24: Hospital Visit

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “24” picked up its game in the same hour it put the Dana/Kevin/Cole nonsense on the backburner. (Or at least in the bottom of a river.)

Things are still far from great — the season still has an undeniably aimless quality to it — but the latest episode was definitely a step in the right direction.

The episode picked up right where we left off last week. Jack was leading a CTU-team (including Agt. “Poopypants” Owen) to pick up Farhad Hassan after Farhad had been betrayed by his cronies (who we learned were actually President Hassan’s covert ops personnel called IRK - seriously). Unfortunately, Farhad ran out into the open like a numbnut and got himself mortally wounded seconds before Jack and Co. arrived. (OF COURSE!)

Jack unleashed the Bauer scream to the EMT working on reviving Hassan (good for the EMT, yelling back at Jack!), but it was too late. Fortunately, in addition to being physically awesome, Jack is a super-genius and quickly devised a cool plan: CTU would pretend that Farhad was still alive and (hopefully) draw out an assassin that could potentially lead them to the terrorists. This is the kind of cool, old-school CTU tactic (that hasn’t been beaten to death) that I like seeing. (Jack must've watched "Weekend at Bernie's" with his granddaughter the day before.)

The plan, of course, worked. A young, American-born assassin named Marcos had been recruited and, after warning his mom (Mare Winningham) to get out of town, he set out to kill (the already-dead) Farhad.

In the episode’s most tense sequence, the fate of thousands of lives rested on the (shaky) hands of Agt. Poopypants Owen. Marcos had a bomb strapped to his chest, so Poopypants had to make Marcos reveal the bomb within sight of a surveillance camera so Chloe (getting a chance to be competent!) could remotely disarm it. And, yes, I realize this was absolutely preposterous, but tense + preposterous = “24” at its best.

Marcos was foiled (I thought having him shoot Farhad’s dead body was hilarious), but jumped out of a hospital window. Despite being injured, Marcos was able to outrun several CTU agents (including a cat-like Jack) and lock himself in a hyperbaric chamber(!?) Remember a few weeks ago when I complained about how the show blatantly drags things out to fill 24 hours? Well, having a disoriented bad guy conveniently come across one of the few places the authorities can’t get to him definitely qualifies. (Eye roll.)

Still, the clever and tense action in this episode gave me some hope for what’s in store the rest of the season. (Jack and Renee’s second consecutive lovey-dovey chat gave me considerably less hope.)

If only the non-Jack parts of the season looked as promising.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like President Hassan when he was the even-tempered charismatic diplomat. I’m just not feeling Anil Kapoor’s performance as the unhinged President Hassan. (Kapoor gives off a natural slickness that makes him an unconvincing loon.)

Anyway, President Hassan flipped his lid (but his hair remained unmoving) when he learned that his formerly-trusted bodyguard had escaped custody and was likely shacking up with his daughter Kayla. (Showing those two getting it on — good use of split screen.) Hassan appealed to his wife for help and spilled some details that might be useful to her if she turned out to be a villain. (I’m still hoping Kayla turns out to be the real baddie – having Hassan’s wife be the bad guy would reek of Sherri Palmer.)

Besides that, President Hassan had a tense scene with President Taylor, who threatened to bomb Kamistan if Hassan’s covert ops people detonated a weapon in New York. (Fortunately, Kamistan isn’t a real country, so jokes on you President Taylor.)

Seriously though, seeing Taylor face down Hassan was encouraging, but our president’s scenes have still been sorely lacking this season. For example, we got the 27th variation of “this is what will happen if the weapon is detonated” scene last night. (You’re not gonna believe this, but thousands of people would be killed.)

I continue to be more intrigued by Chief of Staff Rob Weiss, who tried to bully CTU Head Hastings into scapegoating Renee Walker. Hastings refused, and I was really happy to see him stand up for his own people. I was actually pretty high on Hastnigs until I remembered that he’s apparently perfectly ok with not having heard from his head of field ops or lead analyst in the last hour or so during a major crisis.

So what’d you think of this episode? Why did Marcos wait until his suicide mission to tell his mom to get out of town? (Why not tell her to get out as soon as they got their hands on the nuclear rods and decided to use them in New York?) Finally, isn’t Agt. Owen out way past his curfew?