Jack Bauer has spent a lot of his career protecting various Presidents of the United States. So the idea of assisting a sure death would be something of anathema to him.
Still, there he was in Monday’s episode of “24: Live Another Day” piloting a helicopter to Wembley as planned, so President Heller could do one final selfless act as President – turning himself over to terrorist Margot Al-Harazi so she can stop her plan to blow up London with the U.S. drones she’s pirated.
And in the final seconds of the 6 o’clock hour, he was targeted in the empty stadium at the 50 yard line and blown into smithereens
It happened so close to 7 that nobody had time to react. Or surely Jack would have said, “Dammit!”
Much of the episode was given up to Heller’s resolve about his swan song. He told his chief of staff just to keep the secret service out of the way. He went to visit his daughter Audrey and had a nostalgic moment. And he shared a laugh with Jack about the latter’ surgical skills when he removed the presidential transponder from beneath his skin (the What?!?).
One of his main excuses was that his Alzheimer’s was about to be reported anyway; he’d be useless in office and unable to recognize people in a year, he claimed.
Before this, they did what they could to work the other angle: Finding out from the bus-hit daughter Simone the location of her mother the terrorist (wait, I feel a sitcom title coming on).
The doctors were putting her under in an induced coma, but one good shot of adrenaline got Simone awake long enough to give up her mom’s address. By then Margot had already fled the mansion, possibly by enlisting the One Hour Moving Service Ltd. But they found a disc with the drone info, if they could only decipher it.
Amid all of this apocalyptic geo-global destruction, the focus back on the attempts of CIA chief Steve Navarro to tamp down a leak in his cover up on framing Kate’s husband seem like pretty small stakes.
Jordan Reed, the computer nerd who stumbled upon the irregularities earlier in the day was not killed by the assassin sent to get him. But a second confrontation didn’t leave him in a good position, though it killed the assassin.
That Navarro is working with the Wikileaks-type guy Adrian Wilson was the twist revealed at the end of last week’s episode; this week the orders continued. Since when do hacker guys run the CIA? (Illegal hacker guys I mean).
Other than intercutting the major story with the minor one, the problem with the early evening episode was the lighting – with the sky ablaze during a meeting at the Presidents’ London office early in the hour, only to become a pitch black sky for helicopter driving late in the hour.
Maybe Margot Al-Harazi’s drone had shot out the sun.
What’s next for “24″? A new President anyway. Someone has already probably put a call into Charles Logan!