24 – Day 8: 2:00am – 3:00am

This week kept the pretty brisk pacing and hightened suspense going while still being as believable and tense as “24” gets. We also had one of the top five Jack Bauer moments of all time, in my opinion. Let’s get started!

Debrief

• Dana and Cole returned to CTU after getting rid of Kevin and the other guy. They’re on thin ice and Dana is now reporting to Chloe. Kevin’s probation officer is on his way to CTU to talk to Dana about her relationship to Kevin.

• The terrorists sent Marco the directions to manually arming the bomb. He began the process while CTU looked into his background and found his mother. As she was getting ready to leave NYC, Cole found her and brought her to the hospital.

• Tarin and Kyla plan to get immunity from the State Department. Kyla’s mom has returned to try to get ahold of her, but Tarin forbids her from talking.

• Marco’s mom shows up and tries to get him to surrender. She fails, but Jack succeeds after promising to kill her if Marco detonates the bomb. Seeing that Marco has surrendered, the terrorists remotely set off the bomb, not giving Jack enough time to disarm it. Before he died, Marcos said that Tarin was part of the nuclear attack planning.

• Tarin wants to leave for the embassy to apply for immunity. After hearing form her mother that Tarin is involved with the terrorists, she is attempting to buy CTU some time.

Agent Philboy’s Assessment

This week makes about three episodes in a row of consistent great episodes. I’m definitely back on the “24” train after a slower start to the season. This week had me playing a game of “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”

The main storyline is awesome. The tension keeps mounting and twists keep consistently changing the story enough that it doesn’t get too old from hour to hour, which is a common “24” problem. Jack’s speech this week cemented my love for this storyline and Jack’s desperation for wanting to see this mission through. All of the hype at the beginning of the season was accurate: Jack now has a family, therefore he has something to fight for. He would have threatened Marcos’ mother in any season, but this season it takes a whole new weight because you get the sense he doesn’t have many more of these huge threats left in him.

The secondary storyline of President Hassan and his wife and daughter is fascinating to me, especially now since the President’s suspicions were eerily accurate. It was his paranoia that drove Kyla away, but it might also end up killing her as well. The difference between this and other seasons where children have gone missing is a) she is with a prime suspect and b) they want to get her out of the city that’s about to be attacked. There’s a lot on the line there, and it shows in everyone’s performances.

The Dana storyline is coming back, sadly. Hopefully the great Stephen Root can bring something to it, but I’m doubting it very seriously. It’s stupid, but we learned from the past few hours that we don’t really need Dana there, so she might as well just go away and deal with her silly past.

One more thing I wanted to talk about was the promo for next week that we’ve never seen before. I cannot recall a time that we were told when in the span of the hour specifically things would occur. I hope to see the ad again and then keep track to see how accurate things might be next week.

I didn’t really learn much, so let’s jump right to the kill count.

Weekly Kill Count = 1 Total Kill Count = 27 *This is a disappointing low kill count, don’t you think?

Did you suspect Tarin as any sort of mole? Are things ruined for you knowing partially what will happen next week?