Season 8 – 24 – 9 am to 10 am

Previously on “24”, we found out that: They choose new temporary directors of CTU by seniority (but we’re still happy Chloe is now in charge); They choose new presidents of fictional countries by marriage; They choose new plot lines by recycling old presidents; The sniper who killed Renee better be choosing his coffin, because Jack is going to be doing some recycling of his own.

The following takes place between 9 am to 10 am:

9:00 am – Jack tries to use his powers of staring to bring Renee back to life, but it isn’t working. A nurse comes in to take Renee’s body away, and I have to say it is the best acting Renee has done all season.

Jack wanders down the hallway and another nurse gives him some new clothes, with less blood on them, to put on. His phone rings. It’s Chloe.

Jack insists on finding the person who killed Renee. Chloe doesn’t know who did it, but does know the Russian mafia is involved. She’s reluctant to give Jack any information since she’s now in charge of CTU. She’s also pretty sure that Jack is completely capable of taking out the entire Russian Mafia with a shoelace and a butter knife, so she declines to tell him where he can get more information.

Jack knows they still have Bazhaev in custody, and he promises not to interfere with the overall CTU investigation. In Jack Talk that translates to: “I’ll only kill him a little bit if he doesn’t give me the information I want.” Chloe, who has known Jack for eons, believes this for some reason, and tells him where Bazhaev is currently being held – he’s in federal court downtown.

9:02 am – Ethan, who had a major heart attack a few hours ago, who was denied treatment by some White House staffers a few less hours ago, and who got out of surgery even fewer hours ago… shows up for work. This guy is the very definition of a workaholic. Mrs. President is shocked to see him.

Mrs. President tells Ethan that she decided to send ex-President Logan over to the Russian embassy to pick up some of those cool nesting dolls, and to negotiate a peace treaty while he was there. Ethan asks how Logan intends to do this, and like everyone else on the show, Mrs. President is completely stumped. She has no idea, and assumed that he was going to try to win them over by offering them a bunch of blue jeans and iPads. Ethan thinks this is pretty suspicious.

9:04 am – President Logan shows up at the Russian embassy outdoor buffet, and orders an espresso from one of the KGB agents. Novakovich tries to explain how sorry he is about Hasan’s death, but Logan isn’t buying it. It could be the huge smile on Novakovich’s face while he says it. He goes on to explain that he doesn’t think Hasan’s wife can do a thing to help the peace process, since there was so much opposition.

Logan points out that the people that killed Hasan weren’t exactly brain surgeons, even if they did speak ominously and slowly, like they really knew what they were doing. They are, after all, all dead. They’re not much of a threat now, unless someone puts them into a cannon and starts firing them at buildings. He’s convinced that they had help. Logan says he knows Novakovich was in on the whole thing. Logan tells him Mrs. President doesn’t know a thing about this, because he wanted to be sure Novakovich heard about it first. He threatens to tell Mrs. President everything. This pretty much shows why Logan was a terrible fake TV president in the first place… he gets everything backwards. Later on in the show we can fully expect to see him leave the United Nations before he gets there.

9:11 am – Jack arrives downtown, which fortunately was less than ten minutes away in the typical non-existent New York rush hour traffic. He listens while a lawyer tries to point out that while “technically” Bazhaev’s grandson doesn’t have a father because Bazhaev shot him dead yesterday, it was only because the nuclear radiation that the father had been exposed to would hurt the baby – and that Bazhaev should be commended for that. The judge points out that trafficking in nuclear material might be the run of the mill sort of crime in New Jersey, but they’re in New York so he’s going to deny bail. Bazhaev see Jack and whispers to his lawyer that he wants to talk to Jack. Oh, and that he now needs a change of underwear. The judge calls a recess of thirty minutes.

9:13 am – Bazhaev tries to threaten Jack with bodily harm if Jack tries to hurt any of Bazhaev’s family, but that’s like trying to threaten congress with accountability. Jack points out that Bazhaev is in the wrong chair for trying to make threats like that. Bazhaev tries to switch chairs so he can make the threat again, but Jack interrupts. He tells Bazhaev that Renee was shot dead, and that while technically she wasn’t related to him in any way, he considered her part of his family. Not really in the Sister Sledge “We are Family” sense, but more like the Captain and Tennille “Muskrat Love” sense. Jack goes on to tell him that he’ll have no problem taking each and every one of Bazhaev’s family out. Bazhaev is relieved…until he realizes Jack means that he’ll kill them, not take them on a date. Jack believes that the sniper was part of an organization named “Red Square”.

Bazhaev won’t talk, so Jack gets up to leave, telling him that his family will make a nice set of coats. Bazhaev says “Oh, THAT Red Square”, but is still worried that someone else will want to make a set of coats out of his family. Jack tells him that in the witness protection program, which is run a lot better than the people that were watching over Hasan, his family will be safe.

Bazhaev tells Jack that Moscow did it. While Jack ponders how a city would be able to carry out such a complex plan, Bazhaev goes on to explain that he meant that people in the government did it. Jack finds this a little hard to believe since nothing any government does is very organized, plus even he would have a hard time trying to kill 100,000 people from Moscow just to avenge Renee. Bazhaev tells Jack that Dana knows who set the whole thing up.

Commercial

9:19 am – Logan is headed back in his limo when he gets a phone call from Mrs. President. She tells him that the Russian foreign minster called, and he’s going to come over to sign the papers in about five hours, which is just about when the season is going to end. Logan pumps his fist in the air, hitting the roof of the limo and hurting his hand, but he retains his composure.

Ethan asks how Logan did it. Logan says, “I told them that peace was in all of our interests”, which even Ethan finds hilarious. Ethan asks again, but Logan insists, “That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Nayh, Nayh.” Logan says it’s a victory, and they should all leave it at that.

9:20 am – Jack is back on the phone with Chloe while walking down the street. He tells her that Bazhaev’s family is going to need witness protection, preferably in a nice place like Steve Martin had when he was part of the mafia. He goes on to explain that Russia was behind the whole thing and they used the terrorists to do it. If they had only been more astute and realized that an organization with such stupid initials could have never pulled something like this off, the day might have gone quite differently. Jack tells Chloe he’s coming in to talk to Dana about all this, since she was the Russian’s inside person.

9:21 am – Chloe finds Cole and after briefly discussing how closely their names resemble each other, she tells him Jack is coming in to “talk” to Renee. Chloe is worried that because of the way Jack expresses himself, Dana might not – well – live through the whole thing. She tells Cole that Jack respects him, and that he should be there when Jack “talks” to Dana. Arlo overhears this.

9:22 am – Logan arrives back at the U.N. His assistant receives a phone call. Logan gets out of the car, and when one of the Secret Service agents doesn’t genuflect in front of him, he wants the agent fired. The assistant, who still looks like Jacob from LOST, tells Logan that his contact tells him they have a big problem: Jack Bauer. If I were to guess right now, I’d say that Arlo is ALSO a mole, and passed this information along. That’s a lot of moles in CTU. They should do something about that.

Anyway, Logan’s assistant is remarkably well informed about what’s going on because he also knows that Jack is going to CTU to talk to Dana, and was asking Bazhaev about who killed Renee. They have to stop Jack Bauer.

Logan tells his assistant that Jack tried to use torpedoes on his presidency, and if it had been a ship, it would have been sunk. Right now Logan thinks his best move is to ring for an elevator, which he does, successfully.

9:24 am – At CTU, Chloe meets Jack. Chloe tells him that she didn’t tell Dana about Jack coming in to “talk” to her, because she didn’t want to give her a heads up. I think she should be more worried about Dana getting a “heads off”. Jack points out that they shouldn’t be worried about him killing Dana, because if he wanted her dead, she would already be dead. Jack is just that good.

Dana, on the other hand, has no idea what’s going on because she’s been staring straight ahead at the camera since we last saw her. Jack enters the holding cell.

Dana asks Jack one of the stupidest questions this season: “What do you want?” He tells her that Renee is dead, and by “dead”, he means “dead dead”, not “my career came on this show to die” dead.

She tells him that she’s sorry Renee is “dead dead”. That doesn’t go over as well as she probably hoped because Jack proceeds to try and make an impression of her face into the table. When that doesn’t work, he slaps her a couple of times. She tells him that she’s got an audio file and some film that she’s hidden away in the Apple iTunes store, and without the right keyword search there’s no way he’ll ever find them. She wants her immunity deal back. Jack whispers in her ear that he’ll hunt her down and kill her, no matter which network she tries to hide in after all this is over, so she better tell him the truth.

Commercial

9:32 am – Mrs. President tells Dahlia that the U.N. delegates will recognize her. Dahlia wasn’t sure why they wouldn’t, since she’s met a lot of them before. Mrs. President explains that she mean they would recognize her as the representative of Fictional Country. She thinks that’s a pretty cool trick, because Fictional Country itself won’t vote to recognize her signatory authority for another hour or so. Ethan interrupts and asks for a word. She says, “Weasel”. That happens to be the code word for ex-President Logan, who wants to see Mrs. President.

9:33 am – Logan watches a fake news broadcast about everything that’s happening in Dahlia’s fake country. When Mrs. President arrives with Ethan, Logan tells them that he thinks Jack is completely out of control. Jack’s been able to interrogate two different people way across town in the same time it’s taken Logan to have breakfast potatoes with the Russians and get back to the U.N. He tells them that Jack appears to be a wee bit upset about Renee dying. Ethan announces he loves the Wii, particularly the bowling game.

Mrs. President, who hadn’t heard about Renee’s death, seems a bit surprised they let Renee leave the show before the end of the season. She’s very upset, since she should have been able to get the same deal.

He insists on wanting to stop Jack, but Mrs. President refuses to do it without a very good reason. Logan, who’s been able to lie through his teeth and can make anything sound convincing, does the unthinkable: he tells her the truth. He tells her that the Russian government has been behind the whole thing, and not a group of writers that were unable to come up with a better plot.

Mrs. President is really, really upset. Logan insists that if Jack talks to Dana, the whole peace process will end, because the Russians will have been exposed. So to speak.

Ethan doesn’t think that Mrs. President will go along with this, just for the peace deal, but Logan is pretty insistent that she will since she won’t want to throw away a peace deal. Logan wants to be sure that Dahlia doesn’t find out about what the Russians did. Logan goes on and on about how much better the world will be. Ethan throws in a few words with his opinion about what Logan is saying, and he doesn’t like it one little bit.

While this is going on, Mrs. President doesn’t say very much, but gives a lot of meaningful glances. What they mean, nobody is really sure, but they sure look full of something. It could be indigestion though.

An assistant comes into the room to let Mrs. President know that Jack wants to talk about an immunity deal for Dana. She says she’ll call him back. Ethan tells her she really doesn’t have a choice about what to do. She tells him that she does have a choice, and only she can make it.

And, in typical “24” style, instead of picking “A” – what Logan wants, and “B” – what Ethan wants, she picks “Monkey” – She’s going to CTU to see Jack Bauer.

Commercial

9:43 am – Chloe tells Jack that Mrs. President hasn’t called back. Arlo runs into the room to say that Mrs. President is on the phone, and wants to talk to Chloe. Chloe answers, only to have Mrs. President say that she’ll be there in a few minutes. And to make sure that Jack doesn’t leave. It is unclear why she needed to make the phone call, stay on hold, and give Chloe 10 seconds worth of instructions. It’s probably a game that presidents play with new CTU directors, just to make them feel special.

Jack and Chloe can’t figure out why Mrs. President is coming to CTU. Meanwhile, Dana continues to stare at the interrogation room camera trying to melt it with her non-existent x-ray vision.

9:45 am – Mrs. President arrives already, again proving that traffic in New York doesn’t exist. Mrs. President arrives in the main area of CTU, and appears perplexed why everyone would be standing up while trying to use their computers. She tells them that, despite them letting Hasan down, she’s pretty sure they’re not going to let HER down, since she’s their president, and not some foreign president.

From the looks on their faces, nobody at CTU quite has the guts to ask who the lady was that just gave that speech.

9:46 am – She goes up to Hastings office, where she meets with Jack. She tells him that she needs him to “stand down”. Jack says he’s confused, since he’s already sitting down. Mrs. President tells him that she’s not going to sign any immunity deal for Dana, because the whole thing would jeopardize the peace process. Jack points out that it’s been more like Wheel of Fortune, since the Russians, who she’s insisting are very important to the peace process have been repeatedly hitting Bankrupt and have STILL been trying to buy a vowel. Mrs. President asks him to quit making game show references, and to look at it from her point of view. The peace process is almost signed, and it’ll just be Jim Dandy if it is. Jack says he can prove they did it, and then realizes that she doesn’t want to know the truth about the Russians. Jack tells her that he wants Justice, and she tells him that she wants peace. She tells Jack that she wants him “debriefed” at Mcguire Air Force base, which is not going to be as interesting as it sounds. She has two guards escort him out of CTU.

While they’re leaving, Chloe asks Jack want happened. He tells her, “It’s just like the rest of the hour: nothing happened.”

Commercial

9:55 am – Chloe goes up to talk to Mrs. President. Mrs. President tells her to lock down Dana, and to have no one talk to her without her express permission. Chloe points out that Dana has a lot of information. Mrs. President points out that Dana is a psychopath, which Chloe really can’t argue about, since it is… well… true. She tells Chloe that security has to be air tight for the announcement that Dahlia will be the new Fictional Country president – not Tupperware air tight – just security air tight.

9:56 am – Chloe tells Cole that nothing is happening with Dana, and that they have to set up a security detail for the U.N.

Mrs. President leaves via the very same tunnel where the EMP bomb went off a few hours ago. The CTU janitors have already cleaned up all the car and people parts from the bomb area, and the blood and guts from Dana’s attempted escape, so Mrs. President doesn’t slip in anything unfortunate.

9:57 am – Arlo tries to find out what’s happening with Jack, but Chloe won’t tell him. A helicopter lands on CTU take Jack away. Jack walks to the helicopter, and of course, pulls the escort’s gun on the guy escorting him. Chloe realizes what’s happening and tries to stop Jack. She gets on the radio and tells him that she’s going to have to try and get the Air Force to stop him. Jack just flies away. This time using the helicopter.

10:00 am – Time’s up!

NEXT TIME ON “24”: HELICOPTERS! JACK IN A GUITAR SHOP! JACK WITH A GUN! UGLY THINGS HAPPENING! BAD VIDEO~!

Personal note: Welcome to all the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop attendees that read this! I enjoyed meeting Theresa Lode, Dave Fox, Danny Gallagher, Matthew Dewal, and everyone else!

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

edit: thanks to Jeff for one correction. see if you can find it…