While He Was Bauering...

24 Episode 8 & 9
6.16.14/6.23.14
6 p.m. - 8 p.m.

I'm glad I missed writing about last week. I would have spend 200 words talking about Alzhiemer's and how the show was telling us the only cure was to be nailed in the head with a drone. I would have gone on about how all old men just want to die alone in a stadium as they stand confused in the middle.

Thankfully, I didn't make an ass out of myself since the very next episode just discredited everything we just saw and exposed this season of 24 as a ridiculous romantic dramady.

How do you win back your ex who's now married to Tate Donovan? You create a crazy plan where it looks like you and Tate Donovan conspire to kill your ex's dad. Only in the end you didn't really and now Tate Donovan has that stupid confused Tate Donovan face on because you just shit all over his life.

Let's forget the fact that, somehow, the president was able to run away from the blast thanks to the stadium's video feed being hacked by Chloe from a pub with apparently the strongest Wi-Fi in the world. Actually the Wi-Fi is the most silly part of the whole thing. I've been in bars with Wi-Fi. It's like having a dial-up modem.

Oh and Jordan Reed is dead. The tech guy. Who had a gun but didn't shoot in time. Totally dead.

So yea, there was a doctored video feed. And somehow in the final 4 minutes before the drone missile hit, Jack called the president back in time. And they avoid the blast. And now Audrey's lady feelings are strong and hard for the Bauer.

You know who misses Lady Feelings? Margot. Everyone just leaves her and her only plan to make people stay is to threaten them with violence. Even her husband decided going toe-to-toe with a drone would be better than dealing with her incoherent threats whenever he chose not to wash the dishes.

BTW, let's consider Bauer taking the electrical cables and Batmanning through the window. And then hucking people out the window with no consideration for due process. Apparently that presidential pardon has gotten to his head. He can even tell the CIA he has someone in custody and then isn't asked to explain why said person who was in custody is now a pancake in the parking lot.

Jordan Reed. Still dead.

Finally, the true evil has revealed itself in the Override Device and it has been determined that it can get people into any security system, including the diaries of teenage girls. And now Chloe's old boss, the dude from the Crow, wants it. For what he won't say. Because he's the middle man and he compensates other people well.

He's made Navarro, head of the CIA office in London, find a way to run off with the OD thanks to a poorly timed phone call from Audrey. Somehow, she always knows the worst possible time to do anything.

"You said if I needed to disappear, you would make that happen."

Navarro. You are head of the CIA. The first lesson in the CIA is that you don't talk about the CIA. The entire agency is built on the idea of secrets and spying. You're fucking telling me you need someone else to get you out of the country? You don't have a go-bag? You don't have a storage locker with a secret identity? Fail. Big massive fail. I hope you trip as you're trying to literally run away. You probably graduate in the same class as the CIA security guard who goes down with one punch.

And Jordan Reed is still dead and no one knows how to access his computer. Send help. And cookies.

Grand Theft Bauer

24 Season 9 Episode 7
5 p.m. - 6 p.m.
6.9.14

"Her mother is sending a drone to kill her."

Few shows have the courage and the stomach for the ridiculous. Sure, other shows have vampires or incorporate lady prison feelings or mathematical dick jokes, but none have a man running around the streets of London dodging drones.

Forget the fact that all of this is based on desperate motherly rage, akin to a new mom trying to bargain with a toddler's desire to watch "Let it Go" for the 35th time that day. You want pain? Watch this a million times. Then imagine every woman in your life singing it off key. All the time. With unbridled joy.

But I digress.

When my mom wanted me to keep my mouth shut, she would simply lock me in my room or, in some extreme cases, employ the stern look that communicated the phrase "Try me" in my mind. Although if moms today want to torture their precious kids with drones, you can do that with a manned paper airplane.  C'mon scientists. We get that and no flying cars?

Maybe if flying cars existed, London would be able to pick itself up from this horrible day. Drones are now responsible for killing British soldiers, a hospital, a woman's arm in the crowd and a terrorist's husband. And the only man that can replace Margot's dead husband is a president who can't remember how Breaking Bad ended.

At least it's the late afternoon, which means bedtime is just around the corner once 7 p.m. hits. If anything, Margot is an evil genius by forcing a senior citizen to stay up past their late afternoon bedtime. Not that Heller even knows what time it is.

"I hate these people. They can justify anything."

I'm confused. Is this a Bauer monologue or is he talking to a mirror. Either way, whatever part of the brain that detects irony is now gone. After acting like a used car salesmen to Simon (lots of yelling, twisting her broken finger, walking away from a slumped body on the ground in an effort to get the sale), he saves her from the Mother Drone even though her pulse is fading and she no doubt has internal bleeding.

She's in good company at least since Benjamin Bratt lived out the dream of every American boss by sending his tech guy out in the field to get shot in the arm. That's what happens with the Wi-Fi doesn't work and the printer is broken. Just be glad you didn't bed a brown deserter or else you lose a finger.

I don't even want to get into the fact that Chloe's boss was revealed to be the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone, essentially pulling the strings. Yawn. Unless the dead traitor husband shows up alive, this plotline sucks. Oh and the Russians want Bauer too. Double yawn. Stop living in the past man. That was 4 years and a season ago.

But hijacking cars to trick drones? Yes. That's a plotline we can all get behind because deep down inside we all want to out maneuver the robotic drone sent to kill us all.

On the Edge of Torture Porn

To be fair, when I look at Yvonne Strahovski I think of the word "drilling" too. Just not in a torturey kind of way.

Jack Bauer has moved on. He's done sharing mouth air with married women (it's the new way to have a covert affair) and is demanding the feisty blonde girl he met earlier to join him on adventures.

Even President Heller is on board. If Bauer lives through the day, he'll be in prison, so he may as well go out with a metaphorical bang that includes unmarked cars, untraceable cell phones and syringes filled with drugs. I'm willing to bet this plotline came from some real-life Kiefer stories.

The plan? Re-establish cover with a known terrorist and hope the dude is absolutely fanatical about online banking, but lacks the most recent Norton update on his computer. It's sound as a pound and nothing could go wrong.

Oh wait, Heller has ALZHEIMER'S? Finally the condition has a name. For a while I thought we were dancing around the fact that he was constipated or, worse, menstruating.

As the president is being painted as a loon, the British PM is busy starting at heat signatures and basing one lifeless body as evidence that Jack is turning against the US, thus summoning MI5.

Let me get this straight. We can find a dude who's technically off the grid in a car tunnel  through heat signatures, but we can't blast drones out of the sky? The best idea is to deploy airplanes with massive metal fly swatters in the hopes of finding the unmanned aircraft that is no doubt hiding in the clouds?

Cloud cover is important when a drone is heading direct to London to completely wipe out the rest of Brown Leader's family. The plot is becoming clear. The mom wasn't down with an interracial marriage. So every Brown must die. At least, every London Brown.

And let's send the emotional fragile daughter to do the mercy killing. Makes sense. She's lost a finger and her husband in the same day. If she loses her cell phone by dropping it in the toilet, she wins a free weekend at a napping hospital for the mentally broken.

That's nothing compared to the mental scars Jack's new girl partner will endure after her torture wake-up call. It was essentially 3 tortures in the span of as many minutes. Torture sure has changed. It used to be all about timing and questioning and there was a flow. You start with the fingernails, you start asking questions and THEN you go to the bucket of pee before the electrocution. Amateurs.

At least we still have computer viruses and moles, two 24 staples that is always a consistent "c'mon" moment that we all wait for. But I have to ask. If we have a goddamn drone that can send a rocket up a man's ass, why don't we have computers that can press Enter for you? Get on it Apple. Abolish the Enter key and just make it happen.