24 Episode 6.14 - "7:00 PM - 8:00 PM"
Airdate: Monday, March 19th, 2007

A bit of a bumpy ride this week, folks. I’m not gonna lie to ya.

First and foremost, we get the "Oh, by the way, Jack. The love of your life from before your time being tortured in a Chinese prison? She died trying to save you. We forgot to mention that. Sorry."

I suppose it’s possible that this is a seed being planted for later in the season, when Audrey is revealed to be either the true evil mastermind behind the various nefarious plots afoot, cementing Jack’s reputation as perhaps the WORST judge of character in the history of people. But if that doesn’t happen, what’s the deal here? Aren’t there about a zillion easier ways that they could have deposited Audrey onto the sidelines of Jack’s life? Hey, just for grins, here’s five off the top of my head:

1. She married someone else, thinking Jack would never make it back.
2. She moved to London, England for a job opportunity.
3. She’s deep undercover with CTU, perhaps never to return.
4. The dingo ate her baby.
5. She’s shacked up someplace with that naked lesbian Mandy, who appeared way back in the first episode of season one.

See? Easy. This whole Audrey plot just seems a bit heavy-handed. Does Jack Bauer really need this situation to be any more personal?! His freakin’ DAD and BROTHER and SISTER-IN-LAW (who, by the way, he used to hook up with his own self) are key players. He’s got all the stakes he needs.

Speaking of stakes, vice President Noah Daniels is all about raising those bad boys. He’s gonna nuke Iran if it’s the last thing he does! I’ve written before about the show’s politics--how exec producer Joel Surnow is a public and well-avowed conservative and Bushie, while other writers seem to fall more heavily into the liberal camp.

Again, the Vice President character is being utilized as almost a broad parody of Dick Cheney, only this week, it isn’t all fun and games--there are several realistic scenarios in which I could imagine either Cheney (or Bush being puppeteered by Cheney) dropping a nuke on some part of the world, and thus launching World War III. So the scenes with Powers Boothe stopming around the bunker as Daniels have an eerie whiff of worst-case-scenario reality to them, even as they fit snugly within the confines of 24’s typical unreal insanity.

In other news, I’m thrilled by Rick "Ricky" Schroeder (anyone else catch that in the credits? A sly in-joke poking fun at the former Silver Spoon star, perhaps?) and not so thrilled that Karen Hayes has returned to the President’s bunker.

With Ricky, they keep referring to this ugly incident in Denver, and then this week, they seemed to suggest that said incident involved some kind of sexual pleasure he derives from interrogating prisoners. THAT is what I call a "fascinating character trait," especially when it’s a grizzled, pockmarked Ricky Schroeder doing the interrogating. Yowza.

As for Karen Hayes, it was just a bit of a disappointment that the character returned to her verbal sparring with Tom Lennox, almost as though she never left, and once again got herself out-chomped by Peter MacNicol. At least at CTU in LA with her hubby Bill Buchanan, the two of them could sorta out-bore each other, offering flatline responses to horrific national tragedies.

Hey, there’s an idea--a wacky episode where Karen switches places with Morris, and we get to see Tom Lennox and Morris pal around in the bunker. Maybe they could get themselves handcuffed to water pipes together? That’d be sweet.

iTunes Links

24 - Series
24 - Season 6
"7:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M."

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.