By: Brandon Wolfe
’24: Live Another Day’ has a lot of story left to tell and not a lot of time left to tell it. “9:00 PM – 10:00 PM” is the penultimate episode of this 12-episode event series and it breaks its neck setting up all the pieces for next week’s finale, yet it still feels like it’s setting up the next 12 weeks, as if the writers somehow forgot that they weren’t required to fill their usual quota of 24 episodes. The episode is a non-stop dash for Jack to put many pieces together in a very short amount of time. It’s a busy hour that rarely takes a breath, usually ‘24’s’ strong suit, yet it all feels a bit like speeding toward a red light. I don’t know how the writers intend to resolve not only this season satisfactorily, but perhaps the entire Jack Bauer saga altogether (those ratings ain’t great, after all), with just one measly hour left. Historically, these guys aren’t the best closers even when they have all the time in the world. It’s all quite worrisome to say the least.
After last week’s falsely orchestrated attack on a Chinese aircraft carrier by an American nuclear (not “nucular”, guys. You’re still doing that) submarine, the president of China chides President Heller that he has no choice but to retaliate against the United States regardless of the attack’s circumstances, and begins deploying fighter jets toward American outposts in Japan. After a seemingly endless firefight, Jack makes his way into the Open Cell headquarters and, in the first of a couple “Oh, come on” lucky breaks, finds a cell phone that Chloe was able to use, in the span of about two seconds, to record Cheng Zhi’s voice before being carted off as a hostage. Jack instantly recognizes the voice of the man who tortured him for almost two years and informs Heller, who had thought along with the rest of the world that Cheng was already dead. Heller thinks there’s a shot at dissuading the Chinese from attacking if he can produce both Cheng and the override device to the Chinese president before the bombs start dropping.
But before Jack can track down Cheng, he has another matter to attend to. He learns (here’s that other lucky break) that Mark Boudreau was the one responsible for sending the Russians after him, delaying him from reaching the override in time. Jack confronts Boudreau angrily (as if Jack ever confronts anyone another way) and rather than allow Heller to throw the book at him for treason, opts to use Boudreau in the field to snuff out the Russians. For, you see, the Russian official Stolnavich (played by the not-very-Russian-sounding Stanley Townsend) with whom Boudreau made all of those clandestine arrangements is directly in league with Cheng and his plot to kick off WWIII. This is ‘24’ dot-connecting at its most obnoxiously contrived. Having the Russians as a fly in the ointment of the main plot was actually not bad. They wanted Bauer for their own reasons, independent of anything else, and that conflicting agenda was monkeying up the works. But tying Stolnavich to Cheng for narrative expediency is ridiculous, as is the revelation that Stolnavich is conveniently based right in London, about a five-minute drive away (though on ‘24’, everything is a five-minute drive away).
The episode is essentially a long sprint for Jack from one gunfight to another, as “9:00 PM – 10:00 PM” functions primarily as an all-business venture, laying down exposition like brick. The show is still pretending as though Cheng is the Ultimate Bauer Adversary rather than that guy most of us completely forgot about somewhere back in 2006. Boudreau is given a quasi-redemption for his weaselly acts, infiltrating Stolnavich’s lair with a song-and-dance about defection while Jack and Kate storm the place and take out the guards, and I do appreciate how the writers have neglected to demonize him as much as they could have. Stolnavich dies before Jack can get any information about Cheng’s whereabouts from him, which is customary per ‘24’ law. Chloe manages to escape from Cheng’s van and then lies around in the woods for about 20 minutes.
The most significant development occurring in the episode happens to Audrey, who attempts to reach out to the daughter of the Chinese president in a last-ditch effort to avert the impending military conflict. In a scene that couldn’t have been more foreshadowed if text had appeared onscreen stating what was about to happen, the daughter is killed and the episode ends with Cheng informing Audrey that she will be shot as well if she moves. This is significant because the episode (and this whole season, really) has taken pains to point out that Audrey is really the only person left that Jack still has human feelings toward. The strongest moment in the episode is an earlier phone conversation between Jack and Audrey that is fascinating in how it depicts Jack as such an awkward, wounded animal when he has to engage with another person using sentences that can’t be punctuated with “Copy that” or “Tell me where (x) is!”. Jack’s feelings toward Audrey are clearly very strong, but he’s been through far too much emotional trauma in his terrible life to begin to know how to relate to another human on a personal level anymore. His burbling inability to communicate might be funny if we weren’t privy to all the tragedy that resulted in it. So if ‘24’ opts to take Audrey’s life next week, it will tip the scales of cruelty against its hero even further into the realm of misery-porn than it already has. A lot needs to happen in the finale, but let’s hope that’s not on the agenda. Hasn’t this poor bastard has suffered enough?
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