24- Season 8.7 - 10pm: She’s My Cherry Pie

10 pm

If I had to divide this episode of 24 into a pie, I guess it would be in four slices.
1. One slice for Hassan and his obsession with anyone who might have had anything to do with his assassination attempt.
2. A small slice for Sergei, the Russian arms dealer who likes to keep his sons in the walk-in fridge.
3. A generous portion for Dana and her redneck ex-boyfriend.
4. A big, bloody slice for Renee and Jack.

Unfortunately, three out of four pieces of this pie were practically inedible. Luckily, we did get a classic 24 moment tonight that salvaged the pie… or the show. You know what I mean.

So first you take a bite out of the Hassan slice. How did it taste? Bland. First let me just say that keeping track of the names of Hassan’s people is almost impossible, so I will not even try in most cases.

Hassan’s chief or security implores him to layoff the harsh tactics and seemingly gets through to him. But when the Security guy goes to see Hassan’s daughter, Hassan has another security guard take over and arrests first guy, who happens to be dating his daughter.

Okay, nobody cares. Let’s move on to another slice. We find Sergei and his remaining son Josef in the refrigerator. I guess it’s because Sergei wants his son to cool off after he murdered his other son. Sergei assures Josef that he loves him and only wants the best for him and his family. Unfortunately, the corpse of the dead brother is there in the fridge next to the vodka and canned tomatoes, so it’s a little hard for Josef to take his dad seriously. It’s kind of like the Big Bad Wolf telling the Smart Little Pig to let him in because he just wants to talk. But the little pig can see the bloody remains of his brothers strew across the lawn, amongst the scattered twigs and straw. Too bad for Josef he’s locked in a cooler and not a nice brick house with a chimney.

Let’s move on. The next piece of the pie is Dana and her redneck boyfriend’s attempt at the Brinks job. Dana continues to sneak away from her post during a nuclear crisis in order to guide Kevin Wade and his buddy through the security system so they can steal the money in an evidence cage. They really should have got Larry the Cable Guy to play Kevin’s sidekick, because all that was missing from this mission was the two of these hillbillies yelling “Git-R-Done!” each time they successfully opened another lock.

Once inside, they have trouble locating cages that are numerically ordered and only get more frustrated when Dana throws more numbers at them. (Imagine them trying to figure out a tip.) The best part was when Wade’s sidekick squirts him with a loaded water pistol that happens to be in the evidence room. But the fun and games go south when they get greedy and linger too long. A cop shows up and gets the piñata treatment from the sidekick, who also found a bat in the evidence locker. (Apparently someone robbed a toy store.) So now Dana is screwed.

That piece of pie was a little better than the others, but still pretty lame. Luckily we have one slice left, and it must be cherry, because it’s oozing red liquid all over the place. Oh wait, that might just be because Renee stabbed it.

Jack arrives at Vlad’s place, where he tells Renee that he’s extracting her from the mission. Renee says “Like hell you are. I just let that sleaze ball have his way with me. I’m seeing this through.” So after enjoying some thickly sliced bread, Vlad starts calling potential uranium dealers. But sexy Renee is more distracting to him than Facebook is to people who work at a normal job, and she has to keep reminding him to focus on the task. Vlad calls Sergei, who denies having any knowledge of nuclear materials, as does everyone else in his rolodex. But Renee keeps pushes him to call them all back again. Finally he snaps and starts punching her. He gets in a few solid shots, but when Renee gets back up, she’s got a knife and she stabs him. And then she stabs him again, and again and again.

Jack rushes in to help/stop her, but startles her and she accidentally stabs him too. Jack goes down with the knife in his torso, but when one of Vlad’s goons comes in, Jack pulls it out, throws it and kills the bad guy.

Killing a guy with the very knife that just stabbed you... finally, we get a classic Jack Bauer moment. He should call that move The Jack Knife. I bet if he wasn’t distracted by Renee, he would have went back and cut up some more bread with that very same knife.

Renee crumbles into a sobbing mess and Jack tenderly dries her eyes. I bet they would have hooked up right there if it wasn’t for the nearby bloody corpse of her rapist. Its kind a buzz kill. (Sort of like the dead brother back in that refrigerator.)

So Jack puts a Band Aid on his stab wound just before Sergei’s men show up. It turns out he lied to Vlad and really wants to hear about this deal for the uranium. So Jack hides Renee in the closet and allows himself to be captured, secure in the fact that CTU will track his movements with their camera drones.

But Jack forgot that the only people more inept than Kevin Wade and Larry the Cable Guy are the folks at CTU. The Russian’s are smart enough to travel through a tunnel, so no one has any idea where Jack is taken.

“Git-R-Done!”

Next week its Déjà vu as Jack is strung up and tortured with electricity. We’ve seen this before. All electricity does is make him stronger, like the Energizer Bunny… if the Energizer Bunny had a knife and a Jack Sack instead of a bass drum and mallet.

He keeps going, and going and going, dammit.


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