What Makes Jack Run?

You can tell it's gonna be a rough day for Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) from the opening sequence. Midnight in South Korea, and we're coming on the end of a protracted electroshock torture/interrogation: the victim has plastic baggies on his bare where it looks like melted toe jam has pooled. When he gives out a final essential piece of info ("It's today!"), we camera over to some grim lookin' white guys sitting outside the interrogation room. One of 'em sez it's time to phone the president. These, you quickly realize, are the Good Guys.

Meanwhile, it's 8:00 a.m. in West Coast America, and former assassination target/current president David Palmer (Dennis Hasbert) is out fly fishing with his son. Last season's Hillarie Macbeth, Sherry Palmer, is temporarily out of the picture. Which right away tells you how enlightened the country has grown: not only is it ready to elect a black president, it's elected one who is separated from his wife. Palmer gets word from his weaselly underling (Timothy Carhart) that a fundamentalist terrorist group called Second Wave has brought a nuclear weapon into L.A. They plan to detonate said device within the next (you guessed it) twenty-four hours.

Paging Jack Bauer! In the year since his marathon sprint against evil Serbs, Jack has quit the Counter Terrorist Unit and apparently devoted most of his time to growing an Al Gore beard and moping. Periodically, he opens a drawer, pushing his gun aside to pull out a family photo and gaze at the image of his dead wife & estranged daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert). When men lose their spouses in stuff like this, they mourn forever a la Mel Gibson's Lethal Weapon loony; when women do, they're like Kim Delaney's character in C.S.I.: Miami. Three months to grieve than it's back to business.

Daughter Kim, while still grieving, has also done some maturing: from last year's petulant party girl to the "best nanny ever" for a well-to-do L.A. family. Things aren't entirely rosy for our gal, though. Very quickly (the instant he tells Kim she has a "nice body" once his wife has stepped out of the room) we learn that corporate Dad is an abusive scuzzwad. By the end of the ep, we know Kim'll once more be on the run in the doom-laden city. The timing seems more contrived (last season's Kim-in-peril plot tied into the Big Baddy's plans, after all), but perhaps we're missing something.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

Visit Bill Sherman's author page — Bill Sherman's Blog