What a difference a little Jack can make! In this hour of 24, Jack is back in a big way, and he’s darker than ever! Last hour, Jack and Doyle had the main terrorist Fayed in custody and this hour begins with Jack handing out a good ol' fashioned beat down trying to get the location of the nukes out of Fayed. Well, this is a twisty little episode, and the first twist, the most obvious one, is that President Palmer’s nuclear strike was a falsehood, an attempt at scaring some information out of the mysterious Middle Eastern country with no name. The ploy worked because just before the nuclear missile struck its target the government called in with one of their Generals who was involved in the plot. Palmer called off the attack and shared this new information with CTU. This leads back to the next twist, a plan by Jack and Doyle to trick Fayed into believing he had escaped. A group of CTU agents posing as members of a terrorist cell sent in by the General to rescue Fayed crash their truck into Jack and Doyle and get into a mock fire fight ending with the agents escaping with Fayed. The ploy goes awry and Fayed kills the agents and escapes with Jack hot on his trail. Fayed leads Jack to the location of the remaining nukes and Jack blasts on Fayed’s security detail. They do have superior numbers and weapons but this is Jack “F’ing” Bauer here, so he kills them all before running out of bullets leaving him and Fayed to stand off against each other one last time. This fight ends with Fayed getting hung with a big chain. Just before he dies, Jack had to rub it in by telling him to say hello to his brother. This is the dark, desperate, angry Jack we all know and love. He’s finally found himself, moved beyond everything that’s happened to him, and he’s meaner than ever.
I knew the nuclear strike was bogus but since we are only in hour 17. I bought the fact that Fayed might escape with help for as long as that twist was aloud to exist. The finality of the terrorist story arc just felt anti-climactic. It feels like everything that’s happened so far has just been filler to get us to this point, to the ending of this episode. I knew several episodes back when Jack was told that his love Audrey was killed in China when she was looking for him that we would come back to this story and here we are, but I didn’t expect it to be the focus of the last seven episodes. At the end of the episode Jack gets a call from Audrey. Once Jack has verified it is Audrey, his old Chinese buddy that tortured him snatches the phone from Audrey and tells Jack he must call back in 10 minutes on a secured line or Audrey dies.
In previews for the next hour, it appears that Jack is being asked to steal a “component” in exchange for Audrey’s life and based on the standoff between Doyle and Jack I assume the component is one or both of the nukes. So, a lot of questions remain: how did Audrey’s captures know that Jack had the nukes at that very moment? And will this more personal battle for Jack be the real focus of the last several episodes of the season? I had read that the feature film being made from the series was to be set in China, so is this a set up for that film? There’s also a lot left to be tied up in the White House too. In the preview for next hour Palmer asks Daniels to resign to which he refuses, so I’m sure there’s going to be some sparks there, especially since Wayne seems to be paying a price for being pulled out of the coma early.
Overall, this was definitely one of the best episodes of the season. Finally, Jack got back to doing what he does best and at the end of the episode I was excited to get a bunch of new questions answered. This hour got back to what I like about this series, the over the top action and intrigue. Now, as I mentioned earlier I think the terrorist story arc ended with a whimper rather than a bang but maybe we should have seen that coming after the uneventful death of Gradenko in the last hour. Even if the end of that story arc was a bit weak, it’s worth it because the story was leading to nothing but repeated scenarios from season two whereas now, for better or for worse, we are in newer territory for the series.
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