Written by Mitch Cyrus

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And now, the end is here

And so I face, the final curtain

That can be said for both the television version of “24”, and also this column that I’ve published through three seasons of Jack.

Let’s start with one last response to my most fanatic email partner; Mr. Gary Benz.  Gary jogged my memory about something I had forgotten; the fact that Jack kidnapped Logan in Season 5. 

In other words; another retread of a plot device. 

How surprising.

On the other hand, as much as I usually agree with Gary’s points, I will disagree with him on one thing that seems to bug him a lot more than me.  That being Jack’s journey “off the rails”.  Gary’s opinion is that if Jack had been the type of person to totally wig out over a murder, it would have happened after the death of his wife Teri at the end of the first season.

Fair enough…but I contend that no single event in itself caused Jack to go over to the dark side.  Instead, it was a culmination of all the terrible things that had happened to him over the years; Teri, his father, his brother, being kidnapped and tortured by the Chinese, Tony Almeda’s actions, Audrey Rains going loony-toons, being forced to execute Ryan Chappelle, and the deaths in the line of duty by so many that he cared for; like Bill Buchanan, Michelle, Edgar, David Palmer, etc.  There is only so much angst one person can take before he is ready to go Anton Chigurh on as many people as he can…and I think that line was finally crossed with the death of Renee Walker.

In the words of Popeye…Jack finally said “I had alls I can stands; I can’t stands no more!”

But instead of opening up a can of spinach, Jack opened up the Ultimate Can of Whoopass.

2 PM – 4 PM

In case you didn’t know this was going to be the last show ever, Kiefer is there at the start to tell us goodbye.  I like how they felt the need to put a caption saying “Kiefer Sutherland”.  I guess they were figuring that anyone stupid enough to have watched 22 hours of this crap this year was dumb enough to not know his name.

I’m not sure what that really says about me.

Mr. Blonde is in his server room, checking out the news on his little 19 inch Dell monitor.  You’d think that someone who has spent that much coin on all those computers might just be enough of a techno-geek to have a 52” plasma somewhere.  Cole drops by to have a little conversation about finding Jack, and guilts him into helping.

Blondie drops the dime on the fact that Jack overheard Logan and Suvarov’s conversation, where the Russian president admitted giving the order to kill Renee.  Since they have “over an hour” until Suvarov is supposed to be standing on a podium to sign the peace accord, we’ll have to kill time by drinking until our ears bleed…um…I mean, watching Chloe and Cole try to track down Jack, along with a bunch of other boring crap.

And speaking of boring crap, we have more conversations between Logan and Taylor Not-So-Swift, where he admits to the President that Suvarov is involved.  Of course, she is still willing to keep committing more and more crimes every minute.  She then walks into a meeting, and announces that she’s just made the CEO of BP the new Secretary of the Interior, and awarded the 2015 Super Bowl to that horrid blue field at Boise State.

BeadyEyes calls his human mannequin assistant Edan, who lets him know that Bauer was wounded.  He says, “We’ll find him.  It’s only a question of time”.

“Maybe a little quicker than you thought”, says the man hiding in the back seat of his car.  Yes, Jack Bauer still rules.  It was fun seeing Jason’s beady little eyes almost bug out of his weird looking head when Jack told him that he knew that Suvarov was involved.

At the U.N., Lady McBathist gives Taylor Not-So-Swift a gift that Omar was supposed to give her, which was a fancy pen to use for signing the treaty.  So I’ll go on the record now at 8:18 and speculate that once she finds the truth, she’ll try to stab her with it (I would, anyway).  After that tender little Muzak Moment, Kayla gets to her mother and tells her about the phone call with Meredith.  The wheels, they be a-turnin.

Chloe has a plan…one that she borrowed from the movie “Serenity”, which itself borrowed it from “The Running Man”, and that being to use all their super-duper computers to send out the biggest Spam Email of all time, broadcasting Jack’s recording of Logan’s phone calls to “over 100,000 people”.  Hell, that’s better ratings than the CW ever sees.

BeadyEyes is able to drive Jack right into the U.N., which makes things rather convenient, since Jack may not have much time before he bleeds to death.

I am Jack’s Gaping Abdomen Wound. 

Then we find out that BeadyEyes has a bit of a weak stomach, as he almost hurls as he’s forced to stitch it up.  On a side note, I find it interesting that Jack was stabbed in the exact same place that Jack Shephard was stabbed Sunday night by Fake Locke.  Coincidence?  I think not

After the successful surgery, Jack puts BeadyEyes down on his knees so he can execute him, but the sniveling wuss starts crying like a baby and begging for his life, so Jack instead just fractures his skull with the butt end of his Glock.  Should have went ahead and plugged him.  Sign #1 that Jack is getting a bit of his humanity back (dammit!)

President Taylor Not-So-Swift is confronted by Lady McBathist, and she proceeds to lie through her teeth.  Dahlia is having nothing of her stone-walling, and puts Allison right into the corner by stating that she won’t sign the agreement until she’s convinced the Russians had nothing to do with it.  This pretty much forces Taylor to admit to the cover-up (she’s nowhere near the professional liar as Logan).  Needless to say, Lady McBathist blows the proverbial gasket, and calls the whole thing off…after calling out the President as the dishonest snake that she is.

So what does this most despicable President ever do when her back is against the wall?  She threatens to wage full fledged war against Kamistralia unless Lady McBathist signs “the peace agreement”.

What.

A.

Bitch.

Luckily for the Side of Good, Jack is now 100% OK after BeadyEye’s suturing, so he’s now getting his plan together for solving things with a high powered rifle.

Thanks to the most unrealistic “facial recognition” pickup ever (a reflection off a candy machine?), Chloe decides that she’s the only one who can talk Jack down off the ledge.  Since we have a little time to kill, Jack is busy making his farewell video to Kim.

Hey!  It’s Dr. Peter Benton!  And he’s been gone so long on his medical humanitarian work in Africa that he has developed quite the garbled African accent.  I guess they thought so much of the work that he did there as to name him Secretary General of the U.N.  Take THAT, Dr. Carter, and shove your inherited foundation where the sun doesn’t shine.

Enough of that boring diversion…where were we?  Ah yes…Chloe tracks down Jack, who immediately disarms her…and puts the sleeper hold on her.  As the first hour closes, he knows that his spot in that building has been compromised, but he still looks like he’s going to go through with his plan.

Which involves calling up Logan, and tells him to bring Suvarov over to his room after the press conference. 

“What am I supposed to tell him?”

“Try the truth for a change.  Tell him you got credible intelligence about a threat to his life”.

Followed by the coolest evil grin we’ve ever seen from our boy.

Chloe wakes up, and starts the work of trying to convince Jack to go along with her plan.  He’s not listening, which will make things a little interesting since Cole sees that his “10 minutes” are up, and sends the tactical team up, with the intent of using lethal force.

Chloe finally evokes the R-Word (“Renee wouldn’t WANT this!”), right before Jack can pull the trigger on Suvarov, so he holds off firing…which surprises the hell out of Logan since he’s just standing there waiting for Suvarov’s brains to become modern art against the wall of his suite.

Jack only sees one way out of it, which is to give Chloe the evidence, and then have her shoot him, since he knows that if she doesn’t, she will be arrested as well.  I’m also assuming that he was pretty much figuring she wouldn’t hit any vital organs.

So it looks like the last 30 minutes of this “drama” will be ran by Chloe and Cole, with an assist by Arlo, while Jack is on route to a hospital (where he is certain to be sprung by someone).  But first, we get more time killing from BeadyEyes, who wants to see Chloe, as he knows that Jack made the recording.  After a nice feel-up, Chloe is able to make her escape, but BeadyEyes isn’t fooled for long, not once he finds out that Jack’s wound is “a through and through”.  Jack starts gasping, and wants to talk to him…drawing him in close…closer…let me whisper sweet nothings in your ear…and then pull a Mike Tyson to his left ear.  Rah!

I’m not sure that really gave Chloe that much extra time, but it was fun to watch.

Unfortunately, they weren’t able to get it uploaded in time, and their only hope now is in Jack escaping again, as the card gets turned back over to Logan, who turns it over to Taylor.  He also tells her that they absolutely must kill Jack or else he will never stop.  She “agrees” to Jack’s murder tacitly, by not telling Logan to not do it.

Allison listens to Jack’s farewell address, which gets her crying as well, as Jack’s “moving” speech finally is the one thing that can get through her thick, corrupt skull and convincer her to change her mind.

Seriously?

Meanwhile, Logan and BeadyEyes go back to his suite, being just a little too smug for themselves in honor of all the lies and murders they’ve been behind. 

We’ll get to the end of this all at some point…but not until they ddrraaaaaaaggggggg it out forever with tense music going on while Dr. Bentontu is blabbering on, and Lady McBathist is shooting eye daggers through Allison.

And NO…they did NOT slip this stupid line in?!?!

“Today, we bear witness to an extraordinary act in one of the world’s defining dramas”, says Peter Galus Bentontu,

You’ve got to be kidding me.  That was about as subtle as a sledgehammer in the self promotion department of this show.  Now I will admit that “24” was one of television’s defining dramas of the early 2000s.  But this level of self congratulations?

Barf.  Barf.  Barf.

Anyway, once the barf bags have been stowed, Suvarov and Dalia sign the agreement…then it’s time for the President to sign.  She opens up the box with the Special Pen from Omar…(I was hoping it would explode in her face).

And OMG!!! She can’t go through with it!  I’m SHOCKED!!!  Shocked, I say!

She also gives the order to Wild Tim to stop Logan’s goons from killing Jack, but it’s too late, the ambulance has already been ambushed, and Jack has been taken prisoner.

Logan and BeadyEye’s celebration got cut a bit short once they saw the news come on the screen…so Logan does the logical thing; refusing to answer the phone from the President, then basing BeadyEyes on the back of the head with a decanter before killing him.  And yes, that is EXACTLY what happened last season when JonVoight hit his dissenting board member over the head before killing him.

And then Logan shot himself…but didn’t have the angle right, so he only “probably suffered brain damage”….making him the perfect test audience for Fox Television’s newest comedies.

Wild Tim orders the release of Cole and Chloe, and after Chloe has BeadyEyes’ mannequin arrested, the two of them work with Arlo to try to find Jack.

Jack gets pulled out of the van, and placed down in the execution position, when a last second phone call from the President saves Jack.  She talks to him, and tells him that she will immediately resign the presidency and turn herself in for prosecution.  It was about as lame of a scene as I’ve ever seen.

The only good thing is that she tells him to leave the country before the Russians and the Americans come gunning for him.  Wise idea.  Then again, it does add “aiding and abetting a felon” to the list of charges coming up against Allison.

I think Europe might be a good destination for Jack.  What do you think?

Jack has time for one last call to Chloe, asking her to protect Kim and her family, and then goes on to a weepy goodbye speech to her as well, telling her how surprising it was to him that after all of these years, Chloe, the geeky girl he met so long ago, would be the one person who would “always have my back”. (sniff, sniff).   He looks right into the drone camera (at about 10,000 feet), thanks her, and then slips off into the sunset.

“Shut it down”, are the last words of the series.

Final Thoughts

So Sunday night, we have the exquisite series finale of “Lost”, one that will be talked about for years and years.

And tonight we have the series finale of “24”…which should only be talked about if the subject is “how not to end a series”.

The worst part was that there was ZERO tension in the last two hours.  Since the movie is an absolute given, there wasn’t a bit of concern on my part that Jack was going to live.  From a mile away you could have predicted the interruption to the assassin seconds before he pulled the trigger.  No Teri Bauer type moment was really possible here.  I suppose they could have knocked off Chloe at the end, but there is no way the audience would have expected that…and there was no one else on the show that anyone felt enough connection with to care in the slightest if they lived or died (now that Renee is dead, anyway).

I can only hope that there might be SOME redemption for this series in the upcoming movie, as this season was by far the worst it’s ever had.

Honestly?  I would love to find a way to get these 24 hours back, as there are literally thousands of things that would have been more productive than watching this.

Questions still on the table…

~ When do you think they’ll start noticing the smell from the wall where Dana stuffed Milton’s body?

~ How does Jack get out of the country?  (given what we found out about the way the airlines handle the “no fly lists”, maybe this isn’t that outlandish of an idea).  I could really see Jack and Mr. Blonde walking down a runway in a knockoff of the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” line from “Casablanca”.  Jack’s got to get out of the country, as does Mr. Blonde, now that his cover is blown…and he seems to have a lot of resources at his fingertips.

~ Once the truth becomes known to everyone about the identity of Jenny/Dana/Starbuck, you know there will be a connection made when the KevinBobbsie neck-twins’ bodies float up from the Jersey swampland.  I think Cole might need to see if he can book a second bunk on that slow freighter Jack is taking to Portugal.

~ What are the odds that BubbaHastings jumped up and yelled “die, Bitch, die!” at the TV screen when he saw Allison make her announcement?

~ I am assuming that Vitaly Corleonovich will probably walk now, since everyone connected with his arrest are either dead now, or in hiding.

~ Didn’t Chloe say early in the show that she was only back to work because her husband Miles had lost his job?  I’m assuming that there are now at least two geek openings at CTU, which should solve that problem.

~ We also have that little murder and treason trial coming up for General Turdisdumb and RobWeasel.  Oh, to be a high priced defense lawyer in D.C.

Bauer Body Count

37.  Jack got no one else in the last two hours.  The writers, on the other hand, have killed off literally millions of viewers that once watched this series, but tuned it completely out during this dreadful year.

 

For those who have stuck through it with me…you are to be commended…or else committed, as you’re probably just as nuts as I am.

But I thank you for your support of this column for the past three years.