Day 2: 2:00 a.m.-3:00 a.m.

Day 2, hour 19: things get really ugly for Jack and President Palmer, as the imminent war with the Middle East seems increasingly less likely to avoid and the real interests behind the conflict are revealed.

Palmer-wise, the situation escalates when the President has to deal with impatient Joint Chiefs and Jim Prescott reveals his plan to Chief of Staff Mike Novick (Jude Ciccolella): to take over the Presidency through the 25th Emendment. Meanwhile, Jack has managed to retrieve a chip from Wallace's corpse and instructs Kate and Yusuf to take it back to CTU as it can prove the Cyprus recording was manufactured by the men behind the nuclear bomb. However, Kate and Yusuf are attacked by angry citizens who mistake the Arabic agent for a terrorist, while Jack himself is abducted and tortured by a group of men working for the cynical businessman Peter Kingsley (Tobin Bell).

This is one of the most violent episodes of the series, in fact it received some criticism when it originally aired, thanks to the torture scene. It is also brilliant in establishing the motive the villains have for unleashing the conflict with the Middle East: they don't care how many people will die in the process, as long as their oil stocks benefit from the war. Such a revelation is very relevant in that it reflects our time perfectly: it's all about business.

Plus, there's Tobin Bell, aka Jigsaw, Agent Dreyer from Alias and other notorious bad guys, most of them of the small-screen type (see Seinfeld too, for example). Introduced quite late in the game, as befits a criminal mastermind, he uses his one-minute appearance to instill an immediate sense of menace that doesn't lift after-wards. Now, who said the villains on 24 are rubbish?