Keeping Score on 24
Posted on | January 17, 2006 at 5:15 pm | 9 Comments
This entry is about the four-hour Season 5 premiere of 24 the last two nights on Fox. There are some minor spoilers, so if you haven’t watched it yet but intend to, you might want to skip the rest of this post.
I came into work this morning, and my co-worker Ernie (a fellow 24 Watcher) had the following tote board scrawled on his whiteboard:
Jack Bauer Crime Count (day 5, first 4 hours)
Kills: 9
Assaults: 2
Assaults on Federal Agents: 2
Forced Suicides: 1
Stolen Helicopters: 1
Kidnappings: 1
Breaking & Entering: 1
Brandishing Firearms: 1
Grand Theft Auto: 2
Torture: 0
Faking Death/Insurance Fraud: 1
This cracked me up. Ernie says he’s going to try to keep track all season and update the board. However, it’s sometimes really hard to figure out the number of kills, especially in a gun battle where you don’t know if Jack was responsible for taking someone down or if it was another agent. Ernie plays a lot of First Person Shooter video games, BTW.
I can’t believe that we’re four hours into the day and there’s been no torture yet. I guess you might be able to count Jack trying to get the assassin at the refinery to tell him who hired him by withholding potential medical treatment from him. But seeing how that ended…
Let me add that I really wish I had a cell phone like Jack’s, which takes incredibly detailed pictures from far away and can also be used to remotely activate detonators by emitting a radio frequency. That rocks!
Latre.
Comments
9 Responses to “Keeping Score on 24”
January 17th, 2006 @ 9:15 pm
Which was the “forced suicide”?
January 17th, 2006 @ 10:27 pm
The guy in the airport (Chevansky) that Jack originally went there to see – who popped the capsule in his mouth while Jack was preoccupied.
January 18th, 2006 @ 8:41 am
$20 on 37 Murder/Death/Kills by the end of the season.
January 18th, 2006 @ 12:23 pm
Chevensky? “Forced suicide”? No way: Jack didn’t want him to die – he would have been much more valuable alive. Sure, he was probably instructed to kill himself if he was discovered…but that’s hardly *Jack* forcing his suicide. This entry should bear an asterisk!
On another note: does anyone think Jack should get a tattoo warning any woman thinking of getting involved with him? I mean, they don’t exactly have the best of luck, now do they.
January 18th, 2006 @ 12:35 pm
Yeah, but if Jack wasn’t there and hadn’t been asking him questions, he wouldn’t have been forced to commit suicide. I don’t necessarily agree with Ernie’s reasoning – I’m just reporting it. Though I did just have him add “Impersonating a Fed” to his list.
It’s not just women involved with Jack who get into trouble… kids, innocent bystanders, dogs, etc. He might as well be radioactive.
Alan, I think your guess is a little low.
January 18th, 2006 @ 12:56 pm
Check this out, people. This guy’s claiming only 7 Jack Kills so far this season.
January 24th, 2006 @ 1:31 pm
Hey Rog,
I’ve just started following your blog and it’s fun. We also just started watching 24 this season and your whole review cracked me up. It’s so true! Our local radio station morning DJ’s follow it too, and they are particularly amused by Jack being “dead” for 18 months, and then everyone just accepts that he’s miraculously alive. And the guy that was in a coma, they’re expecting him to show up for brunch, healed. It will be great to follow this show this season with you.
Sent you a card today – watch for it! Love, Jo
January 24th, 2006 @ 3:50 pm
Hey Jo, welcome aboard. Those DJ’s are right. Mark My Words: Tony, who is in a coma and critical condition from a car bomb explosion (and whose doctor was just murdered) will be running around firing a gun by… oh, hour 12 or so. And note that the cracked ribs Jack suffered in this episode will not be mentioned again and will not be slowing him down at all.
Yep, no one is surprised that Jack is still alive – he’s died so many times before. Part of me thinks that the writers will ignore the fact that the Chinese want to imprison him for his crimes last season and all that will be forgotten by the end of the day. But the other part of me thinks that the Chinese will suddenly show up around hour 15 or so at a very inconvenient time, demanding again that the government hand over Jack to them.
Hour 5 was a pretty boring episode for Ernie’s “Jack Crimes” toteboard – he was only able to add one kill. At least it was by scissors to the neck, which was slightly unusual. Jack didn’t even leave him alive so that they could find out who sent him. He still hasn’t gotten to torture anybody yet this season. At least it didn’t take them long to smoke out the CTU mole this year. Though my co-workers thought they could’ve gotten him to talk faster by just leaving him alone in the room with Chloe and her withering stare.
And lastly, you gotta love a Secret Service that is so incompetent that the First Lady is able to give them the slip by squeezing out a bathroom window in her bathrobe. But then again, the Chief of Staff is a mole for the Russian separatists, so anything is possible in that administration. Another one of my co-workers says that whenever President Logan appears on screen, she just wants to slap his weasely face.
January 24th, 2006 @ 9:37 pm
Yeah, it was pretty obvious Spencer was the mole (even if – and it seems somewhat reasonable – he’s telling the truth when he says he believed he was working for the White House). I suppose Walt Cummings told him he had to sleep with Chloe. I suppose when Spenser first saw Chloe’s face, he was all like, uh, can I sleep with anyone else? (To be fair, I think Mary Lynn Rajskub intentionally squunches her face up funny in that role.) And Logan…I mean, how bizarre a world is it when a guy can be president whose notion of leadership is to be pissy, indignant, and utterly ignorant of facts? Uh… On a brighter note, there was way more cleavage from the First Lady than in the real world.