Monday night’s episode of 24 was number 6×20, so we’re coming close to the end of the season here. The “action” (I use that term loosely today) took place between 1:00AM and 2:00AM and covered CTU’s lame efforts to try to track down Cheng. There was also a bit of drama over at the White House, with the usual late-season twist. Here’s a closer look at what happened during this hour.
CTU: Doyle brings Jack and Audrey back to CTU (separately). Audrey is taken to medical where she awaits examination and questioning from a Division-appointed shrink. Jack is taken to a holding cell where he begs Doyle to let him in to see Audrey.
When the shrink gets to Audrey, he can immediately see that she is non-responsive and that her body shows signs of hundreds of injections. This means the Chinese used drugs to torture her and try to get her to talk. The shrink believes the only way to get Audrey talking again right now is to inject her with even more drugs. Of course, one possible side effect is death, so….
Doyle objects to this course of action, and tries to convince Nadia to do the same. Nadia makes a half-hearted plea with the shrink, but he says he outranks her, so she drops it. Doyle then takes matters into his own hands by going into the holding cell to apprise Jack of what’s happening, then letting Jack “overpower” him, escape, and rescue Audrey.
Jack does this and drags Audrey down to a room on the lower level. He disables the keypad on the door lock so they’ll be able to talk for a while. Audrey is pretty much unresponsive to Jack as well, though at one point she seems to squeeze his hand in recognition. She doesn’t say anything about Cheng, however, until Nadia and a team of agents come crashing through the door. That’s when Audrey pipes up with “Bloomfield,” which may or may not be a location where Cheng was holding her.
Jack is escorted back to his cell where he gets a surprise visit from James Heller, Audrey’s father. Instead of gratitude or anything approaching kindness, Heller tells Jack to stay away from Audrey for good. Everyone Jack touches ends up dead, and Heller doesn’t want that for his daughter.
White House: We get more skeevy Daniels and Lisa scenes full of innuendo about their relationship. Then Daniels sends Lisa home to get a change of clothes or something. When she arrives at her apartment, there’s (predictably) a man waiting there. His name is Mark Bishop, and he’s apparently an intimate acquaintane. At any rate, the two soon fall into bed together, then Lisa jumps into the shower to get ready to go back to the White House. While she’s in there, Bishop downloads some stuff from her PDA and then makes a phone call saying he has the data.
Meanwhile, the Russian President calls Daniels and tells him he knows the Chinese have the circuit board. If the Americans don’t get it back soon, he warns, Russia will have no choice but to attack a U.S. Army base (in Asia, I think??) in retaliation. Daniels says they’re working on it.
Everyone wonders how Suvarov could have gotten that information so quickly. Tom Lennox says there’s a leak in the White House, and later on it’s established that Lisa is the one. Daniels confronts Lisa and tells her that she better cooperate — or else.
My Reaction: It seemed like a whole lot of nothing happened in this episode. We got two seconds of Cheng racing away in his Hummer, followed by another guy testing the circuit board only to realize that it’s been damaged. Then it took half the episode to get Audrey to say one damn word, and another 20 minutes to establish that Lisa was the one giving up information. BORING!!! I’m just about ready for this season to end….
It’s not often that I go to the theater to see movies. I much prefer waiting for the DVD release so I can watch the film on my own terms: start it when I want, take breaks when I want, re-watch certain parts, etc. In other words, it usually takes a pretty compelling movie to goad me into paying $10 for a ticket. I felt that the first big blockbuster of the summer season, Spider-Man 3 (with its monstrous $258 million budget) would be a good candidate.