PREVIOUSLY ON 24: We learned that: Nuclear weapons make people stand up when they watch TV; Jack probably taught MacGyver how to use television antennas to save people from helicopters; It’s been so long since Gray (Hollywood Looking Guy from last season) has seen his brother Jack, that he can’t even remember Jack’s first name; If Jack asks you “Paper or Plastic”, always pick paper.
The following summary takes place between 11 am and 12 pm:
11:00 am – Wayne has been speaking on TV since last week and finally wraps everything up by telling the country that everyone faces a grave crisis…. Are there zombies out already in Valencia? Haig overhears Lennox’s plans, for conquest of the US without clearing it with Wayne, and doesn’t like it very much. They launch into speeches at each other, which hopefully gets it out of the way for the rest of the show, which we hope will involve thigh shots. Lennox plots to get Haig out of the way with one of his lackeys.
11:02 am – Over at CTU, Nadia pretends to type at a computer, and runs to Bill to ask about profiling, since anyone with a mideastern background has to do a double super secret login, plus they all need special decoder rings now. Bill tells Nadia that Chloe handles all the programming issues, but that using “gprof” will probably help her. Nadia asks how she’s supposed to work with one hand tied behind her back, and Bill says he bets that she still can type faster than most people. Bill asks about Jack, and Nadia says they haven’t heard from him, other than a requisition for a case of head-sized plastic bags.
11:03 am – Gray, who has been holding his breath since last week, starts crying that he doesn’t know where Jack’s dad is, when the bag is finally pulled off. Gray denies everything, until Jack shows him the bag again, and suddenly Gray magically remembers every single detail about the nuclear weapons. Turns out that Jack’s dad is into nuclear weapon recycling, and that Gray made a giant boo-boo by hiring the lowest bid contractor, who accidentally turned out to be a terrorist. Gray probably would have noticed that if he had read the guy’s business card a little more carefully.
11:06 am – Gray really insults Jack by telling him that “What we are were going to do would be a lot more effective than what you and your people were going to do.” Wasn’t Gray paying attention to all the explosive terrorists, thigh shots, and general mayhem that Jack caused last season? Oh, well, it has been a while since Jack was away at Chinese prison, so maybe he forgot. Jack’s dad is out looking for the nuclear weapons, handing out flyers and posting signs on telephone poles. Jack tells Gray that he’s coming along for the ride, since he’s fresh out of people to drive him around.
11:09 am – Mrs. Gray is taking this opportunity to watch another shot of the expensive nuclear blast special effect, never noticing that Gray and Jack were making lots of noise just a few feet away in another room. Gray and Jack leave.
11:10 am – Jack calls Chloe and asks if she’s picked up any threads, and Chloe tells him that she’s heard of “Pick Up Sticks”, but never of “Pick Up Threads”. Jack tells her to send a few field units out into the field, and to wait for him there, because he gets cranky if there is shooting going on, and he’s not involved.
Commercial
11:15 am – Milo tells everyone that the nuclear explosion, which seems to have burned out the picture on the LCD in the briefing room, is making it hard to find Fayed. Bill tells him that’s because the way this normally works is that they send a lot of people out into the field and come up empty; then Jack eventually calls in to announce that he’s single-handedly figured out where the bad guy is. Chloe comes in and tells Bill that Jack has asked for a couple of field units to be sent out into the field, and Bill tells Milo that this is what he’s been waiting for.
11:16 am – While Jack is driving around corners at top speed, Gray is trying to convince Jack that getting CTU involved is going to involve “the family”, which is apparently the Bauer mafia. Jack tells Gray to “trust him”, which is Jack code for “you could be dead soon”.
11:17 am – Bill calls Jack. Jack says that his father is involved with the nuclear weapons through McCarthy. Bill jumps to the conclusion that Jack’s father had nothing to do with the nuclear weapons being sold, and Jack points out that might not be a good assumption, but that they’ll have to wait for a little later in the show to find out if this turns into a real plot twist. Bill tells Jack to have fun shooting people, and to call him back when he finds out anything.
11:18 am – McCarthy is on the phone with a nuclear weapon engineer recruiter looking for someone that can activate nuclear weapons. The search on Monster has come up with nothing so far. His girlfriend starts complaining, and he finally pulls over saying that he doesn’t need “negativity” and needs “his space”, just like Dr. Phil always recommends. The phone rings, and Fayed wants to know if he’s found an engineer. McCarthy tells him it’s harder to find an engineer right now than before the Internet bubble hit, and hangs up on Fayed.
11:19 am – Back at the detention center, the FBI guy is showing Sandra his vacation slides when a picture of what’s going out in the courtyard comes up. He’s telling her that he’s going to post the pictures to the Web, and get CTU to look at them.
11:19 am – Milo instantly gets the pictures on his screen, and tries to go to Morris to get him to look at it. Morris tells him to talk to Nadia. Milo tries to get information from Nadia that he needs, and she tells him to go talk to Bill. Milo says he feels like he’s trapped in an old MASH episode.
11:20 am – Milo talks to Bill about Nadia, and Bill tells him that Nadia’s been flagged by a Homeland Security memo. Milo launches into a mini-speech, until Bill stops him and tells him to get back to work.
11:21 am – Bill calls Haig and asks if she got the memo. Haig says that she did, and that she promises to have a cover sheet on her next TPS report. Haig says she’s going to try and tell Wayne about Lennox.
11:22 am – Back at detention center, Walid faces away from the rest of the detainees, trying to hide the very visible earplug that the FBI put in his left ear last hour. He casually asks if everyone is from around there, where there kids go to school, and whether they know any homicidal nuclear terrorists. They all look at him funny for a couple of seconds, and then go on as if Walid asking questions like this is perfectly normal. They reveal that one of them has a cell phone that went completely undetected by the guards, and Walid says that he doesn’t even want to know where that thing was when it was smuggled into the detention center.
11:24 am – Back at the White House bunker, Lennox’s lackey comes up with a list of things he can blackmail Haig with, including video of her playing Solitaire on her computer, the late lunches she’s been taking, and the fact that Bill might have let Fayed go when he was in CTU custody 14 months ago. He wants Haig out of the way. Haig tells Lennox that he has skeletons his in closest too, and he tells her that his skeletons are out of the closest and living in San Francisco now, so there’s nothing she can do about it.
He wants Haig to resign within the hour.
Commercial
11:31 am – Morris wants to know why Nadia is taking so long, and Milo says he’s running a background downloads on her system, so everything has slowed down a lot. Milo logs Nadia in using his user id.
11:34 am – Haig goes to Wayne and asks for some time to speak with him. Since Wayne only has to worry about a nuclear weapon that just went off and a four more that are in the country, he of course says he has time to talk. Haig hands in her resignation, which Wayne doesn’t accept at first. Haig presses the point, and then butters him up a bit so that he’ll give her a good reference. She asks to be transferred to Los Angeles and then leaves. Wayne looks pretty bummed out. Lennox’s lackey bumps into her in the hallway, tries to get her autograph, and she declines. The lackey calls Lennox to tell him this, and in a first ever, we see that one of the real jerks on TV isn’t using a Windows laptop, he’s using a Mac.
Commercial
11:40 am – Jack and Gray look like they’re car shopping, but Jack’s on the phone with Chloe trying to find the car that McCarthy might be using. Chloe asks Jack what to do with the back-up teams that are “in a two block radius”, and tells Jack that she can’t use the term “perimeter” right now, because it’s “still too soon”. Jack says he understands. Jack and Gray go into an office building marked “Nuclear Weapons Traders”.
11:42 am – Back at the detention center, Walid watches the guy with the cell phone wander around the yard saying “Can you hear me now?” but no one can. In an incredible (and by that I mean “not at all credible”) feat of acrobatics, we find out that Walid also happens to be an excellent pickpocket, because he stumbles and grabs that guy’s cell phone away from him. He talks to the FBI using the wire he had implanted last hour, and the FBI asks him to call for carry out because it’s nearly noon. They also ask him to dial a number, press star twice, and turn around three times on one foot. The FBI says after that, he should just “put the phone back”. Chloe instantly gets everything from the phone after Walid dials it (because she’s just that kinda high tech girl we all know and love). The FBI instructs Walid to get the phone back to the guy he stole it from. He goes over to talk to the rest of the detainees, but can’t quite seem to figure out what kind of small talk to make.
11:44 am – Chloe is searching through the data when a skull appears on her screen, which doesn’t freak her out at all. Stuff like that happens to Chloe every day. She calls The FBI guy and tells him that the stuff on the phone is useless. The guys in the courtyard have been reading blogs, so the data is essentially worthless. She also says she’s horrified that anyone would be browsing the web with such a small phone with such a tiny screen. Sandra takes the opportunity to start making a speech, and the FBI guy urgently calls someone on his radio to tell them they’re going to extract Walid from the yard.
11:46 am – Meanwhile, out in the courtyard, the guy that was so proud for smuggling the phone in realizes that he hasn’t been obsessing about having it for the last couple of minutes, and can’t find the phone. Walid says that he doesn’t have it, but the cell phone guy is pretty quick on the uptake, and tells everyone to search Walid. They find the phone, and start using Walid as a punching bag, proving that whomever the FBI called is really slow at performing extractions. This all goes on for a short while until the guards all start running up, and the FBI guy finally calls for medical assistance. Sandra tries to talk to Walid, and he says that’s the last time he agrees to THAT.
Commercial
11:51 am – One of the CTU backup team guys calls Chloe to let her know that even though Jack has been at the McCarthy building for a long time, they finally just got there. These guys must be new, because Chloe tells them to watch all the entrances and exits to the building.
11:52 am – Inside the building, Jack reprograms an electronic door lock without the aid of any tools whatsoever, and he and Gray go inside the room. After 52 minutes, we FINALLY see a gun, which fortunately Jack is holding. Jack starts going through a conveniently placed computer and realizes that it has some kind of bizarre operating system on it that puts all the file access in a series of cascading menus. The files can’t be accessed because someone has started to scramble and delete them all. Jack hears a noise in the next room, so he does what any brother would do. He chains Gray to some furniture and goes to investigate.
11:54 am – Jack looks around, making lots of noise as he goes and gets into a fight with someone. Jack is just about to do a thigh shot when someone comes up from behind and hits him in the back of the head. The guy is just about to shoot Jack dead when Zefram Cochrane comes out of the next room and tells the guy not to shoot, because this is a little “Clouseau and Cato” game that he and Jack like to play.
11:55 am – Jack asks for his gun back, and gives the keys to one of the guys that tried to beat him up while Zefram explains that he’s been working on a warp engine design with McCarthy and things got WAY out of hand.
11:57 am – Jack tells his father that he’s looking for the nuclear weapons, and that if Gray has to go to prison, that’s Gray’s problem. Gray comes back and starts to smart talk Jack a bit, and says just the wrong thing (he mentions Jack’s dead wife), which really gets Jack upset and he nearly punches Gray in the face. Jack’s father must have been REALLY busy when these two were kids. Jack’s dad finally tells Jack to call CTU, when a plot twists happens while Jack is off guard – his dad’s thugs turn out to be Gray’s thugs! They have a gun on Jack and his dad now! Gray and the thugs take Jack and his dad out of the building.
11:58 am – Meanwhile, the special effect that went off a couple of hours ago is dissipating quickly, so they show one more shot of it while they can. McCarthy and his girlfriend are on a hotel walkway. McCarthy is on the phone trying to get a room upgrade when he realizes he accidentally dialed the recruiter that’s looking for an engineer that can enable the weapons, who has found a guy he thinks they can force to do the job.
11:59 am – Downstairs in the lobby, Gray and the thugs start to take Jack and his father outside when everyone notices that the two new CTU back-up team guys are going to need back-up teams themselves, because they’re dead. Gray tells the thugs to call him when “it’s done”, and they load Jack and his dad into a van. Jack looks VERY disappointed that he didn’t hit Gray when he had the chance.
12:00 pm – Time’s up!
NEXT TIME: JACK SHOOTS SOME BAD GUYS! THE RETURN OF THE DISSIPATING SPECIAL EFFECT! JACK GETS TO BEAT UP GRAY SOME MORE!
Be sure and catch all of Steve’s summaries of Season 6 of “24”!