Date of airing: December 11, 2001 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.61 million viewers, 4.8/7 in Households, 3.6/9 with Adults 18-49
This episode was a rather quiet one. Jack Bauer continues to break a few rules after announcing in the previous hour that breaking rules is what he has to do now, and it’s kind of a plot that turned out to be a major development in Jack’s character arc during this episode. Now that he even has to break out a cop killer, just so he can do his job to stop an assassination attempt, it pretty much means that Jack won’t stop to get the job done, and at one point he will draw the police against himself. The little talk he had with George Mason at the end was lucky for Jack, but I cannot imagine that another stunt like this will allow him to get into his car and drive off once more. Jack is starting to become more unhinged during this investigation, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s because he just learned that Kim has been kidnapped. After all, he cut off a thumb a few episodes ago and he was already planning to break rules with cop killer Penticoff before the guy became a cop killer.
At the end of the day though, the jailbreak didn’t lead to anything important in the narrative – what Jack was looking at was just another piece of the puzzle in the conspiracy regarding the assassination attempt, and Jack didn’t even get an answer about Kim’s whereabouts or who Gaines might be. Because let’s recap for a second: When Penticoff got the phone call, Gaines introduced himself with his name, which means Jack knows who’s behind his daughter’s kidnapping, at least. I’m surprised he wasn’t giving that particular piece of information to Nina who could have started to dig out some information.
 |
| Jack has something personal to discuss with the prisoner. |
I only have one problem with Jack’s story. Mason hates him deeply and wholeheartedly. Mason already hated him before the pilot episode (most likely because of the bribery scandal that was included with Jack’s backstory, making me wonder how deep Mason was involved in the bribery scandal and why Jack didn’t blow up the dude as well before the events of the series), and Jack took it up a notch and shot him with a dart four hours ago. I can’t quite believe that Mason would even listen to anything Jack has to say, even if it happened to be something about the attempt on David Palmer’s life or an unidentified dead body in the trunk of a random car. So Mason’s choice to let Jack walk away and continue his investigation was very out of character. Mason letting Jack go after he broke a killer out of jail was out of character. It was a convenient plot twist to get the story moving and to have Jack metaphorically breathe into Gaines’ neck.
Gaines wasn’t one of the smartest people in this episode either. When he placed Kim in the back seat of his car, I was rolling with my eyes. There is a gagged and bound young woman in the back seat of a car of a man in the middle of the night, and Gaines was not thinking about the possibility that she might cause some trouble when she sees another car? Or that someone else would maybe look into Gaines’ car and see this gagged and bound woman, being alarmed about a potential kidnapping happening right now? I was asking myself why Gaines didn’t just stash Kim in the trunk from the beginning, since that would be the most logical thing to do. Los Angeles during witching hours is still Los Angeles, and there is traffic, even if the show’s aerial shots of cars driving on seemingly empty roads sometimes won’t show that traffic.
Still, that was extremely stupid behavior of a terrorist who wants to kill the Senator from California who is about to turn into a presidential candidate. Now that Kim knows who she is dealing with and one of her kidnappers is dead (it’s a certainty that the other will follow his friend into the grave very soon), it’s time for her to be scared now and maybe start thinking about either fighting back or escaping. She has been kidnapped and she almost witnessed Janet’s murder. Now she witnessed a real murder. I would be happy if that fear were to be seen in Kim’s face every once in a while, but I saw Elisha Cuthbert again who again didn’t seem to be able to properly portray the fear of being a kidnapping victim, as well as the trauma of witnessing mayhem and murder.
The rest of the episode was okay enough, but not of much interest to me. The conversation between David Palmer and Maureen didn’t lead to much because it just confirmed what Palmer already knew two episodes ago – that his son’s therapist was the source for Maureen and that the writers started dancing around this Palmer family back story instead of revealing more information, or making it count as a dramatic character story for David and his family. However, the story delivered some nice and probably needed tension between David and his son, which helps to position David as a problematic character who isn’t necessarily the perfect presidential candidate he will probably try to be in front of the cameras when it’s daylight outside. I kind of like the notion already that this contrast will be shown in a few episodes, putting a lot more depth into Palmer’s arc in the process.
 |
| Early morning is a dead time to be in the hospital. |
The events at CTU were likewise of no interest to me. Well, nothing happened there anyway, except for the usual weird stuff happening between Nina and Tony, as if the writers wanted me to care that the two share a history and that there might be a love triangle between the two and Jack. Maybe Tony and Nina should just take a ten-minute break and get it out of their system in the staff washroom, as the tension, that mostly comes from the annoying Tony anyway, is starting to get on my nerves. It was a problematic story in this episode because it didn’t give either character anything meaningful to do.
