(S06E03/S06E04) -- Okay. Let me catch my breath.
Seriously.
Curtis Manning is dead. (Or at least I think he's dead. He looked pretty dead.) I knew he was ticked off that the "good" terrorist, Hamri Al-Assad, got a full pardon from President Palmer II in exchange for help tracking down the "bad" terrorist, Abu Fayed, who was in possession of a suitcase nuclear bomb. And Curtis had good reason to be ticked. After Assad's people ambushed Curtis and his Army squad in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Assad himself beheaded two of the soldiers on videotape. Curtis just couldn't let Assad get away clean. So he pulled a gun on him. And Jack Bauer shot Curtis in the throat to protect Assad.
Then Jack cried. And threw up. And gave up, telling CTU chief Bill Buchanan that he was through with all this counterterrorism stuff.
Then a nuke was detonated in Los Angeles. (The Drudge Report was right in its speculation regarding the bomb.)
And, when the 24 clock got to the end of hour four, there were four more suitcase nukes floating around inside the United States.
At first, I thought that the third episode was off to a slow start, gradually increasing the suspense. The major development seemed to be Fayed's demand that the President release 110 suspected terrorists being held by the government in exchange for an end to the three-months-long terror attacks on American civilian targets. And even though Palmer deemed Fayed untrustworthy, he thought that making this deal -- over the objections of his chief of staff Tom "The Biscuit" Lennox, unusually docile in the two new episodes -- was at least, a stop-gap measure.
Another major story line of the third hour was Jack and Assad following the "handler" for the would-be LA subway suicide bomber who Jack thwarted in episode two. The duo staged a traffic accident where Jack rammed a stolen SUV into the handler's vehicle, totaling it, while Assad pulled up and offered the guy a ride. This led CTU to raid the handler's storage unit, which the handler proceeded to blow up. Amid the ruins, Jack and the CTU team found a laptop with critical information about one of the 110 suspected terrorists, a nuclear engineer, along with intel on a nuclear bomb.
Thus far into episode three, nothing overly dramatic had occurred, other than the threat of a nuclear bomb in terrorist hands.
Meanwhile, the injured suburbanite teen terrorist, Ahmed Amar decided to take his neighbors hostage, forcing the dad to pick up a device from someone (the device turned out to be the nuke's triggering mechanism) and deliver it to Fayed.
This is the point when we moved into hour four, and things got nutty.
After the dad, Ray, got the device by beating a guy's head into the ground, he demanded Ahmed release his family. Ahmed let the mom go, only to have her rebuff her husband's pleadings and Ahmed's orders not to do anything. She called the police, which eventually led Jack, Curtis and Assad to her home. Ahmed was shot by someone from the CTU tactical team, but his teenaged hostage, Scott, remembered the address to which his dad had been told to deliver the device.
As a different tactical team was dispatched to Fayed's warehouse -- where the newly freed nuclear engineer had already rigged the trigger to the nuke -- Jack learned of Curtis' history with Assad, just before Curtis put a gun to Assad's head. The trauma of shooting his colleague sent Jack over the emotional edge as he lay on the manicured grass in a California suburb, looking as lost as he did when he stepped off that Chinese plane four hours ago.
Minutes later, President Palmer and staff, as well as agents from CTU-Los Angeles, were watching a live feed as their team invaded the Fayed warehouse. And the terrorists detonated the nuke. While everyone stood there watching their monitors, mouths agape, CTU analyst Nadia Yassir translated an Arabic phrase some of the detainees in a federal lock-up facility in Washington, D.C. had been overheard uttering. It translated to "five visitors," visitors being code for weapons.
Whew!
Other story lines:
Sandra Palmer, the President's sister and attorney for the Islamic American Alliance (IAA), was freed from federal custody after she intentionally erased personnel files for her organization that the FBI wanted. But her boyfriend, Walid Al-Rezani, the head of IAA, remained in custody with other suspected terrorists. It was Walid (who I keep thinking of as Geena Davis' chief of staff from Commander in Chief) who overheard the "five visitors" phrase.
A trio of CTUers -- Chloe O'Brian, her ex Morris and analyst Milo -- had a love triangle goin' on in the midst of the insanity. At least we finally learned why Morris and Milo were acting like children in a schoolyard spat. Morris was jealous that Chloe had gone out with Milo a few years ago. When Chloe called them both on it, the bickering stopped. At least for the time being.
And yes, several folks posted comments to my season premiere post saying that I didn't mention that presidential adviser Karen Hayes and Buchanan were now married, but living on separate coasts. How this will play out in the overall story, I don't know. Remains to be seen.
So, the moral of the first four episodes? Never trust those terrorist dudes, unless of course one has been dubbed a "good" terrorist. Then it's apparently okay.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
1-16-2007 @ 12:13AM
evan said...
could you not put so many spoilers before the jump? thanks.
Reply
1-16-2007 @ 12:13AM
Anon said...
HEY.... thanks for the spoiler alert!
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1-16-2007 @ 12:17AM
Matt said...
WHEN JACK BAUER CRIES, NUCLEAR BOMBS DETONATE IN LA
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1-16-2007 @ 12:30AM
brett said...
Cry west coasters!....spoiler...aka east coast bias.
remember..i was the first to say that assad is a head of this mission
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1-16-2007 @ 12:37AM
MosquitoControl said...
I luckily watched these last week (I have a Blockbuster manager friend, he brought it home from work.)
-The season started slow, but Jack wasn't exactly Jack, so it makes sense.
-Kal Penn was a horrible casting choice. He did a good job, but to a large chunk of the 18-24 male demographic... he's Kumar. Or Taj.
-I understand the need for something big and dramatic. I understand that they ended last season with almost exclusively likeable characters. But I did not enjoy the Curtis subplot. Curtis was acting far, far, far too out of character. From the first time he looked at the Assad I turned to the people in the room with me and said "Jack is going to have to kill him." And I was right. Obviously I took a big leap saying it, but it was literally from the first seconds the two were in the same scene. Predictable? Somewhat. Curtis acting out-of-character made it so.
-The nuke. Early "predictions" aside (half the world watched these before they aired), did anyone NOT expect this? And not expect it at that time? They'd alluded to it over the summer. And the timing seemed predictable, especially with the DVD. The DVD was the first four episodes, and 15 minutes of the fifth. Again, all of us expected a nuke to go up, and us to get a tease of the aftermath. A cliffhanger for the DVD.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but thus far it seems slow and predictable, and like they're bending it to make it work. I haven't felt that way since the awful Kim left ("dad, I don't care if there's a nuclear bomb in the city, I need help with my nanny job!")
But it seems like it will pick up drastically. I just hope they don't alter any more characters to create drama. The Curtis we'd seen in past episodes would never have done that. And I'm not convinced the Jack would have turned his back on Curtis (literally) so easily, allowing Curtis to grab Assad, anyway. Jack was smart enough to know something was up, it just seemed more careless than I'd expect even a depleted Jack to be.
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1-16-2007 @ 12:39AM
David said...
AMAZING EPISODES...I really feel for Jack in a way we never have before...I hate having to wait to next week to see how quickly he returns...
its a shame Palmer2 is no match for Palmer1, at least not yet
also - Morris is upset not just because Chloe and Milo once had a thing, but he mentioned the video!! they made together
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1-16-2007 @ 12:53AM
MattIsWaldo said...
Damn it. I cannot believe they killed Curtis. Although I saw it coming, it still was quite a shock and very upsetting.
I hate you.
Good job, guys.
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1-16-2007 @ 8:59AM
Justin,,, said...
"The Drudge Report was right in its speculation regarding the bomb"
This is news??
The episodes leak and thousands watch it beforehand and you say the DRUDGE REPORT WAS RIGHT??
Are you 12? Or just American?
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1-16-2007 @ 1:04AM
Edward said...
Season 6 would be 2008 right?
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1-16-2007 @ 1:18AM
me said...
im going to have to stop visting this site if you keep putting spoilers in the friggin main page!
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1-16-2007 @ 1:36AM
Ted said...
They've started the season off with something so terrible that it's hard to know where they can go from here... Who can root for the "good guys" when they're so incompetent, making one bad decision after another, negotiating with every terrorist in sight, and allowing the worst to happen? If this occurred in real life, the entire country would be a) calling for the president's head, b) calling for terror-supporting states to be wiped out immediately, and c) enlisting in the Army. In other words, this ain't exactly light drama anymore. Well, except for Chloe's love life.
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1-16-2007 @ 1:46AM
Ryan S. said...
I think that might be the point slightly. this is the worst that we have ever seen 24 America. Jack has stopped nearly every major attack (the shooting down of Air Force One and the Virius attack on the Chandler Plaza Hotel in season 3 are the only major attacks I can think of that Jack didn't stop, and now a Suitcase nuke going off although he did everything he could to stop it) I think it was neccessary to show how really, really, really bad things are in this America.
I have the utmost faith in the creative minds of 24 and I know that this will be another great season, and with the last 15 minutes, it is setting up another good one.
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1-16-2007 @ 2:10AM
Mr Textbooks said...
It has been a bit of a strange start, but if I've got Jack, Buchanan, and Chloe, I'm still totally in.
If Curtis is dead, I'll be pretty disappointed, it was a little lame to have him go from so by-the-books to totally off-the-rails. How many times has Jack had to avoid Curtis because Curtis was such a stickler for procedure. Plus he's just cool.
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1-16-2007 @ 3:04AM
Ratphink said...
I'd just like to thank Alexander Graham Bell, otherwise this show is dead. "I have the president on the line...I have Jack Bauer on the line...I have Bill Buchanan on the line...Mr. President, your sister is on the line..."
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1-16-2007 @ 3:56AM
Vito The TiVo said...
I believe season 6 would be June of 2011. That's assuming that we started from CA Presidential Primary the first Tuesday of March 2004. I suppose you could count it from 2001. But there wouldn't be a primary in 2001, so why count from an airdate instead of the internal date?
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1-16-2007 @ 7:42AM
Darnell said...
I'm sick of people bitching because of a so called spoiler. She put the post up at 12:02 am. The episode already aired, so it can't be a spoiler. And if you in the west coast shouldn't you be watching the show about that time?
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1-16-2007 @ 7:41AM
LC said...
People, what are you complaining about? This is a show recap not a spoiler. The title said "24: 8:00am - 9:00am/9:00am - 10:00am" and only showed a photo of Wayne Palmer, so the only way someone could have the episodes ruined for them would be to read the recap.
If you haven't seen the episode, why in the world would you read an episode recap and then complain of spoilers?
If I haven't seen an episode, I move to the next article.
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1-16-2007 @ 8:07AM
Alan said...
I'm sorry guys, but if you're really looking to "avoid" spoilers, what are you doing reading a TV blog that gives show summaries, eh?
Good recap, folks.
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1-16-2007 @ 8:50AM
Hugeliver said...
ABSOLUTELY! WHY read a RECAP if you haven't seen the episode.
Keep up the good work! Love the recaps and the little personal touches on them.
One thing...WHY are they trying to make Palmer's sister seem like another Sherri? Chewing about civil rights, complaining about this and that. LADY! There's terrorist attacks going on!!!! You have no problem with that???
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1-16-2007 @ 8:53AM
Gordy said...
Another weak president. I mean, he's weaker that Logan appeared. Here's hoping Wayne Palmer finds the business end of a bullet soon. I'd vote for Buchanan.
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