Previously on 24: Dubaku started to rethink his subscription to the dating site “eTerrorist”; Chloe thought the FBI had been sabotaged when she found out someone had installed Vista on all their computers, and she was right; Olivia, the presidential daughter, went running back to her mother and father when she realized that if they died, her lobbyist career would take a real hit; Jack and Renee convinced Marika that acting as a decoy for Dubaku could in no way end up badly; Janis started messing with computers when Chloe was in the room, trying to save her phony baloney job, not realizing she just took her life into her own hands; Agent Aaron showed up, quite possibly because a certain ex-First Lady is driving him nuts; Sean was revealed as The Mole, and thought he was kicking off another great season at ABC, but unfortunately for him this is FOX, where Jack does all the kicking.
5:00 pm – Sean’s girlfriend Erika brings evidence of the warrant that stopped Jack at the police barricade last hour, and it turns out she’s in on Sean’s Evil Plot too. Sean tells her that he bugged the phone that Larry is using, and she flips her lid until she realizes he’s talking about surveillance equipment, not roaches.
5:01 pm – Jack and Renee continue to argue with the police that they really are the good guys and are chasing down terrorists. Unfortunately, this is the exact same excuse that hundreds of motorists in the DC area use every day, and the police aren’t buying it. After they get thrown in the police car, Renee points out that Marika is going to have a tough time dealing with Dubaku without Jack.
5:05 pm – Marika meets Dubaku, who gets really upset that she’s got a Palm Pre when he doesn’t. He tries to tell her that he’s completely misunderstood, and that he’s only a part-time psycho-killer from a fictional country. Marika realizes this all might be a silly mistake, goes along with Dubaku, and leaves with him in a car.
5:06 pm – The police release Jack and Renee, after getting word that Jack and Renee shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place. Renee is so excited that she asks for Sting’s autograph. Jack has to pull her aside to tell her that these police aren’t the police she’s thinking of.
She takes a phone call from Agent Larry who says he feels like a goofball, because Marika’s phone went dead about 3 minutes ago. Renee says that’s probably because it’s a first generation iPhone with one of those lousy batteries. Chloe gets onto her computers and they find Dubaku’s car via one of the traffic camera websites she subscribes to. After announcing they found the car, and fulfilling their product placement obligations with Jeep, they tell Jack where the car is heading.
5:07 pm – Marika looks remarkably calm for someone driving around with guy who likes blowing up planes. Dubaku continues to sweet talk her saying that he really wants to spend time with people he cares about, and with children who have machine guns, because he feels a lot more at ease in those sorts of situations. Marika does look a little worried still.
5:08 pm – Jack and Renee follow Dubaku’s car long enough and in enough traffic that jack finally snaps. He goes four wheeling in a downtown park. There’s a brief car chase until a traffic accident stops Jack’s car, which baffles Jack so much that he tells Renee to get on to of the car to see if that helps.
Marika finally realizes that things aren’t going to according to plan, and shows the driver the palm of her hand, in a very up close and personal way. This completely baffles the driver. He turns the wheel for a better look, and accidentally has an accident. The car flips several times. Jack gets so excited by this, that he runs towards the Jeep and shoots the driver to celebrate. Jack grabs Dubaku. The car’s on fire and Renee goes after Marika to save her… They argue briefly about the role of minor characters on “24” until Renee convinces Jack to help get Marika out of the car before it explodes. They get her out of the car just in time for the car to do its impression of a Pinto wagon, and they’re thrown to the ground. Jack and Renee are hurt, but Marika doesn’t feel a thing, because she’s already dead.
Commercial
5:16 pm – At the hospital, Ethan talks about various things that are going on around the world, while Mrs. President has a staring contest with a wall. She blames herself for what happened to Henry, since she didn’t believe what he was saying all this time about their son’s murder. She says she’ll have to rethink all those times he told her about the Illuminati.
Bill comes into the room to inform them that Dubaku has been captured, his subplot is ending. Bill also says the bigger subplot about the government conspiracy in her administration is going to be harder to figure out without Dubaku. Bill wants her to go someplace safer, telling the president she shouldn’t expose herself. Ethan starts to say that he wouldn’t mind seeing that, but is interrupted when Mrs. President tells Bill that she might expose herself even more at the White House. She finally agrees to leave the hospital, because Henry’s subplot isn’t due to go critical for a while longer.
5:18 pm – Back out at the accident scene, people are busy covering up bodies with yellow plastic wrap in the latest Cristo performance art piece. Jack yells at a couple of paramedics to wake up Dubaku, because he thinks Dubaku is faking a coma. They inject the drugs into Dubaku, who finally wakes up. Jack threatens Dubaku’s family unless he talks. Dubaku tells Jack that he has a “list”, that he checked it twice, and it turns out everyone on that list is naughty. Then he passes out, going into cardiac arrest. The paramedics zap Dubaku a couple of times, bringing him back, while finding a metal plate in his chest.
Jack takes great interest in the plate, and he gets the paramedics to open Dubaku’s chest up. They find an electronic storage device that Dubaku kept under his skin. This kept it safe, but made it extra hard to explain to airport security, and really inconvenient to read with a computer.
Jack gives the device to an Agent who is going to bring it to Larry. Jack gives strict instructions that only Larry should get that device.
5:23 pm – Sean hears this, panics and runs into the woman’s bathroom. He’s able to cover up for this by taking advantage of the fact that Erika happens to be in there washing her hands. Sean tells her that Jack found Dubaku’s database, and things aren’t completely under control. Erika completely freaks out, saying that she really doesn’t want to go to prison, because it’s “icky”. Sean tells her that all he has to do is install Windows 95 on all the computers when Chloe tries to read the Dubaku database, and that should keep anyone from reading it. Erika suggests they tie the main servers together. Sean tells her that it would be a lot easier if they logged into the computers to destroy them, and she agrees. They share an evil kiss, and leave the bathroom.
Commercial
5:30 pm – Jack, Renee and Dubaku are that the hospital. Renee either got a wound on the neck, or is now self-conscience about a Larry hickey – either way, she has a bandage on her neck. Jack informs her that Chloe now has the device, and as soon as she cleans off the Dubaku gunk on it, she’ll be able to find out what’s on it.
Renee takes this opportunity to point out that Marika is dead. Jack tries to explain that minor characters die on the show ALL THE TIME. Renee still isn’t used to this, and decides to give Jack a hard time about it. Jack completely ignores her taunting.
5:31 pm – Larry gives Chloe the storage device. She realizes that she doesn’t have any Norton Delete File Recovery tool on the system she’s on, since it’s a Macintosh. If the drive gets erased somehow, it’s going to be impossible to read through the inodes in the file system to recover it because they’re not using a journaling file system. Larry is baffled by this, but says “OK” anyway. Chloe starts the download of the data.
Meanwhile, Erika is in the server room plugging in a lot of cables that have nothing to do with the task at hand. Sean comes in and watches some of the security cameras that are all over the facility (EXCEPT in the server room) to make sure that Larry and Chloe don’t sneak up on them.
Sean gets a call on his cell phone. He tells Burnett that Dubaku has been captured, the FBI has the database, and that everything will be OK, despite appearances. Sean says he’ll take care of erasing the database, and all Evil Travel Agent has to do is kill Dubaku.
Sean hangs up after hearing Erika freak out about why the computer isn’t formatting. She solves this by “configuring parameters”, causing the screen to go green, which is the universal indication that the drives are being reformatted.
Chloe realizes this, and she and Larry go running off to the server room.
Sean takes this opportunity to shoot Erika in the stomach, and himself in the arm and he slides the gun over to Erika. Since Sean doesn’t do this every day, he doesn’t realize it’s going to be a little tough to explain how both he and Erika got shot when there’s only one gun, and Erika seems to be the one that had it.
Larry asks what’s going on, besides the obvious dead Erika on the floor. Sean tells him that “The Dead Erikas” would be a good name for a rock band, and then starts speaking in fancy computer jargon, which baffles Larry. Chloe doesn’t look as convinced. She is convinced that the computer has been completely reformatted, taking all of Dubaku’s files with it.
Commercial
5:40 pm – Sean and Larry are in the FBI infirmary where Larry tells Sean all the things that Jack told Larry not to tell anyone. Larry feels this is safe because there’s no way that what happened in the server room looks at all suspicious.
Larry gets a phone call from Chloe who tells him that she was able to recover all the files because she was running a very recent version of SVN, and everything has been saved. The files were being decrypted all during the last commercial break, and she has everything. She continues to work on this while Larry waits.
Larry takes this opportunity to tell Sean that everything is fine, since Chloe saved the files. Sean takes this opportunity to leave the room as fast as possible, since he knows his name is going to be on that list.
5:43 pm – Sean works his way out of the building, and is accosted by Janis one last time. He looks just like anyone else would in this situation, very happy to get away from Janis.
He continues to try and leave the building, but is finally stopped by security. Larry slams him into the wall, briefly considers torturing him with Janis. Sean asks for a lawyer, and Larry backs down. Jack would never have backed down, but well Larry just has him hauled away to a holding cell.
Larry calls Bill.
5:45 pm – Marika’s sister, Rosa, finds Renee at the hospital, where Renee tells her “Marika didn’t make it. Marika is dead.” She says, “I don’t understand”. Renee explains what dead means, and hands Rosa Marika’s watch. This doesn’t go over as well as Renee hoped, because Rosa really doesn’t want that watch.
Jack calls Renee over to let her know they have the names of everyone involved in the conspiracy, and that they’re going to have a giant arrest party soon. Renee tells him that she’s very upset about Marika. She asks Jack if he’s human, if he feels anything, asks if he feels anything. She slaps him a couple of times. She tries a third time, but Jack stops her, which is a good thing, because otherwise he would have had to shoot her. Jack leaves.
Commercial
5:52 pm – Mrs. President walks into a room where Olivia is waiting and explains what happened with Henry. Olivia wants to go see her father, but Mrs. President grounds her, and doesn’t let her leave the White House. Olivia says something snotty, and the President leaves.
5:54 pm – Bill tells Mrs. President, “I have very good news”. She says, “You can save me money on my car insurance?”. Bill says, “No, but we did get a list of people involved in the Dubaku conspiracy.” Turns out there are over 100 people on the list, and they should be making arrests within the hour. Bill points out that Jack was instrumental to getting this list, and asks that Jack not have to testify at the congressional hearing. Mrs. President shows her gratitude by saying “I’ll think about it.”.
5:56 pm – Jack sits on some steps at the capital, enjoying the view when Tony comes by. Tony tells Jack there’s going to be another attack soon, and Dubaku’s boss, Juma, is behind this one and things are going to start happening at 7pm. Tony only knows it’s going to be “high volume, and high impact”. It seems that the same senator that has been giving Jack a hard time at the congressional hearing has someone on his staff that has been working with Juma! Boy, is he going to be surprised to find that out! Tony’s going to go after him.
Tony tells Jack that he needs Jack’s help.
5:59 pm – Senator Mayer (also known as Senator Red Foreman) gets called to the White House, and questions that timing of the situation. Mayer wants Burnett to come with him to the White House. After the Senator leaves, Burnett gets a text message saying “Units in place. Operation on schedule.” Something tells me Burnett doesn’t want to be anywhere near the White House. Probably the look on Burnett’s face. Well, that and the previews.
6:00 pm – Time’s up!
NEXT TIME ON “24”: JACK YELLS! ATTACKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE! TWO HOURS! LOTS OF BLOGGING! WAITING AROUND EVEN LONGER THAN USUAL FOR STEVE TO GET THE SUMMARY FINISHED! BE HERE IN A WEEK TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS!