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Hey, welcome to my twenty-fourth recap of 24. It's like the equivalent of having recapped one full season, but with more unanswered questions and unresolved plots. Okay, maybe just one or two more.
Previously on 24: ImhoTerror leaned on NotMandy to prevent Kiefer from finding an incriminating hard drive, and NotMandy died trying. Kiefer figured out that Poor Man's Eric Stoltz had stolen a stealth bomber, and unsuccessfully tried to talk him out of shooting down the President. Someone said, "Air Force One has been fired on," but not so you could hear it during the actual episode. Potato Face reported that AF1 had taken an indirect hit. Kiefer seemed to take it pretty personally. The following takes place between 11:00 PM and 12:00 AM.
I hope you didn't have your heart set on seeing an actual plane crash this week, because you're not going to. Even that shot of a burning Air Force One from last week's preview is absent, probably because it a) showed the CGI fire on the wrong side of the plane, and b) was cheesy-looking as hell. Instead, the whole descent is "witnessed" via audio and radar from CTU. The worried voices of Air Force One's crew are being broadcast over the floor. I don't speak pilot, but I'm pretty sure they're saying they're fucked. Potato Face projects that the plane will hit the ground about 20 miles northwest of Indio. Bitchelle orders search and rescue teams from every agency she can think of prepared to head out to the likely crash site. Soul Patch even calls in the CTU troops from Vegas. While that's happening, they lose the voice transmission. Potato Face channel-surfs until she gets it back. The crew announces that they're going in at 160 knots with no landing gear. Ooh, that's gonna be bumpy. The 747's blip disappears from Potato Face's radar screen. "Air Force One is down," she reports. Everyone stands around listening to the radio chatter until DoDder, of all people, rushes in to report that the DoD is reporting ground flashes showing up on surveillance satellites. Yeah, that'll happen. Be sure and let us know if there's smoke, too, okay?
Kiefer trots in and approaches Buchanan, the one person there that he's never met, to ask after Air Force One. "It's down," Buchanan tells this random guy who just ran in off the street, as far as he knows. "Rough landing, radio's down, we don't know if there were any survivors." Kiefer asks if anyone has tried a technobabble channel that should allow them to directly reach any surviving Secret Service guys on the plane. No one has, so Kiefer takes care of it himself. With the help of a government operator, he's quickly on line with a Secret Service guy. "What is the status of the President?" Kiefer asks. "I don't know," says the Secret Service guy, in audible pain. "I can't move yet." Beyond raising his shirt cuff to his mouth, of course. Kiefer says help is on the way, and the agent says he thinks there are other survivors.