By: Brandon Wolfe
Hours where Jack Bauer is sidelined are generally never the best episodes of ‘24’. Jack is the engine that makes the whole thing run, but every once in awhile, a plot development will force the writers to take Jack out of the game, as with his current military apprehension. It never lasts more than an hour, but it invariably means that the hour in question won’t be one for the time capsule. “3:00 PM – 4:00 PM” is an episode calibrated toward inching the plot forward and bringing other characters up to speed. It’s housekeeping, plain and simple, but it’s not the worst instance of ‘24’ stopping to line up its ducks.
Agent Morgan successfully takes possession of the flight key before Jack is taken into custody. With help from Chloe, with whom she’s probably a bit more instantly chummy than she logically should be, she manages to upload the key’s contents to Open Cell, where Chloe finds proof of the override’s influence, which Morgan then forwards to her tech buddy at the CIA CTU. It is confirmed and station chief Navarro gets Heller on the phone to tell him those three magic words in ‘24’-land: “Bauer was right.” This is all going along way too easily for this show, so as soon as Heller starts grounding all active drones, Margot Al-Harazi hastily orders that the override device be used to grab as many drones as they can, successfully nabbing a handful, which go dark from detection, even by the American military.
Another thing that seems to be going a little too well is Mark Boudreau, who has spent the first four episodes undermining Heller and plotting against Jack, but who, in this episode, is quick to apologize for his actions concerning Bauer. Doubting Jack is the most cardinal of all ‘24’ sins, but Boudreau owning up to being in the wrong so freely, and even having Jack brought to Heller before the president has thought to order it himself, seems a little too much of an about-face for an oily ‘24’ bureaucrat. Yet Boudreau isn’t shown to be up to anything in “3:00 PM – 4:00 PM”, the implication we are left with is that his apologies are sincere. Longtime viewers of this show know better than this, so no one is letting Boudreau off the hook just yet, but the show usually doesn’t let its established snakes have protracted moments in the sun like that.
The Al-Harazi thread continues to be the weakest link of ‘Live Another Day’. The machinations and manipulations we get from that leg of the story feel a bit too much like the worst qualities of ‘24’. Margot is portrayed as one-note eeevil, cutting off her daughter’s finger as a message to her boyfriend Navid to toe the line, then opting to discard the man when she finds that she no longer needs his services. ‘24’ has never really done the best job at giving its villains much nuance and those four years off didn’t seem to improve matters in this regard. By the end of the episode, when Navid pleads for his life to Margot, insisting that Simone would not want him dead, Simone coming forward and tacitly approving his murder is one of those moments that ‘24’ believes is shocking and mindblowing, but isn’t because we know ‘24’ too well by this point.
A big question we’re left with is whether or not the show is finished with the character of Chris Tanner, the drone pilot falsely accused of the preliminary strike earlier in the day. Because the flight key has successfully proven that he was not responsible for the attack, he presumably has been exonerated, but we are not shown this. It’s very difficult to imagine an actor as charismatic as John Boyega being hired for such a small, meaningless role, so one can only presume that he will have some function later in the story, possibly using his drone expertise to save the day before these rogue drones can do too much damage. Another character I would assume we aren’t yet finished with is Open Cell leader Adrian Cross, who parts company with Chloe this week rather than help the government stop the drones. Cross is a potentially interesting character for a number of reasons, one of which is that he seems to be in love with Chloe, which is alone is fascinating because Chloe is not anyone’s definition of lovable. But he’s also a morally gray character, and ‘24’ doesn’t usually do those. ‘24’ is a very black-and-white show. Jack himself is probably the only character who straddles that line, given his penchant for doing bad things in the name of the greater good. Cross is murky, neither a villain nor hero, and that could make him an intriguing wild card. He’s also played by the great character actor Michael Wincott, one of the only actors with a scarier voice than Sutherland.
Unsurprisingly, even for an episode that requires so little of him, Jack remains the highlight. Frogmarched into Heller’s quarters, grimacing with coiled anger, Jack tells the President that he insists on being reinstated temporarily into active duty to locate and break an associate of Al-Harazi’s in the short window before the drone strike commences, a request that Heller scoffs at as impossible - quite reasonably, considering that Jack is considered a master criminal in the current ‘24’ world - but one that we know he will grant very soon, because there isn’t a ‘24’ if he doesn’t. But the best scene in the episode is a brief reunion between Jack and Audrey, his former girlfriend, now married to Boudreau. I don’t know that these two character ever quite had the epic romance that ‘24’ seems to attribute to them, but Sutherland and Kim Raver act the hell out of their quick scene together, filling in all the regret and longing that isn’t there on the page. This scene is a fine example of how much Sutherland brings to this character. There isn’t much to Jack. He’s a pretty simple character, and ‘24’ has never had a deftness with character development. But Sutherland has always made the effort to elevate the thin material given to him, which he does in this scene, the sight of Audrey reducing this hardened man into a quiver-lipped picture of anguished heartache.
As it nears its halfway point, ‘Live Another Day’ is still going relatively strong. If it’s still technically falling back on the same bag of tricks, at least it can be said that it’s giving us a higher grade of the ‘24’ formula. We know it well by now, but it’s turning out to be a good batch of the old stuff.
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