Previously on 24, and A Change

Ok, let's see what happened last week.

The President and her team are sequestered on a military base in NJ. (Why they didn't go back to DC is kind of odd. Whatever.) The bad guys, of course, put in a call to Madame President, probably on her cell, to give her an ultimatum: unless she hands over President Hair Gel to them, they are going to unleash nucular bombs that will kill a swath of my fellow New Yorkers.

After further credible conversing with CTU to determine the reality of this situation, she decides that she's not going to deal with terrorists --- and that Jack Bauer must personally escort the President of the Islamic Republic and his family through an improbable tunnel between the UN and New Jersey.

(And of course, it turns out that Jack, although shot, has not been wounded. His body armor took the brunt of the bullet. He might have a broken rib...but nothing like that can stop Jack. He agrees to take the President's assignment, bringing Renee with him at her insistence.)

While she and her cabinet debate the issue of dealing with terrorists, one of her senior military advisors, a General, decides that the solution is treason. He and the president's scaly senior aide, Rob, agree to circumvent the President's authority. We see them attempting to hack into Ethan's laptop to find info for the word on POTIR's whereabouts, so that they can turn him over to the bad guys themselves. Ethan walks in on them, and before it comes to total fisticuffs, he appears to succumb to a heretofore unrevealed heart issue. He has Jack on speed dial, and gets off a call, but is unable to get through.

The General who is running the coup op bullies Rob into withholding medical care from Ethan, until they've captured or killed Jack and the other agents escorting the President of the Islamic Republic...they send a special ops team to meet them at the outside of this odd and improbable tunnel they're traversing.

Dana, aka Bridezilla, as it turns out, is working with the head bad guy. She's conversing with him from time to time from her desk at CTU, as he directs Tarin to drive the now armed bomb up to the Upper West Side, presumably to blow himself up with 100,000 of my uptown neighbors. (Though I rarely go that far uptown.)

Jack keeps trying to call Ethan from his march through this oddly cluttered tunnel. (It looks like a movie representation of a museum basement, stick dry and filled with crates.) When he can't get through, he gets suspicious, and tells his team to turn back.

When they turn back, the special forces guys come into the tunnel after them. Gunfire ensues, along with a chase scene and the usual number of bodies. Jack learns about the covert op from one of the poorly directed members of the national service, who seems to have understood and agreed to participate in this treasonous op.

Jack sends Renee, the President and his family back. More gunfire. And boom. POTIR, having somehow gotten his hands on a gun, gets a shot off against one of the bad guys, saving Jack's life.

As the show closes, it appears that Tarin has misgivings about his mission to blow up the Upper West Side, and POTIR is contemplating turning himself over to the bad guys.

(Wouldn't it be delicious if POTIR was in on this whole thing?)

And on a side note, I won't be live blogging tonight, for the first time in many years. (More on that in my next post.) I hope that M can chime in at some point. We'll catch up tomorrow.

"M" says: Hubby just got home at 9 CDT and now both kids are in bed. I'll have to try to watch and post notes. Maybe I'll do that as I do "step" on the Wii