Day 2: 1:00 AM -- 2:00 AM

Electric blue Kiefer. Electric blue Spawn. Electric blue Palmer. A whole new hour of 24 starts now. 24. Series of beeps that sound like a fax machine is going into cardiac arrest. Previouslys. Everyone in the Palmer administration wants to go to war now. They're all sporting huge hard-ons -- even Rolaide -- and rubbing them in Palmer's face, trying to get him as aroused as they are. It's like a date rape. Palmer led them on by declaring war and now he's changed his mind. What a cocktease! We paid for dinner, bought him a corsage and everything. Spawn's latest adventure, involving escaping from being held hostage in a liquor/convenience store, is so lame, but fortunately it's almost over. Lesbo-Carrie tells Soul Patch that Bitchelle has been helping Kiefer out on the sly. Soul Patch questions Bitchelle, and they monitor her activities, which means that it's now Lesbo-Carrie's job to stare at Bitchelle all day, as opposed to before when it was just a compulsive hobby. The Seventh Coral Snake wants Cate, and he makes Kiefer bring him to her so he can get out of the country in one of her company jets. PoorMan'sArmandAssante is now on the SideOfKiefer. Kiefer, SCS, PMAA, and Cate get shot at.

The following takes place between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM. The gunfight between Kiefer, SeventhCoralSnake, and PoorMan'sArmandAssante is still going on, and I really like that they're opening this episode in medias res. It feels more like true "real time" when they do that. Snipers are exiting surrounding buildings by fire escape and coming in from both sides of the alley as Kiefer, PoorMan'sArmandAssante, and SeventhCoralSnake crouch behind the car and attempt to fend the snipers off with return gun fire. "Give me the keys," blares the trumpet that is Kiefer's velvety voice in SCS's direction. SCS throws his car keys at Kiefer, and Kiefer goes back to the trunk and gets Cate out while PMAA covers him. They all run back to the safety of the warehouse. Inside the warehouse, whose interior has the look of that damp place where they imprisoned the kids in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Kiefer asks SCS who their attackers are. SCS assumes that it's the shady oilmen who hired him and now want him dead, making a second attempt on his life. Meanwhile, back out in the parking lot, PMAA goes into the trunk of the Kiefmobile and grabs an entire arsenal of bad-ass automatic weapons. He calls Kiefer on his cell and tells him that there are three men down and at least three still out there, but he has no idea what their location is so he intends to find a better vantage point. Kiefer tells him to stand by and await further instructions once he finds that vantage point. SCS wants to get the hell out of there, and asks Kiefer why they can't just get into the Kiefmobile and do exactly that. Kiefer replies that they don't really know how many snipers are out there or where they are. He starts to call Bitchelle back at CTU to get him Whatever Technology location information about the snipers, but SCS makes this weird Mickey-Rooney-on-crack face and makes Kiefer put away his phone. He doesn't want CTU involved. He dangles proof of the Cypress tapes forgery in Kiefer's face once more and tells him he won't get what he needs unless they do things SCS's way. And what SCS wants to do is to get the hell out of there pronto. So then Cate appears, gets in Kiefer's face, and asks him who these people are who are shooting at them. The look on Cate's face is priceless. She looks so self-righteously offended by the snipers.

During my junior year of college, I spent a lot of time in my friend Marnie's room; she happened to live in the only all-women dorm on campus. Anyway, the hallway where Marnie's room was had this problem. The bathroom they all shared kept getting attacked by someone they had all nicknamed "the fecal phantom." Every week or so, someone would go into one of the bathroom stalls and find a "present" lying on the toilet seat. Marnie and I became obsessed with the question of who was the fecal phantom. Was it the gracefully bony foreign exchange student from India? Was it the Goth chick who never left her room or spoke to anyone on her floor? Was it the anorexic TA? The angry dyke with the lazy eye who was the editor-in-chief of Womynspeak? Or was it, God forbid, the three-hundred-pound black woman who ran the gospel choir? Or the always perfectly coiffed southern belle with the boyfriend at the Citadel? Or the really really perky classics major from New Hampshire who wore nylons under her jeans? Or was it an outside job? But why would this outsider be targeting this one hallway specifically? It was like living out an English murder mysterysort of. Marnie and I would talk about this endlessly. We looked up psych journal articles about fecal-philia and tried to profile everyone in the hall. We made complicated charts on poster board compiling information such as all of the suspects' schedules and the times the presents had been found. We were able to eliminate various suspects, including all of the boyfriends of the girls in the hallway. We ourselves had been eliminated as suspects early on because we were away at a swim meet one weekend when the phantom struck pretty hard. So Marnie became the girl everyone ran to tell about the latest visit, because she was the only one brave enough to push the deposit into the toilet with a fistful of paper towels and then wipe the seat down with Fantastik, thereby restoring peace and order to the hallway. So every week Marnie and I would invariably be in her room when one of the women would run in and announce the discovery of a present from the phantom, and no matter who ran in, they all had the exact same squishy, confused expression on their faces. "Omigod, there's another turd on the toilet seat! Can you believe it?"

Anyway, that's the exact same expression Cate has on her face right now as she asks Kiefer why more proof is needed when they are being shot at. Kiefer tells her it's still not enough proof. PMAA calls again to let Kiefer know that another Humvee full of snipers is pulling up in front of the warehouse. Kiefer relays the news to SCS and insists that they call in outside help from CTU. SCS reluctantly allows it, once Kiefer promises that everything will be kept "offline" and that information about their whereabouts won't fall into the wrong hands. Kiefer calls Bitchelle's cell phone. At CTU, Bitchelle walks around the floor and keeps her expression inscrutably casual as she informs Kiefer that her cell phone is scrambled, so they can talk now, but otherwise, she's being monitored and shouldn't be contacted over the CTU phone lines in the future. "You were right," says Kiefer. "Syed Ali's recording was a fake. The president is about to invade the Middle East based on falsified evidence." Bitchelle asks him if he has proof. Kiefer promises to get some if Bitchelle can help them by finding out how many men are surrounding them using infrared satellite Whatever Technology. Bitchelle promises to see what she can do, walks over to a computer, and gets to work. Kiefer tells PMAA and SCS that they're going to have to wait a while.

Uh oh. Another Spawn plot begun before the first commercial break. Not a good sign. Back at the convenience store, paramedics remove the dead body of MenacingStoreOwner and the live, but wounded, body of HisPanic and take them to that junkyard where the casualties of Spawn subplots go to die. Spawn asks the African-American Police Deputy with tonight's speaking part if HisPanic is going to be okay. Who cares? Spawn tells BlackDeputyWithSpeakingPart that the death of MenacingStoreOwner truly was an accident. BDwSP takes note of Spawn's account of the accidental shooting, but explains to her that the DA still wants to know what he was doing with a gun in the first place. "It wasn't his," says Spawn, watching the ambulance drive away. BDwSP asks for an explanation. Spawn explains that the gun belonged to her. "My name is Spawn of Kiefer," she says. "This afternoon I escaped from police custody and I'm a suspected murderer." Damn, I don't think we'll be seeing Spawn run tonight.

Meanwhile, at District Headquarters in Los Angeles -- yes, the "District" we've hearing about for so long -- Palmer and staff watch Fox News and learn that there's all this violence happening on the East Coast, where apparently people are up at 4:00 AM, aware of the B-O-M-B and rioting. Okay, people are not only awake at this hour, but they've also formed angry mobs? I always let 24 get away with many violations of the real time format, because I'd rather this show be entertaining than "accurate." But jeez, all I can think right now is that when I am up at 4:00 AM -- and I was once for this paper route I had in junior high -- I am most certainly not able to turn on the television, let alone watch the news, call up ten of my gun-toting friends, arrange to meet at the nearest Middle Eastern neighborhood for an angry riot, and lastly get my ass there and do enough scary shit to make me the lead story on Fox News. Palmer asks PoorMan'sHumeCronyn about calling in the National Guard. PMHC tells Palmer that they're ready to be deployed in all major cities. "What about outside the major cities?" asks Palmer. PMHC expects that they may have to bring in "the military" to help out if local law enforcement is unable (or unwilling) to restore order. Palmer tells him to call General Windbag and have him put troops on standby. "The army?" says PMHC. "We can't do that." He explains about that rule where you can't use U.S. Army or Air Force troops on American soil. Okay, number one, if it's a law that we can't use Army or Air Force troops on American soil, then why did PMHC just suggest that they bring "the military" to help, and then tell Palmer about that law? And number two, what a strange law. When you think about it, isn't it weird that we as a country are so sure that no one would ever invade our land that we can afford to have laws forbidding U.S. troops engaging in combat on American soil? Like, we just know that no wars would ever be fought here, so we just assume that our armed forces exist for the exclusive purpose of fighting wars in other countries. And apparently Posse Comitatus is a real law in existence. However, for some reason, the Navy and the Marines are allowed to be brought in, but the Navy is, well, the Navy. I mean, what are they going to do? Send a boat in to stop the looting and plundering? And there aren't enough Marines, what with Joshua Gracin off doing American Idol. But then it's weird that they're even feeling the need to explain this law to us, the viewer, because I've only ever heard of the National Guard being brought in to quell American riots. I never considered that the Army would ever be brought in until PMHC told me that it was not an option. "I'll deal with the consequences," says Palmer, telling PMHC to call General Windbag anyway. The order of business is the bombers. Rolaide informs Palmer that the planes are on their way and should reach Fauxraqistan, Akalakistan, and Tofurkey sometime during Episode 22I mean, "in four to five hours."

Back at CTU, Bitchelle is going through some satellite imagery in search of Kiefer's lokation. Meanwhile, the noises that this Satellite Station makes sound just like Pac Man. Guess who's looking over Bitchelle's shoulder! It's Lesbo-Carrie, of course. She wants to know what Bitchelle is doing at the Satellite Station. Bitchelle does a quick Alt-Tab so that Lesbo-Carrie can't see what she's doing, and says that she's just "checking on something." Then, in order to get Lesbo-Carrie out of her personal space, Bitchelle sends Carrie off to go do some work. "I'm going to go see if Soul Patch needs any help," says Lesbo-Carrie. She runs up to Soul Patch's Sky Cube to tell him that Bitchelle is not only looking up stuff at the satellite station, but that she received a call on her cell phone that she didn't log into her book. Soul Patch, who's still hobbling around on crutches, insists that it's not that strange for Bitchelle to be looking up satellite information, and that she could have been talking to Division. Nevertheless, he has Lesbo-Carrie find out what Bitchelle is looking at over at the Satellite Station. He then hobbles over to look down over a rail at Bitchelle, who is dashing from station to station on the floor.

Back at the warehouse, Kiefer, Cate and SCS wait for information from Bitchelle. PMAA calls in from the parking lot to tell them that the snipers are "repositioning." Kiefer promises to get back to him as soon as they hear from Bitchelle. He walks back to where Cate is crouching and assures her that, with CTU's help, they are going to get out of this mess. Making the "turd face" again, Cate asks Kiefer what SCS wants with her in the first place. Kiefer explains that SCS has important information that could prevent the war, and that he needs to get out of the country; he wanted Cate for her travel dispensation and her access to a cargo plane. "They wouldn't let him on board as a passenger unlessI went on with him," says Cate. Kiefer lays down some Sutherland velvet and promises that Cate will not have to get on board that aircraft. The velvet quiets Cate and soothes her panic momentarily.

Back at CTU, Bitchelle looks at satellite imagery of Kiefer's warehouse, peering cautiously around to make sure no one can see her. However, Lesbo-Carrie, who appears to be working at her desk, is studying Bitchelle's every move from a security camera that is feeding live video to Lesbo-Carrie's computer screen. The time is 01:10:45 AM.

Okay, I totally have a crush on the guy named "Zeke from Battle Creek" in the Carmen-themed Beyonce Pepsi Ad. I still don't know his name, but I first noticed him as one of the back-up dancers on Britney Spears's Fox special "Live From Hawaii" and promptly decided he was my favorite Britney Spears back-up dancer of all time. Not only is he cute as a button, but he totally sells it without being queeny. Yes, I have a favorite Britney Spears back-up dancer. What are you going to do about it? Gay-bash me? So then I notice that he appears in Britney's Pepsi Ad, but his face is blocked out and I thought, "A-ha! Britney realizes how awesome this guy is too! She's pulling a Flo Ballard on his ass so he doesn't steal the spotlight from her!" Then for Britney's HBO concert from the MGM Grand in Vegas, my favorite dancer is noticeably absent. I imagine that Britney got tired of looking over her shoulder. But he turns up in a bunch of other places: Janet Jackson's HBO special, a Mad TV parody of Christina Aguilera, another Pepsi Ad. I mentioned my "celebrity crush" to a friend of mine who's in the "biz" in L.A. "Um, that's not really a celebrity crush," she pointed out. "He's not a celebrity." Well, he's a celebrity crush if I've never met him and projected all kinds of qualities onto him that I have yet to see in real life, right? Oh, he just looks so lost and lonely in the big cityuntil Beyonce finds his Pepsi, that is. I just want to take him home and feed him soup.

Meanwhile, back at CTU, Soul Patch is on the phone dispatching some agents to try to make sense of the warehouse gunfight. His second line rings. It's Spawn. She explains how, although she's been cleared of murder and kidnapping charges, she and Enricky escaped from police custody, caused a near lethal accident, and might need CTU's help to clear her of any additional criminal charges. Soul Patch promises to call the DA's office to see what he can doeven though she should probably have her father deal with this. "What are you talking about?" asks Kim as the violins swell on the soundtrack. "You mean he's alive?" Soul Patch explains about how Mason took over Flight 86 at the last minute. "When can I talk to him?" asks Kim. "Not for a while," says Soul Patch as the Kiefmobile is shown on another screen pulling into a clinic.

PoorMan'sArmandAssante pulls the Kiefmobile up to this clinic that looks like one of those managed health care facilities like "Health First" where you pay ten bucks to get a doctor to give you antibiotics if you have a cold. It's like the real-life equivalent of your college infirmary. Like, they can't remove your appendix or anything, but you can lie down on one of their cots if you have menstrual cramps. My stepfather, who used to work in one, calls them "Doc In A Box." Kiefer barges in past the front desk with SeventhCoralSnake in tow. A Kathie Lee doppelganger in a lab coat tries to stop them. "I'm going to call the police," she threatens. "Lady, I am the police!" says Kiefer, whipping out a gun. Kathie Lee gets super-cooperative at this point and Kiefer gets let into see a doctoror what passes for a doctor in a place like this. "This is a clinic," says the frightened doctor. "This man needs a hospital." Kiefer explains that this guy has information that could stop WWIII, and they need to stop his bleeding and keep him conscious.

Santa Corita Police Station. Spawn makes a phone call. She turns out to be calling Enricky's hospital room. Aw! Where have you been, Innis? Making an Inca Cola ad or two? Glad to hear it. A torso shot establishes that Innis is hooked up to all kinds of tubes. He can barely answer the phone. When he finally gets the receiver to his ear, he is hardly glad to hear from Spawn. She tells him that they will probably be cleared of all charges, but Enricky is surprisingly not excited by the news. "How are you?" she asks. "I'm fine," says Enricky. Spawn demands to know why he doesn't sound more excited. "I should have never done any of that stuff," says Enricky. "Yeah," says Spawn. "But it worked out." "For you," says Enricky. "I'm the one in the hospital." Finally Enricky admits that he doesn't want to see Spawn anymore. Spawn is stumped by his need to cut her off -- that's a hint -- but Enricky doesn't explain any further. He hangs up and the camera pulls back, revealing that his right leg has been amputated. The time is 01:46:45 AM.

The time is 01:51:21 AM. CTU. Bitchelle bursts into Ye Olde Kiefer Kube and basically tells Soul Patch that she wouldn't blame him if he fired her. Soul Patch explains that he's angry with her for ignoring the chain of command and causing chaos. Bitchelle reasons that she was just trying to help Kiefer get the evidence to stop WWIII. Soul Patch points out bitterly that they still don't have Kiefer or the evidence to prove the recording was forged. "What do you want from me, Bitchelle?" asks Soul Patch. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry," says Bitchelle. Soul Patch dismisses her from his office.

District. General Windbag briefs the President on the status of the bombers as they head towards the Middle East, assuring Palmer that the planes can be ordered back at any time. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, would rather have a firm decision. Rolaide and PoorMan'sHumeCronyn enter and inform the President that the situation in Marietta got out of hand when the National Guard took on a more aggressive posture at the president's request. "What happened?" asks Palmer. Rolaide explains that two people were killed when the National Guard shot rubber bullets into the crowd. One of them was the leader of the militia group -- i.e. a "good" death. One of them, however, was a young Middle Eastern boy from one of the families they "were trying to protect." While you ponder what the hell a young boy is doing out at 4:30 AM while an angry mob is going crazy in his neighborhood, get ready for the schlockiest line of the entire evening. "The young boy," says Palmer. "What was his name? The boy!" Rolaide doesn't know. "The boy had a name! Find out!" says Palmer. "Indeed I will, sir," says Rolaide. He then orders PoorMan'sHumeCronyn to tell the National Guard to not back down until they've restored order to Marietta.

Back at Doc In The Box, The doctor examines SeventhCoralSnake's x-rays and tells Kiefer that he is not authorized to perform surgery, and therefore can't remove the bullet from SCS. Kiefer assures him that he'll take care of everything to see that Doc In The Box will not be held legally responsible, because this all has to do with the B-O-M-B. Moved by the Sutherland velvet, DocBox prepares to give SCS anesthesia. Kiefer stops him and demands that SeventhCoralSnake not be sedated because he needs him to talk. Cate gets a departure time for their flight, and Kiefer guarantees that he will get on the plane with her if that's what it takes to protect her. Suddenly, SeventhCoralSnake stops the surgery. He tells Kiefer that he's not going to make it. SeventhCoralSnake whispers to him that the original source files to make the Cyprus recording are on a memory chip. When Kiefer asks where that chip is, SeventhCoralSnake says, "It's inside" Before he can finish his sentence, SeventhCoralSnake stops breathing. Defibrillation paddles are brought out and everything, but it's no use. SeventhCoralSnake dies. Kiefer doesn't know what to do, and rests his head in his hands. When he lifts his head, he is facing the light box holding SeventhCoralSnake's x-ray. Kiefer notices a shadow on the x-ray at the bottom of the rib cage. He goes over to SeventhCoralSnake's dead body. There is a stitched scar in the same spot. Much to the horror of the doctor, Kiefer grabs a scalpel and slices the skin where the scar is located. He reaches his hands into the body cavity and pulls something out. "I got it," he says as he holds up the blood-covered microchip. The time is 01:59:5801:59:5902:00:00 AM.