24: Waiting for Some Answers

After last week’s shocking, “Tony IS evil after all” twist, we wanted answers! (At least I did.)

Well other than some vague, quick references to the Bigger Bad Jonas Hodges alluded to last week (headed by Bruce Willis’ best friend in “Armageddon”/Will Patton?) we didn’t get much in the way of an explanation for Tony’s latest turn.

Since there are five episodes left in this terrific season of “24” I’m going to give the writers some slack in when they reveal what’s really going on. Unfortunately, that meant last night’s episode was relatively tame and mostly served as a tease for more exciting things to come. Oh well — at least there was a cool explosion.

For example, last night we saw Kim going to the airport to fly back to L.A. after Jack begged her not to go through with the stem cell treatment to (maybe) save his life. Father and daughter both agreed that they didn’t want to see Jack suffer because of the pain it would cause the other. Of course, the more significant reveal was that Jack has a granddaughter named after his dead wife Teri (Awww.) To be honest, I was just as pleased to see that Kim ended up with a more age-appropriate guy named Stephen instead of her jerky last beau (played by an older, skeezier C. Thomas Howell).

This was all well and good, but it all seems to be a setup for the sure-to-come moment where Kim returns from the airport to help save her father’s life. And given the state of her father at the end of the episode, he’s might need that help sooner rather than later. (More on that in a bit.)

Another way this episode had me looking ahead was with Jonas Hodges. The hour opened with a nifty, chilling sequence in which Jonas’ favorite attorney was drugged and replaced with a doppelganger who went to the White House to see Hodges. She implored Jonas to kill himself with a cardiac-inducing red pill (“Why oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?) so that he couldn’t be prosecuted and spill secrets about the Bigger Bad, and so that Starkwood’s legacy would remain relatively clean. After an encounter with a soldier who spoke highly of Starkwood, Jonas made up his mind, downed the pill and I silently cursed because it looked like “24” might lose its best villain since Charles Logan.

Except that in the previews for next week’s episode we see Hodges in a bed, clinging to life — and about to be confronted by Jack Bauer. Now THAT’S something I wanna see!

One of the brighter spots in THIS episode was the work of Annie Wersching. Renee asked about Larry Moss’ status about 27 times before the FBI team finally arrived on the scene and broke the news that Moss had been killed to her. Wersching did a great job of showing us how wrecked Renee was by the news (she and Larry CLEARLY had more than just a one-night stand), but how the FBI agent still had to act all steely since she was in charge. I really enjoyed the scene where Jack sensitively tried to comfort her and get her to focus by explaining that the reason he prefers to work alone is because he lost a few partners when he started out. I thought it was interesting that she barked at him, “Don’t’ tell me how to feel” after all her talk earlier in the season about how Jack didn’t ever FEEL anything.

Of course, going into the episode, we all had Tony (pictured, right) on our minds.

While I complained earlier in this column that the hour didn’t give us very many answers, one of the answers the show DID give us last night was that, YES, Tony is a bad guy. (To all of you out there hoping that Tony merely subdued Moss and that Tony was still somehow a good guy, my condolences.)

As if that point wasn’t hammered home enough, we got Tony — after shooting himself and lying about Moss’s death — imploring his accomplice Galvez to lure a bunch of FBI agents into a building and blow it up so Galvez could escape in the aftermath. Galvez: “You want me to blow up a couple dozen FBI agents?” Tony: “You got a problem with that?”

Unfortunately for Tony he wasn’t counting on Jack (the only competent person in D.C.) to show up and start poking holes in Tony’s story about how he and Moss had been shot. The guy who was debriefing Jack had also raised a red flag, but Jack got distracted after figuring out that Renee and a bunch of FBI agents had walked into a C-4 trap.

After the explosion, Jack got back to Debriefing Guy and found out that Tony had been lying about killing a source he’d interrogated. Jack ran to confront Tony right as he helped Galvez (posing as a wounded FBI guy) into an ambulance. I liked that they made Tony seem just as competent as Jack (he kept his cool and his story to Jack was perfectly plausible). Still, Jack wasn’t buying it and he would’ve taken Tony down if he hadn’t gotten the most inopportune case of the shakes in recent history. Unfortunately, Tony had pickpocketed Jack’s medication, probably during the moment he took Jack’s arm and told him he was sorry about his incurable disease. That’s a great job by the writers using the audience’s wish to believe Tony is good to distract us from another slyly evil act.

Of course, the main problem is that this still felt like a preview to the heavyweight championship fight that’s sure to come at the end of the season. While this episode may not have been the best this season has to offer, I’m still excited to see Jack face off against Hodges and, eventually, Tony. (Maybe the show can hook us up with a Renee vs. Evil Fake Blonde undercard.)

So what’d you think of this episode? How is Moss’s ex-wife going to react after Janis tells her that Larry is dead? (Apparently better than she would if Renee notified her — the slut.) What do you think are Tony’s motivations? Finally, wasn’t it weird seeing Carlos Bernard do that environmental commercial right after Tony coldly left Jack shaking and convulsing on the ground? (You just messed up our hero — how am I supposed to believe ANYTHING you say?!)