Date of airing: November 27, 2001 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.15 million viewers, 5.9/9 in Households, 4.4/10 with Adults 18-49
This was another very solid episode, in which Jack learns about the fine print of the case he is currently working on. Step by step, the characters (and the audience) were revealed some plot points, which move both parties forward in the story – a move that is necessary after four episodes, otherwise, the show was threatening to become more repetitive with time. Jack Bauer can’t always look for a shooter in quiet and dark surroundings for ten minutes, trying to navigate corners and hallways looking for an assassin, all while he is trying to keep alive the person he is with, but who gets shot to death by the assassin anyway. TWENTY-FOUR is four episodes old, and it has brought this plot device twice already, proving that the show had a problem of repetitiveness, which the writers were trying to eliminate by the end of this hour.
In this installment, the plot device happened in the weirdest and worst possible way, too: Killing off a black woman like this seems like the first example of how the series became a show that was riddled with racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and the particular example of this episode may prove that racism was indeed the very first problem the writers showed off to a willing audience: The male prostitute in the previous episode was only beaten up and the viewers never even knew whether or not he died. However, this episode made it clear that Officer Jessie Hampton was deceased – she was seen bleeding out and she was pronounced dead a few minutes later. Why would you be so clear about this message with a black woman, but not a prostituting gay teen in the back alley nightlife of Los Angeles? Thankfully, something came out of that story when Jack learned that his daughter’s disappearance is somehow involved in all of this. And now is the time for Jack to worry and get all into the terrorists’ business.
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| Father and son talk about what's on TV at this time of night. |
At least the episode had some entertaining moments. The CTU lockdown was a little absurd since George Mason just wanted to find Jack and wasn’t even interested in an investigation into Jack’s actions. Mason could have searched the building for Jack, failed to find him, and went on his way again, but no, he had to lock everything down and question the CTU agents. However, it was funny that even Mason thought this was a waste of time, creating a little amount of meta storytelling here. I take that storyline and file it under “writers wanting to stall time again,” because crucial information needed to be delivered to the audience at the end of the episode, not before that. On the other hand, I’m starting to like the mess Nina – and now Jamey – are in. Nina has no trouble fooling Mason and covering for Jack, but Jamey is not that kind of agent. She is just an analyst who can do computer stuff in her sleep, but when it comes to personal interactions and loyalty, she might hesitate or say something that might bring Jack in a bit of danger. And Jamey has been involved quite a lot recently, making her more important in this narrative, and therefore a more interesting character.
The two idiot boys wanting to go back for Janet, so they could kill her, was great though. Just as Kim realized she has been kidnapped, the guys turn out to be dangerous lunatics who won’t stop killing other people to get what they want, and they are talking about wanting to go back and kill Janet before she can ID them, and before Kim can get rescued by police. What a shame the episode didn’t make use of emotional torture in that scene, because I would have loved to see how Kim reacted to that moment when she heard that the guys whose van she is being held in forcefully are killers – that’s a whole different level of being a victim than just being kidnapped. When she faced Gaines at the end, I got a few chills. Because the show’s hero’s daughter is now in the hands of the season’s villain. It is about to get real for Kim, and it’s about time for that to show in her behavior, especially in her facial expressions.
Meanwhile, Teri and Alan York were also stalling time. I didn’t count the time and don’t know how long they have been with the police officer (it almost seemed like it was for half an hour), but I got the feeling that the officer could have solved that problem much quicker and he could have given an answer to his requests (whether or not the 911 call happened) a lot sooner. First of all, how cruel is it that you are being stopped by the police while you were hoping to save your child from certain doom, and the officer is calmly doing his job, not listening to your pleas (someone is reporting a potential crime, so why was the cop not doing anything about it)? Secondly, why did it take so long for the officer to verify Teri’s 911 call? Maybe I don’t know anything about the procedure of how 911 calls are being electronically archived after they were made, but I find that a little convenient, especially since Teri and Alan only had one job to do in this episode: Drive around the night hours of Los Angeles and not get any closer to their daughters, although the amount of times they were unknowingly driving past them is kind of growing to be more hilarious.
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| Tiny amounts of racism in this series lead to dead black characters. |
Then there was the Palmer family, having been forced into a bit of a break in this episode for some reason, even if it gave time for the Bauer storyline to develop during this hour. But the only development in the Palmer story that happened here was that their backstory got a little bit fleshed out, that David isn’t much of a secrecy bearer, and that he was capable of talking to his wife about the issues that plague him. It was noticeable though that Jack’s story propelled forward with the reveal at the end, while David’s story was stalling in the same episode. As if the writers haven’t quite figured out how to fuel each story in the same episode, how to make both stories put fire into an episode that was written to stall time.
