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The 24 check list

Jack Bauer is back tonight with no time for a sandwich, toilet breaks or sleep. What are the essential ingredients in an episode 24?

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jbauerJack Bauer returns to screens tonight in 24 and you can bet your bottom dollar he still won’t have time for a sandwich.

If there’s one thing we know about Jack it’s that he can run on limitless energy, without pausing for sustenance or slumber.

So here’s a little list of essential 24 ingredients.

– No time for coffees.
– No sandwiches, snacks or meals.
– No sleeping, nanna naps or forty winks.
– No toilet breaks.
– Every 24hr block nearly always starts and ends in the early morning.
– Foreign nationals are always the villains.
– Someone high up in the White House administration will invariably betray the President.
– There’s never any traffic getting from A to B.
– Everyone’s cell phone has the same ring tone.
– Colleagues always bicker over trivial workplace practices while the world is blowing up.
– Someone Jack loves dearly is always in peril at the most inopportune time.
– Everyone forgets about something that shook their world three hours ago and acts like it was three months ago.
– It never rains.
– Cell phones never run low on batteries or lose reception.
– Chloe is a one-woman technical equivalent of NASA / FBI / CIA and Microsoft.
– There are surveillance cameras everywhere if you look hard enough.
– Dead people have a habit of being miraculously revived with a little persistence or subterfuge.
– Despite wild shootouts Jack never gets shot with anything more than a flesh wound that halts him just for an hour.

Still, somehow we still heart 24!

PS. Any more?

  • Tagged with 24

21 Responses

  1. After having a glimpse of her in the trailer last year glad that I finally got to see properly Annie Wersching as Renee Walker as she is gorgeous.

  2. So it’s got a “new night” already… Sunday 9:30… Love how the promo said “On the new night” when it only just started…. Why couldnt it just started on the Sunday instead of switching it after the premiere…

  7. One of my favourites:
    A bad guy will spray 1000 bullets a second at Jack Bauer with a semi-automatic weapon, but Jack will fire one bullet from a hand gun and get the baddie every time.

  9. @steve – oh cr@p – i’ve forgotten all about the advertisements lol. you just cannot beat downloading an episode of your fave show, and watch it unmolested by add breaks every few minutes. I feel a rant coming on about being unable to watch good tv shows / movies late at night because of the smutty advertisements every 7 minutes or so.

  10. Having already seen season 7’s first 7 episodes, it’s a great season, but I’d
    find it incredibly annoying to contend with commercial breaks all the time on free to air and suspect many other Aus viewers have the same view, hence the reason this would be a very heavily downloaded show amongst tens of thousands of other Aus viewers. The only way Seven can beat this is to get permission to show new episodes 1 or 2 days before North America.

  13. David wrote: “Check your brain at the door and enjoy the ride.” I checked mine at a door a few years ago: watching Buffy, still looking for it 😀

  14. No one they hire to run CTU is ever as qualified as Jack, but they can’t hire Jack to run CTU because of something he has just done/is about to do/did last season.

  15. Re 3 month reactions: Invariably in any episode there are events that shake the world of a character at say 11am -death of a relative for example, half a city blown up etc – they react to it for an hour or two.

    By about 4pm it’s long forgotten, whereas the reality is these things would affect our outlook, our ability to function, our drive and resolve for days and probably weeks.

    But 24 characters have to compact their reactions so that an hour equals a week, because that’s how the show airs. It’s a bit daft if you try to look at it logically. Best thing is not to. Check your brain at the door and enjoy the ride.

  16. Indeed we do love 24, sadly Seven can’t be trusted to leave it in the timeslot it has allotted, as a consequence the advertisers won’t be getting me and my friends in the ratings mix, and I’m here to say it is excellent.

  17. I don’t get the “Everyone forgets about something that shook their world three hours ago and acts like it was three months ago.”

    If you are referring to things that happened in a previous season, remember a lot of time has passed between seasons. Anywhere from 3 months to 3 years.

    And if you remember that the season takes place in a 24hr time frame (1 day), a lot of that stuff doesn’t seem so strange. Much traffic on the road at 3am? Nup. My mobile phone battery lasts longer than 24hrs. There’s been times I haven’t slept in a 24hr period for much worse reasons than saving the world 😀 And have you looked around the city lately? Yes, there really are surveillance cameras everywhere if you look hard enough. And the rest are pretty much just staples of any action TV show / movie.

    Just nitpicking your nitpicking list 🙂

  18. Two to add:
    * Fox News will cover the story within two minutes of the event happening.
    * Nothing of importance ever happens during the commercial breaks

    I’ve learn not to over analyse 24. While the theory is everything happens in 24 hours, the plot could also happen over a longer time period. I’ve always watched 24 (a season) over a single weekend rather than 24 weeks. It gives it more of a sense of appreciating the time line.

  21. For some mysterious reason, nothing urgent, dangerous or important ever happens in the missing 19 minutes we don’t see due to the commercial breaks, pre-episode recap and end credits.

    The world of 24 is obviously populated by bad guys who are all former commercial TV network execs who are quite happy to stop killing, torturing and exploding things for a few minutes so you can watch the ads.

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