I really was hoping that, just this once, they’d skip the mole subplot. But they were beating the “Kate’s husband was a spy” plot-point to death, so I’ve known since episode one that was going to be faked.
Something tells me these are Jack’s last 12 hours. Jack himself hinted at it in his pep talk with girl agent. And Kiefer Sutherland phrased something a certain way during an appearance of the Letterman show that gave me that feeling as well.
And I’m calling it now: he was talking to Chloe’s boyfriend, which is how she got picked up and interrogated by the CIA in the first place. Remember his surprise when she escaped?
“There’s always a mole” is one of those cliches that is just not true. Something like half the seasons of 24 did not have a mole in CTU, although season 1 had two, and season 2 pretended to have a mole for a while, but turned out it was someone working a sting operation with Tony Almeida.
And, interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any connection yet between whoever Navarro was on the phone with, who presumably had something to do with framing Kate’s husband, and the current terror plot. It’s also certainly possible that the person on the other end of the phone is in fact someone legitimately in Navarro’s chain of command, and there are other tricky things going on.
Overall, I thought it was a fun episode. Good action, some serious ass-kicking from Kate, a tense scene with Simone and her sister-in-law and niece, etc.
Agree w/ pretty much everything there. The “oh there’s always a mole” thing diminishes times when it turns out there wasn’t a mole per se but someone inside who was working with their own ulterior motive that was actually altruistic (or on the president’s orders or whatever).
The one thing I seriously hope they avoid here that they have done in previous seasons is the person who suddenly turns out to be a bad guy wherein it makes no gorram sense why they did anything up to that point if they had that motivation / predilection. a la James Cromwell trying to kill Jack the third time they were alone together.
It does list more moles than I remember, although a fair number of them were not the traditional cliche one-of-the-people-Jack-is-working-with-is-untrustworthy CTU moles, but either people who thought they were not moles, or moles in the white house, or other places up the chain of command.
I’d argue that no moles after Nina were closely associated with Jack until Tony, who was less a mole and more a rogue. Typically Jack’s first interaction with the mole is someone alerting him that so-and-so is acting suspicious. But there’s always someone helping the bad guys.
Yeah, that about sums it up. It’s great fun, although I am finding Mommy Dearest to be just too much. She can smack her adult children around and they still do her bidding. I’m calling it:
I don’t remember the precise line from season 2, but it was Jack to Kim: “OK, now, shoot him again sweetheart”.
Another favorite is Curtis or one of those guys walking into a room and seeing Jack standing up amid 5 or 6 dead or unconscious goons and saying “damn, Jack!”.
