President Pussy’s First Hour in Office

There are a lot of things we have come to expect from a season of 24. Yes, there is non-stop action and knuckle-grabbing suspense. That’s the good part. Unfortunately, we also have to come to grips with the idea that certain things are implausible, but then again, that is television. If Jack Bauer and friends had to follow the laws of physics and/or probability, the show would be less fun. There has been a steep increase in the “That would never happen” moments over the last few episodes, but the story line is not as disjointed as the last couple of seasons, and the producers are still bringing that suspense everyday.At the end of last week, we were all lamenting at how stupid Jack was for letting the football go. Although he seems like MacGuyver one minute, fashioning a diversion with some bullets, a coffee can, and some dead grass, he wasn’t able to figure out a way to slow down the getaway. Couldn’t he use his knife and slash some tires, perhaps cut some hoses or belts or something? Even if he just had George Foreman sit them and tell them that they aren’t going to pay a lot for a muffler at Meineke would have been better than what Jack came up with.

But that is all in the past. Although the terrorists were not able to get away with the entire contents of the nuclear football, it seems that they got the most important part. You know, the pages that have the launch codes for our entire nuclear arsenal. And whoever made this nuclear football, did you have to put all of those codes in the red section? Doesn’t that just scream “Important Pages!” to you?

Knowing that Marwan likely has the launch codes and is planning to secure a nuclear weapon, CTU starts the protocols to begin locating all of the known warheads. Considering all of the weapons we had created to scare the Soviets away, this is quite the monumental task. It’s going to be lots of high pressure situations and the people in charge are going to have to work together well, so when Buchanan said that Tony and Michelle would be working on this together, we all sort of wondered what the hell was going on.

The current Tony and Michelle saga is much like their saga as we watched them fall in love for the first time. Every episode, we get about two minutes of them talking to each other in order to sort their feelings out. They have been pretty angry and testy before this, but ever since a few people have been making comments on how the other one seems like they are still in love, Tony and Michelle have been working things out. This week, we had a mutual respect, and an understanding that everything was in the past. We also had an awkward silence as the both realized they might have feelings for each other, with an even more awkward “I hope I’m not interrupting anything” from Chloe to kill the mood. Love works in mysterious ways in the CTU building.

Chloe did have some good information though. It turns out that they found an associate of Marwan from a terrorist watchlist. Have we noticed how many watchlists these people have? I really don’t think CTU gets it. They can make a watchlist, but it doesn’t seem like they can watch the watchlist. And when it comes right down to it, watching the list is the most important part of a watchlist. Why do these names keep popping up all over the place? If you are supposed to be watching them all along, why is it taking so long?

Anyway, the person on the watchlist is Yosik Khatami, an associate of Marwan’s. He bought some gas at a gas station with the wrong credit card, but soon realizes his mistake. He calls Marwan for some help, and Marwan sends him to the marina, which is close to Khatami’s current location in Inglewood. Now, I am assuming the marina is Marina Del Rey, and if that is the case, then Inglewood is still pretty far off. Then again, you and I have to travel on actual Los Angeles streets, and not the bullet trains that whisk 24 cast members from one side of Los Angeles to the other in five minutes. (Actually, in this episode, Jack was caught by reverse 24 travel speed. Apparently he was traveling in a helicopter, but it was going to take him more time to get back to CTU than it takes Marwan to drive back.)

With Jack in transit, CTU sends Curtis after Khatami. I love it when Curtis gets to be a bad ass. The guy is obviously smart, but why in the hell keep him behind a desk? Quite obviously, the problem at CTU is with the field teams. And even with Curtis, I was just waiting for Michelle to give the instructions. When she said “Be discreet”, I thought to myself “oh yeah, I am sure that means only three field team members will die”. I was waiting for her to order a hard perimeter to make sure nobody escapes. Since they were in a marina, it wouldn’t be hard. Right? Right?

While we waited for Khatami to meet the guy who would get him out of town, we got a little more Tony and Michelle action at CTU. Michelle is starting to look over at Tony, and Bill Buchanan notices, and gets a little jealous. They argue a bit about his ability to do the job, and Michelle is now firmly on Tony’s side, telling Buchanan that their past relationship won’t hurt their ability to do the job. We also have a little update with Audrey and Jack. Paul is still in critical condition, and they are having trouble keeping him stable. Yaaaaawwwnnn. How about we get to some more important stuff, like where the hell is Secretary Heller? And what about Behrooz? Even Mitch Anderson got more of a mention with his demise. All they have to do is have some random terrorist say “we killed the boy” and it’s over, just don’t hold us in suspense!

At the marina, Curtis is keeping things pretty discreet. The terrorist meets some guy that looks sort of like Abe Vigoda crossed with Bruce Greenwood named Joe Prado. Yosik gets freaked out when he sees some rent-a-cop doing his security rounds. You just can’t find good henchmen like you used to. Remember when Kalil killed himself rather than let Jack get close? Even that fat guy blew himself up to take out a few CTU agents. What the hell is this dude complaining about a guy making $8 an hour?

Yosik and Joe run to Joe’s boat to wait it out, but they hear the CTU agents as they converge upon the boat. Khatami calls Marwan to tell him what’s happened, and Marwan says he must kill Prado because he knows too much. Joe Prado doesn’t give him the chance, and kills him first. When CTU comes to apprehend him, Prado claims it was all in self defense. Khatami’s phone was on the whole time, and he heard that Prado was taken in custody. He knows that Prado can damage them, but he has no way to get to him. Instead, he calls a lawyer from Amnesty Global, alerting him on Prado’s behalf that he was taken into custody with no charges. Don’t laugh! It really happened, and I will get to that later.

When the Vice President was being sworn in last week, it seemed like he was doing all that he can not to accept the job. Even when we found out the president was barely breathgin, the Veep acted like it would be only a few minutes before he was good to go. Delusional much? The VP, Charles Logan, is a complete pussy, and Mike Novick is having trouble even listening to his bullshit. He is indecisive, doesn’t know what he is doing, and is more worried about saving his own skin than helping the people of the country through this time of crisis. He heads down to the bunker underneath the White House to kind of wait it out. His advisors do convince him that he should give some assurance to the people of the United States about the nuclear weapons and the president.

Everybody is in the CTU conference room was listening to the now President make his speech. Right on cue, Audrey comes in with news of trouble with contacting a convoy in Iowa. Now, I am sure that most people realized what this mean, but somebody still had to ask what the convoy was carrying. Well, a nuclear warhead is missing you idiot. Do you think that she was going to rush into the room and say “A convoy is missing, but don’t sweat it, because it was only carrying transporting some fig newtons. Oh is that the President on TV? Sorry!”

I know that by this time in the season, the writers have to have a lot of things set up for anything to be believable, but what about this convoy ambush? First of all, wouldn’t we have gone into the process of securing our weapons and accounting for warheads when Heller was kidnapped? Perhaps when nuclear reactors were starting to melt down? I know they were being transported to be dismantled, but if he are on Orange alert or Red alert, doesn’t anybody get a little bothered? And if you think this convoy was ambushed by some swat team with sophisticated weapons and what not, you would be wrong. It was a bunch of guys in the back of an old Ford truck. I saw that superman movie, you don’t just transport a nuclear weapon without a bunch of soldiers around. I am very skeptical that even the Boy Scouts would have been outnumbered by some terrorists during a weapons transport. However, let’s stay back in the world of 24.

Joe Prado is back at CTU and Edgar Styles is pissed! He’s fat, the gets picked on, he has to answer the phone, and his grandmother died. He wants Joe Prado to hurt and hurt badly. Chloe, on the other hand, just wants him to worry about his job. For the fourth season of 24, I want these two to be married. Could you imagine Chloe pregnant? Can you imagine Edgar reading to his kid? An episode of Edgar reading “Horton Hears a Who” would have me rolling. I miss my Dina Araz impressions, but the Edgar Style impression is also pretty fun.

Curtis is not only good at kicking ass, he is a master at torture, at least when he thinks that torture is a good option. That whole “sensory deprivation” produced jack shit. So when he says that he is going to use Richards, you know that shit is going to get down. For those of you who don’t know, Richards is the the CTU guy who knows torture. I think they keep him in the observation room next to interrogations all day. For a guy who does interrogations, this must be his dream day. Everybody’s coming in! Curtis is just about to instill the fear of God into Prado when Michelle tells him to stop. Wha??

Remember that Amnesty Global lawyer(played by Evan Handler of Sex and the City Fame) Marwan called? Apparently, he got a court order to stop the interrogation, and Buchanan is having no luck convincing the judge that Prado is a national security concern, he has had a clean record for the last five years, and has been charged with no crime. The lack of interrogation is starting to piss off Edgar. He confronts Buchanan to the point of insubordination. Buchanan lets him off because you know, he did stop over a 100 reactors from blowing up, but Chloe doesn’t let him off so easily. When she asks him if this is affecting his work he says “I have a photographic memory in case you forgot” to which Chloe replies “You only tell me like every other day!” They’ll be driving to Vegas by the end of this season.

Jack arrives on the scene, and he is also wondering why in the hell this guy isn’t crying like a little baby yet. He goes to the interrogation room, and then tries to reason with the lawyer. They get into a bunch of talk about the constitution, but that isn’t working either. Then Jack begins to put two and two together. How in the hell did Prado get a lawyer so quickly? He was in custody the whole time. Somebody must of called the lawyer, and the only person who would have known that Prado needed one was Habib Marwan.

They are running out of time, and so Jack calls the President. Logan can’t make a decision, so he scuttles all of his advisors out except for Novick and Walt to ask them about torture. Novick, of course, wants to do with this guy whatever CTU should find necessary. Walt is on the other side, he tells the President it would be a blemish on his administration if anything was bad to happen. The President is more interested in his own good name, so he doesn’t authorize any torture. God this guy sucks, and I wish he could make a decision. Luckily, there is somebody around that knows about being presidential and has a history with Mike – David Palmer. That’s right, it looks like President Palmer is taking a break from building his library to help out a spineless politician get some guts.

But Palmer gets introduced later in the episode, and they still can’t torture Prado. This is no good. Jack needs a way to get at him, but he can’t figure out how. Then it occurs to him. If he is not charged with a crime, then they should leave him free to go. Jack could then resign from his CTU position, meaning he was no longer working for the government, and take Prado on as a citizen without repercussion . This works for everybody, so they decide to let Prado go. Joe knows that something is wrong, and wonders why all of this is happening all of a sudden. I am honestly wondering why he didn’t talk. Once he was in custody, he was assured of dying if he was ever free to the outside world, Marwan couldn’t take the chance. He must of been thinking of that when Curtis let him out of CTU.

Edgar saw Prado leaving and was absolutely pissed! It took Edgar only 18 hours for him to grow a set of nuts, but he is definitely saying what is on his mind. I desperately wanted Edgar to snap and go postal on Prado, but it looked like cooler heads prevailed.

Prado was still worried when he left the building, but is assured by his lawyer that the US Marshall will take him anywhere he wants. He advises him to head to a hotel and contact him if there is any problem. Just as the lawyer is driving off and the Marshall is letting Prado into the car, Jack comes from behind and uses a stun gun on him and the Marshall goes down right away. (God, even Sarah took two jolts before she was incapacitated). I actually thought Edgar might go postal and get to Prado before Jack did, and shoot him or something, but that never happened.

Jack is pretty good getting answers out of people. He handcuffs one of Prado’s hands to the dashboard, and the other to a handle behind the seat. He tells Prado that he is going to need some information. Even though there was no blood involved, the next scene had me cringing. Jack started breaking Joe’s fingers, and pulling them backward, trying to get him to talk. After a few dislocations and some VERY audible breakage of his phalanges, Prado started to talk. Marwan was going to be at some nightclub. Why, we don’t know. But we now know that Jack is on the case. How long can Marwan stay at large, especially now that Jack is basically a rogue agent? If they do eventually catch Marwan, I have a feeling he will have one of the best 24 deaths EVAR!

What big eyes you have…Now talk!