Tommy Flanagan, eh? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
A little OT, here, but - the Grandson of Tommy Douglas and now Janeane Garofalo being on a show that I have sensed of the above seems really odd. Is it supposed to be an inside joke, or something?
I really enjoyed this episode once I suspended my disbelief as always. I’m not sure what part was the best–the ambassador being smart enough to lock himself in the safe room but dumb enough not to try to cover the vent or at least hold his breath OR the villainous Snidley Whiplash-y evil double agent Secret Service agent revealing his evil plans in their entireity to the President’s husband while he laid paralyzed on the floor. Evil Secret Service agent was all but twirling his mustache while laughing, “Mwahahaha!”
I also enjoyed Jack’s “sucks to be you!” look while he was covering up the FBI agent’s face with dirt. :eek:
So far nothing too terribly idiotic that it would make me stop watching (as in previous years, when I’d usually bail before the 12th hour), but a hardened terrorist like Emerson should know that a point-blank bullet to the head is going to look quite messy (much messier than the grazing shot Jack actually fired), but the viewership probably is not going to quibble about that too much. TVTropes has a name for that, Pretty Little Headshots.
Actually, I think it was supposed to be a neck shot. If Jack was going to fake a bloodless headshot, he could have just missed her.
-Joe
Cute redhead FBI agent is going to be real pissed about the scar when this is all over.
I’m having trouble getting into this season of 24 because Jack’s actions just seem idiotic. He starts the day facing a Senate investigation because he tortured certifiable bad guys in order to save the nation from a nuclear disaster. Realistically, the worst thing they’d do to him is take away his pension and maybe give him six months in a minimum security prison. After which there’d be a discrete Presidential pardon and a cushy sinecure job in some beltway thinktank. But now he’s gassed and kidnapped the head of a foreign country (and kidnapped an FBI agent just for good measure). This is gonna be awful hard to explain away on the flimsy pretext that “I wanted to find the bad guy with the gadget and I didn’t trust the FBI.”
It’s hard to figure out how the bad guys managed to co-opt and corrupt so many people in the service of Mad African Dictator. So far we’ve got at least 2 FBI agents, a couple of Secret Service agents, the usual hordes of ridiculously prepared and technically competent terrorists, and one high-level official (the President’s advisor?). Really, it would be harder on 24 to find someone who * isn’t * in the pay of the bad guys.
Dude, nothing about this plot makes sense. Presumably, African dictator dude wants the US to stay out of Sangala. To this end, they’ve stolen/manufactured the CID device to blackmail the POTUS into withdrawing the troops. But it’s a pointless threat. The prez has no reason to withdraw troops as long as Dubaku’s henchman has possession of the CID. It’s like being in a Mexican stand off and putting your gun down. Even if she did withdraw, he still has the device and she has no assurance he won’t use it anyway. Not to mention the message it sends to other terrorists.
But if he actually uses the device, he’s effectively screwed, because there’s no way the US wouldn’t invade after an attack on our soil, regardless of whether there was someone to take over from evil dictator Dubaku. He was better off just taking his chances without resorting to blackmail. :smack:
Hmmmm…you’re 100% right. Never thought about it that way.
Technically, I think it’s only blackmail when it’s in writing.
…
-Joe
Palmer would undoubtedly pardoned him, but this was written when Hillary was a sho in, and the current President is supposed to be a bleeding heart pinko liberal, Hero (Jack) hating Hillary analogue.
Apparently, all calls out of the FBI building show up as “F.B.I.” on caller ID. Or maybe the security guard just happened to have that extension in his address book.
My guess is that the silent clock at the end is just to mess with viewers and make the cliffhanger more plausible. If not, though, buried alive is a pretty sucky way to go.
Also, no Chloe or Bill this episode. That’s disappointing.
Especially in light of recent events in the 24 Universe, with a corrupt chief executive for starters. There would have been a massive witch-hunt for anybody who didn’t have a squeaky-clean rep, not an open door for all sorts of shady characters to infiltrate the government.
Again not bad enough for me to bail…yet. I’ve promised myself to try to stick it out to the bitter end this time.
That’s the sort of thing that’s easy to suspend disbelief for, though. It’s a pretty standard trope, and even though it’s patently absurd, it’s always entertaining. 
The President’s husband’s stupidity was pretty annoying, though. Not to mention Samantha whats-her-name’s. You have critical information detailing a vast conspiracy, so what do you do? You immediately go under the radar so that if they get to you, too, nobody you know and trust will have any idea where you are or what you’re doing. :dubious:
Of course, this happens to every single poor schmuck in the 24-verse who happens across such data. They inevitably fall into the clutches of the very people they’re hiding the data from.
You’d think that one of these times they’d manage to catch the one guy who isn’t in on the plot, and who immediately says “shit, dude, you should probably make some backups of this stuff. And put a copy in a safe deposit box. And add some instructions to forward the contents to every media outlet in the country if you don’t check up on it, say, within 24 hours. Hell, rename the file ‘horny lesbian cheerleader orgy XIV’ and bittorrent that bad boy; you’ll have a hundred thousand copies all over the country within an hour.”
But nope. Instead they always confide in the guy who says “have you told anyone else?” And we all know where that goes.
These guys take “genre blindness” to new heights. :smack:
This is definitely the stupidest part of this season’s plot. With that kind of threat leveled against you, there’s realistically only one option you can choose, and “giving in” isn’t it. Anybody with an ounce of brains can see that.
The correct thing to do would be to disconnect and decentralize as much of the infrastructure as possible, and completely open up whatever communications systems you can, since with this Magic McGuffin in the hands of the bad guys, secrecy becomes more dangerous than the alternative. These measures should mitigate the damage of any future attacks considerably. Then you issue an ultimatum to Duhboohoo and Jumanji: hand over the device or you and your regime are screwed six ways from Sunday. In fact, your regime is screwed six ways from Sunday no matter what you do: hand over the device if you want the “comfy ex-tinpot-dictator house arrest plan” instead of the “summary execution by cruise missile plan”.
Even a crazy dictator should be able to see that leveling that kind of threat is a no-win situation: you make yourself far too dangerous to be allowed to live, no matter what the costs. Far from presenting President Taylor with a dilemma, this would have made the decision extremely easy for her.
So, in part, I was pleased that she seemed to be making the right decision in this episode. Sure, she inexplicably seems to think it was a hard choice, but at least she has the right idea.
Son of a bitch! I spent a week and a half debating about whether or not to commit to this season, finally gave in and spent the last two nights watching all five hours. I was just starting to think I’d enjoy it, and now I read this and realize it all falls apart already. :smack:
On the other hand, there is Chloe, and I fell in love with Garofalo years ago, so I’ll stick around for the eye candy.
I disagree. Giving in is not like putting your gun down, because the President would still have access to the biggest fucking gun in history: the U.S. military. Even if she orders them to stood down, they could easily assemble another Kick-Your-Ass force should there even be a hint that Bad African Guy reneged on the deal. And it would be a hungry, vengeful Kick-Your-Ass force, as opposed to a Save-The-Innocent-Africans force.
That said, I do agree that the only reasonable choice for the President is to give him the finger and launch a full-scale invasion of this government that has effectively already declared war on the U.S.
Hey, I can’t comment on “24”, but I just popped in here to see if anyone would be kind enough to get the “Lost” threads going. I’m just too busy these days to do them. Seems like there is a lot of overlap in viewship, so I figured there would be enough “Lost” fans in here to pick up the slack.
Thanks.
The bad guy can crash planes at will, shut down power plants, open damns, etc. I think at the very best, her re election possibilities are slim. It isn’t a one shot deal, it’s an ongoing threat. If he is going to be removed from power, he will go for broke and shut down everything before he boards the helicopter to flee to safety in Itsibitsyland.
But while they’re only talking about planes (because that’s what he’s hit so far), I imagine all of the other essential systems are being pulled back as much as they can be as well. Then, like the NSA guy said, the firewall can be locked down with new code in six days.
Juma’s no fool (he’s played by the Candyman after all), any 24verse President would turn Itsibitsyland into a parking lot long before those six days are up.
The CIP device is useless as anything more than a stall. The 24 writers of season one knew that with Ira Gaines and his crew before the reveal of the bigger bad.
Well, they need some way for Jack to ensure that Agent Rowrrr stays alive. After all, those two are destined to hook up, if not by 8 AM tomorrow, then by 8 PM the following evening.
Although I figured that if Emerson decided to do the deed himself (or come over to inspect the “body” (and a fine body it is…)), Jack would just switch to “Plan B”.
What’s Plan B? That would be to blow away Emerson and his whiny sidekick, have Tony do further communications with Nichols – he would claim that the FBI chick almost escaped, and killed Emerson in the process, before they killed her, and now Tony’s running their side of the operation, since Emerson’s gone. At least his name’s been known enough inside Emerson’s organization long enough that this might convince Nichols to accept him as the new leader of the operation, since their captive is already on the way.
Or maybe they’ll just do that next week.
On the note of Agent Rowrrr… anybody else notice that they did the “silent clock” at the end? They’re trying to screw with us, aren’t they? I’m sure not too many of us believe that she’s really dead, after the pains Jack’s taking to keep her alive. So if they really wanted to throw a not-so-expected twist at the audience, they’d actually kill her off from being buried alive. But… I hope not… Rowrrrr!
Good points. Although being a power-hungry warlord-madman, Logical Reasoning is probably not one of the courses he studied in Warlord School.
Now that’s the smartest idea yet for ensuring that the secret conspiracy-revealing data will survive! And most likely, some random computer geek with lots of time on his hands will have it all decrypted before the Feds even got started on it.
In an earlier episode, they said it would take 6 days to re-build the firewall, blah blah technobabble blah… SO, in 6 days they can have things fixed up so that the CIP device thingy is no longer a threat, right? Okay, here’s one other option. Back down the troops for now, make General Crazypants think he’s made his point, rebuild your infrastructure, and in 6 days send the military back in and turn their regime into Jell-O.
Of course, they have the whole “bad guys heading in to slaughter an innocent village” thing going on. But still… you can wipe out their regime next week, if you have to.