Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT Day 5: 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 2 | Aired on January 14, 2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Buchanan and the rest of the folks at CTU have a prime suspect in Palmer's assassination: Kiefer himself. Seems his sneaky and not-at-all-dead mug turned up on some surveillance footage in the wrong time and place. Naturally, Kiefer runs away as far as he can go. No, obviously I'm kidding. Instead, he takes it upon himself to investigate Palmer's death on his own, going so far as to sneak into the apartment of Palmer's brother Wayne, which is where Palmer was killed last hour. With Brother Palmer's help, Kiefer finds a clue that the millions of other law enforcement agents working the case haven't, and manages to slip the net that's closing in around him now that CTU knows he's alive. Chloe gets busted in his place. Meanwhile, the First Lady is insisting that Palmer was killed over something big that he was about to tell her -- until President Logan plays her a tape of their conversation that sounds completely innocuous. And then he tells her to go back on her meds. Logan, in turn, is insisting that the summit with the Russian president go on as scheduled, like right now, even though a bunch of Eurotrash baddies are clearly up to no good at the time the Russian president is supposed to arrive. Kiefer's clue leads him to Ontario Airport (the one in L.A., not the one in Ontario), where he hands Derek back over to his mom amid many apologies before continuing his investigation. But then Derek spots the aforementioned Eurotrash baddies piling out of a panel truck outside the airport terminal, and decides he has to go warn Kiefer. Because now the kid thinks he's an apprentice secret agent or something. Anyway, the baddies take the entire terminal hostage, including Derek (but not Kiefer, who's still sneaking around in the back). And then we learn that that recorded conversation between Palmer and the First Lady was altered by a mole who's part of Logan's inner-inner-inner circle. Things is moving pretty quickly here. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
One second ago, on 24: Actually, you know what? Screw the previouslies. I never recapped those on the HBO shows, and nobody ever complained. Even though those previouslies frequently went further back than the most recent episode, unlike a certain real-time show on Fox that I could name. The first few minutes of every hour here are always full of characters talking about what happened at the end of the last one anyway. You know, just like in real life.
Okay, so maybe not right away, but they totally will in a minute. Audrey is in a room with Buchanan, micromanaging the deployment of agents at the President's retreat, which I'm calling Not Camp David. They've got a screen with a schematic and little icons showing where all their guys are, which is going to come up again later. When Audrey gets distracted by a phone call, Edgar comes in to announce that they've got video of a suspect in the Palmer shooting. Apparently, somebody broke into the service entrance of the building across the street from Wayne Palmer's apartment that morning; Edgar has sent the security camera footage to Buchanan's screen. Buchanan watches as the blurry image on the monitor resolves. "Audrey," he says, and Audrey turns in time to see the face of her dead ex-boyfriend on the screen. Buchanan just stands there, like, awkward.
Back at the refinery, I don't know what Kiefer has been doing for the last three and a half minutes, but he's just now getting around to explaining to Chloe that he's being framed for Palmer's murder. Chloe advises him to vanish, but he'd much rather lock, load, and find out who was behind the assassination. He can always vanish...later? He explains that his first move is to visit the original crime scene to look for clues. Chloe quite correctly points out that actual law enforcement officers are probably already working on that, and they'll be only too happy to find their new prime suspect sniffing around the place. Kiefer simply demands a schematic of the building and an interagency deployment grid, cleverly getting past Chloe's resistance by making it a challenge to her 7333t h4x0r ski1z. Derek, meanwhile, is looking rather dazed at what he just witnessed. "How could you kill that guy?" he whines at Kiefer. Kiefer says he's sorry Derek had to see it, and tells him to get in the bad guys' white van, which they're commandeering. Derek refuses, because he doesn't understand one of the first rules of 24: when the guy you just watched kill someone in cold blood tells you to do something, you fucking do it.