24

"Jack, what do we do now?" Your fake president, ladies and gentlemen. Seriously, if Logan were any less qualified to hold this office, he’d be... eh, too easy. The important thing is, our favorite fictitious POTUS to hate gets one helluva smackdown from First Crazy - to which I can only say: Thank you, Martha.

I’ve been wanting to slap that guy square across the face for like a year now. And while I’m doling out little tidbits of appreciation, let me go ahead and offer a big ol’ bite of gratitude Jack Bauer’s way. Now, we’ve talked about Jack’s mad skillz in the surly dialogue department, but sometimes the man tosses off a line so effortlessly, I’m convinced even he doesn’t realize just what a badass he truly is. Case in point, when discussing Big Bad Russian Hostage with Vaguely Familiar CTU Operative No.

2: "I don’t mind that they’ve dressed his wound, but make sure they don’t give him anything for the pain." It’s not that he approves of allowing the medic to stop the guy’s bleeding, or even that he’s OK with it. Nope. He simply doesn’t mind. For that, Mr. Bauer, I shall forgive your utterance of the "K" word. For now. Pretty exciting body count in this one, folks.

We’ve got Walt taking the coward’s way out by hanging himself (which I totally called all of 15 seconds before it happened - and by 24 standards, that makes me a winner). Then we’ve got poor Cal, the hostage machinist, getting a slug to the chest from Yellow Tie. (It’s so hard to find good precision metal-cutters these days, especially ones you finally recognize like three hours later as also having played the dead guy Xander hung out with during his wild night of "Zeppo" fun on Buffy).

And speaking of our Sunnydale friends, it only takes two tiny bullets from the Ukrainian Dawn Summers to wipe out her skeezy Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery captor - and with him went Jack’s only lead. Well, without wrinkles like that, how would we know when the hour’s up? - Chana Shwadlenak