to convince everyone on the line to use the canister in down town rush hour traffic, which as depicted on “24” will take about maybe three cars. The shadow figures debate this for a while, and the woman starts to Instant Message during the meeting, so you know this is as authentic as any real world meeting. They finally decide to go through with the plan.
Commercial
3:27 am – Janis leads Jack and Renee to Jonas’ room. Jack enters. Janis, in incredibly bad timing, stops Renee and wants to chat about Jack’s feelings about Tony. Renee tells her that they’re not on the Dr. Phil show, and goes after Jack.
Jonas has been awake for a while, hallucinating that he’s on a show with a really bad script. He sees Jack and realizes he hasn’t been hallucinating at all.
Back the White House, Olivia is so disgusted about being on the show, she walks out, probably to leak to the press.
Jonas tells Jack the plan: A multiple city bombings, all set up with canisters by the shadowy organization of crazy people. Jack asks, “Congress?”
Jonas tells Jack that he was disgusted by the way the hearings in the morning were going, at least the three or four minutes that actually aired on television. He thinks Jack should be regarded as a hero, and he doesn’t mean the sandwich.
Jonas thinks that he has a lot in common with Jack. Jack can’t stand to listen to this, so he decides to fake a phone call to the Washington Post. Jonas completely freaks out, since he thinks this is going to ruin his chances with the Washington Post Hunt. Jonas tells Jack about the mysterious woman, who is the intermediary with the shadowy organization. Jack leaves.
Jack, Renee and Mrs. President talk about what happened. Jack is pretty convinced that the smart move for the shadowy organization to make would be to attack within the next couple of hours, since if it happens after that, they’ll have to wait for a whole new season of “24”.
Jack wants the old CTU servers online, and someone that can use those servers. He calls CHLOE!
Jack has to break the news to Chloe about Bill, and that his death probably saved the President. Chloe looks as though she would have rather had Bill around still. Jack sends a car for her.
Chloe wakes up Morris and tells him that she’s going to go help Jack, since she’s really, REALLY good at “computer stuff” and might have a chance to be snarky at Janis. Morris reluctantly lets her go.
Commercial
3:42 am – Jack arrives at an impromptu meeting at FBI headquarters. The meeting seems pretty improbable, since nobody has any coffee at 3:42 in the morning. Renee suggests they start doing some serious data mining to find out what’s going on. Janice doesn’t want to hear about this AT ALL. She’s pretty upset. (You can tell because her expression changed almost imperceptibly). Janice thinks all data mining to save the country is “illegal” and clearly has never paid attention to the show before. Besides, she says, they don’t have the right computers to do this with.
Renee points out that they DO have the right computers, and points to the people at Geek Squad furiously trying to install the old CTU computers. They look pretty scared because former Geek Squad customers are pointing guns at them, and they’re looking for a little revenge.
Janice finally says, “What does this make us? CTU Lite?”
Renee says, “Yes” and basically tells Janice to shut up. Millions of people all over the country cheer.
3:45 am – Chloe arrives, tells Jack he looks terrible. She tells him she’ll oversee her precious CTU computers that she’s missed so very much. Precious, precious.
Jack tells Chloe that Tony isn’t “Good Tony” like they thought – He’s really “Evil Tony”. She doesn’t believe this at first, until Jack mentions that Tony tried to kill him and watched him break dance – badly. She agrees to help find Tony.
3:46 am – Outside of a building, Tony and the woman talk over how they’re about to frame an innocent Pakistani immigrant. While they stalk this guy, we see that he’s inside cooking breakfast, since he still hasn’t gotten used to the time change from Pakistan to the US, even after all these years.
His brother wakes up, and isn’t in the least bit upset to be woken up by the TV blaring or the fact his older brother this cooking breakfast at three in the morning.
Outside, more people show up. Tony and the woman meet them, and they walk towards the building with guns out, completely ignoring the amount of traffic that’s out at this time in the morning.
Commercial
3:53 am – Agent Aaron arrives in Olivia’s office and tells her that the Attorney General is waiting for a memo. Olivia tells him that the memo is very classified, hush-hush, eyes only, double cross your fingers top secret – and then spills her guts about who it’s for, how Jonas is still alive, and the ending of every major movie in the last five years. Agent Aaron tries to put his fingers in his ears and go “La la la!”, but he hears most of this anyway. Olivia is VERY upset about this, mainly for her brother, but mostly because she can’t figure a way off the show and she wants some serious revenge.
Agent Aaron says he’s sorry and leaves. Olivia is so upset that she needs to leak to someone, so she calls someone named Martin, who’s a political operative. She wants to meet with Martin at the White House, and indicates she needs a problem “fixed”. He’s going to meet her in 15 minutes, which is the exact time it takes to get anywhere in Washington.
3:57 am – Chloe tries to coach Janis in how to use computers, but Janis is still sniping about how she’s not comfortable with this. She makes a crack about “Big Brother”, and Jack finally loses it and yells at her the way millions of people all over the country have wanted to for many weeks now. It finally gets her to shut up, which is a major accomplishment.
Chloe realizes something is wrong with Jack – He thinks he’s in the wrong season of “24”!
3:59 am – Back at the Pakistani apartment, the lights go out. They clap a couple of times to see if the new Clapper they installed is on the fritz, but it turns out to be Tony had his other friends. The Pakistani guys realize that Tony isn’t there for advice on Middle Eastern breakfast food.
4:00 am – Time’s up!
NEXT TIME ON “24”- OLIVIA WANTS REVENGE! CHLOE FINDS OUT JACK IS DYING! TONY THREATENS PEOPLE! A CAR BLOWS UP! SEE YOU NEXT TIME.
Very funny… Keep ’em coming!
I hope those CTU servers aren’t running a Microsoft OS, or it will take the rest of the season to install all the patches that have been released since they were decommissioned.
What?! Nothing — nada, zilch, zero — on Tony taking a shower with a dead body propped against the tub?! Also, since he ripped the curtain off the rod, doesn’t it stand to reason that he got the bathfloor floor all wet? The maid’s gonna be pissed…
We DVR’ed this show and just watched it. My 11 year old son wants to know where the body in the motel shower went. It was there when Ms. Alameda arrived; then Tony took a shower during the “conference call”–did he just let water seep all over the floor? What did they do with the dead dude’s corpse??? Amazing Steve–you missed this!
Yes, in the flurry of writing the summary, I must have looked down at the keyboard and didn’t see the missing body. Doh!
I think what they probably did was prop him out behind the bathroom door and put his hands up in a “rawr” pose to freak out the maid.
My favorite line is when millions cheer for Renee telling Janice to shut up. I think I too cheered for that.
I can’t wait for next week!