As the explosions fly and Jack Bauer drives to safety, “Day 9: 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.” nearly destroys what momentum 24: Live Another Day rebuilt in the episode’s first forty minutes. The chase to find Simone and interview Yasmin may not have been a lot of compelling material, but it served its narrative purpose well, positioning Simone as the season’s most important wild card and further tightening the Alzheimer’s noose around the neck of President Heller. However, when the episode begins to shift attention away from these two characters, onto the more plot-serving personalities on the show – like Margot and Navarro – the inexplicable decisions that follow undermine a lot of the good the lead up to the episode’s climax did.
I’m sure there’s more import to it than we’ve seen so far – but for the moment, Navarro leaking information to Adrian Cross feels like it belongs in a completely different season of 24 than this one. After a brief moment (literally two lines in one scene) in the sun, Chloe’s been reduced to her own least common denominator, serving more as a proxy to the larger story connecting Navarro and Cross to whoever Cross is “middle manning” for, than a meaningful re-integration of 24‘s central friendship into the narrative. She’s become a background presence, nothing more than the voice in Jack’s ear, a character the show clearly doesn’t know what to do with when she’s not serving the larger, currently disconnected-to-her plots (that mostly don’t involve her; she worked for Cross, but the leak of classified documents don’t appear to be coming from her) of Live Another Day.
Navarro’s leak to Cross that’s affecting Morgan’s career is a simplistic, predictable story that shouldn’t garnish much attention until its real importance is revealed. It’s so predictable, in fact, that when Navarro sends Jordan into the field to “pick up a package”, it’s pretty clear both the audience AND JORDAN HIMSELF knows what’s going to happen next (why Jordan doesn’t prepare for this is beyond me) – and it seems, the filmmakers, who give us a quick failed assassination attempt scene out of what feels like obligation, not raising the stakes or tension between Navarro and those who suspect him (which is literally just Jordan so far).
Unfortunately, this illogical approach to Navarro’s nefarious plots is something that becomes the norm for the episode as it carries on, highlighted by Margot wasting the missiles of one of her precious drones trying to blow up her daughter at a hospital. What does she think this is going to accomplish? If she knows her daughter as well as she presumes to, she knows that even a conflicted Simone wouldn’t betray her mother: I don’t know what she thinks killing her will try to do, except make Margot’s larger attack more vulnerable to exposure – and in reality, less effective now that she’s wasted all the missiles in one drone (which, by the way, doesn’t really capture how devastating they need to be: those special effects would suggest that emptying the ammunition of six drones is going to do a lot of damage, but not enough to level the city or throw the entire organized world into unfettered chaos).
And as Margot is wasting missiles and Jack is speeding around in his Chrysler 200, the logic of the whole mess continues to fall apart: Margot’s steadfast discipline is exposed as being false (not to mention Ian’s desire to murder his sister is exposed as being really, really fucking disturbing and unexplained in any satisfying fashion). And it begins to lead the show into the dreaded “of course” territory, no more than the “ambigious” closing moment, where Heller pauses before considering giving himself up to Margot. Of course he’s going to do it: with how quickly the show’s pushed him to the edge of dementia (which has been really, really, really rapid), he’s already in “sacrifice myself for the country” mode, all while not calling out the logic of a woman who went through years of preparations, to steal drones and start emptying them out on personal vendettas across England.
It’s really too bad: up until those final scenes, 24: Live Another Day felt like it was regaining some of the momentum lost in the last few episodes, putting Simone’s loyalties up in the air and letting the ugly Jack Bauer step to the forefront, if only for a moment (though it’s hilarious how quickly Jack goes from torturing Simone until she passes out, to feeling bad, to not giving a shit about it anymore because he can always justify what he does). There’s also the question of who Cross works for, the only interesting thing that comes out of Navarro’s idiotic plan to try and cover his own tracks (by essentially exposing himself in the process… seriously, this guy’s a fucking chief of staff for a foreign office?) – it’s just too bad this hour turned into “Look How Fucking Crazy and Short-Sighted Margot Suddenly Is” rather than embrace the complexities of the situations it constructed for this hour.
Other thoughts/observations:
- this episode was written by Tony Basgallop, otherwise known as creator and writer of BBC’s entertaining, if wildly uneven one-off series Inside Men in 2012.
- Kate’s shoulders seem to be fine, even though she was in that awfully uncomfortable-looking position mere minutes ago. She’s not even sore? Damn, girl!
- there’s so little going on in the fringes of this episode, the closing collage of video features the President taking his jacket off from multiple angles.
- Mark faces treason accusations from the Russian government, which means he’s going to muck up a big mission by Jack by letting the Russians get involved “early” (on his terms; he wants to hand Jack over when the situation ends and the President resigns).