"24" 10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m. (2002)

User Rating:

8.6/10   

Director:

Davis Guggenheim

Writers:

Joel Surnow (creator) &
Robert Cochran (creator) ...

TV Series:

"24" (2001)

Original Air Date:

12 February 2002 (Season 1, Episode 11)

Genre:

Action | Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

Plot:

Jack takes Ted Cofell hostage after finding his name on the key-card and tries to get whatever info...

Plot Keywords:

Digit In Title | Punctuation In Title | Period In Title | Title Ends With Period | Number In Title

Cast

Kiefer Sutherland	...	Jack Bauer
Leslie Hope	...	Teri Bauer
Sarah Clarke	...	Nina Myers
Elisha Cuthbert	...	Kim Bauer
Dennis Haysbert	...	Senator David Palmer
Michael Massee	...	Ira Gaines
Tamara Tunie	...	Alberta Green
Zeljko Ivanek	...	Andre Drazen
Daniel Bess	...	Rick
Jude Ciccolella	...	Mike Novick
Zach Grenier	...	Carl Webb
Silas Weir Mitchell	...	Eli
Currie Graham	...	Ted Cofell
Penny Johnson	...	Sherry Palmer (as Penny Johnson Jerald)
Carlos Bernard	...	Tony Almeida

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Portugal:M/12 (DVD rating)

Company:

Imagine Television

Trivia:

The producers changed Jack's recap monologue again. Apparently people like "Right now, terrorists are plotting to assassinate a Presidential candidate" better than "There are terrorists plotting to assassinate a Presidential candidate."

Goofs:

Continuity: Ted Cofell says, "Mark, I have a change of plans. I'm going to be meeting someone in the parking garage at the corner of Nordoff and Willingham." The closed captioning has him saying that he's going to meet someone at the corner of Nordoff and Sherman Way.

Quotes:

Andre Drazen: When Plan A fails, you should have a Plan B, not Plan A recycled.

It's interrogation time!

Aside from the pilot and the stunning finale, this is my favorite episode of 24's mesmerizing first year (though "day" would perhaps sound better). Why? Because it shows Jack Bauer, one of the best television characters of all time (yes, he is that well-defined) in the most bad-ass of behaviors, proving he is a worthy successor to Die Hard's John McClane (the first really vulnerable action hero ever to hit the screen).

Not that it should be very surprising, given the man's mood: still unaware of Teri and Kim's whereabouts, he coldly kidnaps Ted Cofell, a guy whose name is apparently linked to Ira Gaines and his crew, and forces him to cooperate, whether the poor fella likes it or not. Meanwhile, a new player enters the game as Gaines receives a phone call from his employer, one Andre Drazen (Zeljiko Ivanek), who orders him to execute Bauer's wife and daughter. As for CTU, they are still very far from catching up with their rogue agent.

Plotwise, this is a great episode as it introduces a new character and a new angle from which to look at things, as Andre's words and actions, embodied with lethal charm by TV veteran Ivanek (best known for playing Governor Devlin on Oz), suggest there might be more to this season's events than what viewers and federal agents alike thought in the beginning. Most of all, this sudden shift of perspective is believable and enables the main storyline to develop in an unexpected, original way, something that has been kept in subsequent seasons (Day 4 notwithstanding).

What really makes the eleventh hour stand out, though, is the introduction of another series benchmark: Jack's interrogation scenes. Complete with optional guns, knives or just good old fists, every year of the show features at least one moment when the protagonist has to intimidate suspects and retrieve information. Thanks to Sutherland's nuanced performance, those scenes never get repetitive, but none of them can surpass the pure sense of real menace that the very first interrogation conveys. "You probably don't think I could force this towel down your throat, but trust me, I can. All the way." Jack tells Cofell as it all seems to turn nasty. "Except that I'd hold onto this little bit at the end. When your stomach starts to digest the towel, I pull it out. Taking your stomach lining with it. Most people probably take about a week to die. It's very painful." Tense and almost unbearably nerve-wrecking, it's so good it nearly makes a minimalistic, Jason Bourne-style action sequence set in a car look stiff, sticking to the mantra of Alias creator J. J. Abrams: the dialogue scenes should be as important as the bits where stuff blows up.