This show has entered my nightmares. It happens some seasons, where the moral predicaments that generate the fearful scenarios are so intense to challenge not just the conscious mind (which knows it’s watching a fiction), but the unconscious one (which only cares about what hurts and what doesn’t). Watching Simone contemplate killing Navid’s sister Farah and his very young niece Yasmin was the essence of horror, so much so that it was a relief when she did finally attack the mother, sending the child out shrieking into the street.
That she mishandled the assassination so badly was a sign of her own moral ambiguity (she had no such ambivalence about the first killing we saw, for example), and the ruthlessness of her mother Margot, who ordered the termination with all the aplomb a rancher would use to harvest a food animal. When Simone, not the child, gets hit by a bus, it’s very satisfying, because not only does she deserve it, it feels like an end to her pain as well.
Well, for this week at least. 24 knows what it’s got with actress Emily Berrington and Simone’s sick family dynamic, and apparently there are other beats to follow in the hospital next week. But 24 is all about the now, and now what’s happening is that Jack does indeed get the gun (if not the badge) as predicted last week, and he wants Kate Morgan on his team of two. Their mission? Infiltrate the organization of Jack’s former boss Rask, whose drug empire has ties to Margot’s terrorist cell. Or at least might know where she is. As usual, Jack is all business: “The odds are good that we will both be killed.”
Kate must share his suicide impulse, however, because she’s all in, even if she has to make her criminal debut drugged up in the boot of the car. The betrayal of her husband must have stung very deeply. Which is why when we get hints this week that Navarro might be involved in some sort of cover-up regarding Adam, it starts to make sense.
Jack’s plan works to the extent that Kate survives to be awakened by a different drug and hung from her wrists by a chain hook, so the torture can begin. Jack meanwhile has to stall again until his flash drive can upload fiscal information (and a hidden info-gathering virus) into Rask’s system. It’s all about stalling and portable media this season; Jack has truly adapted to the zeitgeist of the teens!
The torturer doesn’t believe Kate, and is ramping up to murdering her, when a third element creates just the sort of chaos she and Jack can take advantage of, kindred spirits that they are. Maybe she has the stuff that Renee lacked, who became hardened but lost her humanity along the way. She’s certainly got a survival instinct, as she traps her torturer with her steel thighs and ultimately kills him with his own knife.
The third element, btw, was the strategic arm of MI5; seems Prime Minister Davies (Stephen Fry) has had just about enough of Heller’s dick-swinging, and decided to deploy the home team. In a way, it was good that he did, though where we are with finding Margot is still tied up in Simone’s cell phone.