My wife and I are watching old seasons of 24 and we’re confused about something. We’ve watched some of the seasons out of order because we came to the party really late and watched just the previous year’s season, then went back one more season, then said we loved it so much we’d start from the beginning with Season 1.
So we’re watching Season 2 now and we just saw George Mason die in the nuclear blast. (I love the noble sacrifice. Such a poetic death.) But we thought we had seen George Mason in Season 4 (maybe 5??) as the guy who came to Jack’s rescue when he was trapped in some office building with bad guys who had killed the computer tech he was meeting to get some information. This guy helped Jack escape but got shot out in the parking lot and died there. I remember Jack telling someone at CTU that “XXX is lying dead in a parking lot” as explanation of the conspiracy he was trying to unravel.
When we saw Mason in this episode, we thought it was the same guy, but I guess our brains our muddled from screwing up the timeline. I checked some 24 episode summaries but couldn’t find the guy who was killed in the parking lot. Can anybody straighten it out for us?
I know the guy you’re talking about, vaguely, and I’m nearly 100% certain it wasn’t Xander Berkeley (who doesn’t have a credit listed for any episodes beyond Season 2 on imdb.com)–just some random redshirt. Sorry.
To be clear, I’m talking about the guy who came to help, not the computer tech that Jack was meeting. The tech definitely was a no-name redshirt. But this other guy was someone known to Jack and everyone else at CTU, and it was implied that he had a history with Jack and it was big deal that he came to help him. He had a name and everyone knew him at CTU. (Like George Mason. If someone said he was killed, everyone at CTU would know who he was.)
Maybe he wasn’t really much of a character and was just introduced with an implied history? As you say, it wasn’t Mason.
George Mason was in season 1, and then yes, he died in Season 2 – taking the plane the rest of the way into the desert, dying along with the nuke. (He was going to die anyways, due to the morning’s radiation poisoning he got).
I think the one you are thinking about who came to Jack’s (and Audrey’s) rescue was in Season 4 – when they were getting some data from surveillance tapes on a flash drive. Baddies showed up, and cornered Jack and Audrey in a garage/loading bay area. The guy who came to their rescue then was Tony Almeida (who has also been around since season 1).
However, Tony did not die in the episode I was describing above. I think you are possibly mixing a couple of episodes and incidents? There have been a number of people dying around Jack throughout, so it’s easy to get them all confused. You could be thinking of:
the CTU field agent at the start of season 4 who went with Jack, then was later detaining Jack and jad him handcuffed to a railing in a parking lot. Field agent guy got shot, mortally wounded, and Jack had to streeeeeeetch to try to get the handcuff keys from him – guy managed to get the keys close enough to Jack before he expired. That field agent was only a minor player.
With SO MANY dead agents, terrorists, redshirts, and innocent bystanders all over the place, how can anyone keep them straight?
It definitely wasn’t Tony Almeda. We know him very clearly and I know it wasn’t him. Let me give a more detailed rendering of what I remember of the scene and we’ll see if that helps:
Jack finds out about traitors or moles in CTU, then he gets a call from a computer techie who says he unwittingly stumbled across evidence showing who is involved. He’s scared and arranges to meet Jack in an office building at night, when no one else is there. They talk briefly, the guy reiterates that he’s just a humble tech who doesn’t want to be killed over this, and whammo, he’s killed by some lurking thugs. Jack realizes he’s cornered in this building and calls someone for help.
This someone is a CTU agent or director who Jack knows. (Here’s where the memory gets fuzzier: I seem to recall Jack and this guy had some sort of history, maybe they didn’t get along before but for some reason he was the person Jack called for help.) The guy shows up, helps Jack get out of the building alive and as they are in the parking lot trying to leave, the bad guys drive up and start shooting. This guy stands his ground and fends off the bad guys long enough for Jack to get away, yelling at Jack to go. Jack gets away but this guy dies in the process.
Jack was grateful but I think he didn’t mention the guy’s death right away because he was still investigating the corruption in CTU. Later on, when he’s describing the scope of the problem to someone in CTU, he mentions that XXX is lying dead in a parking lot as evidence of what has been happening.
So I recalled it being George Mason, but obviously it wasn’t since he died much earlier. Maybe I’m confabulating the two because the relationship with Jack seemed to be the same – grudging respect for each other even though they had their run-ins in the past.
As I said before, this guy may not have even been a fully developed character. He might have been a one-episode guy.
Thanks, but I had checked that guide already. It wasn’t that computer hacker friend of Chloe’s.
But anyway, we’ve firmly established that it wasn’t George Mason, which is what we originally thought. So okay, it was just some other dead body that Jack Bauer left in his wake. If I saw Jack coming, I’d run like hell. All kinds of wild shit follows that guy.
In that case – I think you’re back in season 1, second episode. Episode Summary
But if this is the one, then you have Jack’s role reversed with the guy who died.
The agent who dies is Richard Walsh, and it’s Walsh who goes to the downtown office to meet with the lowly techie, Scott. The guy gives Walsh a keycard (evidence about the plot against Palmer). Scott wants to join his family (who he sent away after finding evidence). He reluctantly agrees to be available to help Walsh for the next 24 hours. They are attacked, and Scott killed. Walsh calls Jack for help.
Jack goes to the building to try to help and rescue Walsh. They kill some baddies in the building. At the end of the episode, they are heading out of the building, coming out of the parking garage, and Walsh is shot – he hands off the keycard to Jack before he dies.
So if this is the incident you meant, it was actually Jack trying to go to Walsh’s aid. And Walsh was a higher-up agent in CTU, and I think one who Jack considered a pretty close and trusted friend.
BTW, the above would also fit with the Walsh scene I just described. The keycard apparently had evidence that somebody on the inside was involved with a plot against Palmer. Walsh told Jack to take the keycard to Jamey, who would be able to analyze it with her computer and find out who encrypted the info on the card. Jack sends her the info confidentially, and it comes back apparently as being encrypted by Nina Myers (at the end of episode 2).
He spends some of the next episode trying to investigate and verify this, so he doesn’t tell people at his own office about Walsh’s death right away (except for Jamey when he called her – and told her to have Division get a crew out there quickly to clean up the bodies).