TRUE LIES ON 24 – DAY 5 Part 1

Season 4, was my favorite before they jumped the shark, but it was Season 5 that got me thinking that my joke might not be a joke at all. For the newbies…

“If you ever wanted to know what the Anglo American Establishment (Empire) is up to just watch 24 with Kiefer Sutherland, they’ll tell you.”

Season 5 was ranked as the best season of 24, even though I personally liked Season 7 the most because it had my tinfoil hat full kablooie.

The season starts with Jack Bauer trying to get get morning show-up labor work at a Mojave oil field under the alias Frank Flynn. Immediately, Former President David Palmer is assassinated by a sniper at his brother, Wayne Palmer‘s apartment, and CTU Los Angeles is put on a Level 5 Protocol right away, with added pressure from President Charles Logan to arrest or kill the assassin right away before the Russian President Yuri Suvarov (Nick Jameson) and his delegation arrive to sign an administration defining anti-terrorism treaty, until…

Jack’s breakfast with his landlady/lady-friend Diane Huxley (Connie Britton) and her son Derek (Brady Corbet) is interrupted when Chloe O’Brian, fresh from a mistaken one-night stand with a co-worker, Spenser Wolff (Jonah Lotan) calls to tell him that not only was Former President David Palmer assassinated but that Tony Almeida and Michelle Dessler were bombed and she might be being followed. Jack jumps into action, steals a helicopter, stuck dragging a nosy Derek Huxley along to take Chloe to safety when Palmer’s sniper, Conrad Haas (Jeff Kober) and his mercenaries arrive.

A doctored video leaves CTU operating under the assumption that Jack killed Former President Palmer. President Logan’s wife, Martha (Jean Smart) unsuccessfully attempts convincing her husband, Charles, conspiracy is afoot, which is true, but she gets gas-lighted. Meanwhile, after some audacious sneaking around at Wayne Palmer’s FBI & LAPD infested residence, Jack obtains encrypted information in David Palmer’s memoirs that lead to the Ontario Airport, but Chloe is caught as Jack escapes with Derek Huxley. Right after Jack passes Derek off to his mother, Diane, her son spots some shady looking men and goes after Jack. Jack catches a Russian, Chevensky (Taras Los) the information led him to and he cyanide capsules himself to death just seconds after heavily armed terrorists wearing bomb-vests detonate some bombs and take over an entire terminal, taking hostages. We learn that White House Chief of Staff, Walt Cummings is working with the shadowy figure James Nathanson (Geraint Wyn Davies) orchestrating everything.

  • RAND/Tavistock/Stanford mind fuck: true lies on television – false flag operations and the art of plausible deniability. As we see, White House Chief of Staff, Walt Cummings is forehead deep in a terrorist operation on American soil that involves taking an entire terminal hostage and murdering innocent people. This gives a nice dose of plausible deniability for the President of the United State, and it’s something that is discussed in the show more than once for various reasons, to protect the president. Plot thickens…

After some CTU shenanigans involving the White House sending the bumbling incompetent hubris heavy halfwit, Lynn McGill (Sean Astin) from Division to take point, Jack convinces CTU from inside the airport that he didn’t kill Palmer and manages to save the morning despite all the shucking and jiving from the White House. But we quickly learn that the Dawn Brigade attack, led by Anton Beresch (David Dayan Fisher) was to cover up Ivan Erwich‘s (Mark Sheppard) theft of a cache of secretly stored Sentox VX-1 Nerve Gas canisters that were hidden in a bunker under an adjacent hanger onsite being monitored by cyanide chomping Chevensky. After Erwich makes off with the Sentox canisters in a S.W.A.T. truck, meeting Schaeffer (Timothy V Murphy), whom takes transport of the canisters, guaranteeing customs paperwork being finalized at the port. We learn that Erwich plans to use the canisters on Moscow in retaliation for Russian occupation of his homeland. Walt Cummings assures Nathanson that Bauer will be handled when he arrives at CTU, wrapping things up to assure success of their mission.

  • RAND/Tavistock/Stanford mind fuck: plausible deniability – just a quick reminder that at any time any of our operatives could be designated expendable in order to maintain a level of plausible deniability or operational integrity, and since the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing all the time, it could be anyone. It could also be justified, depending upon how you look at things.

We discovered just before the assassination attempt on Jack Bauer by Hank (Robert Rusler) that the White House Chief of Staff could easily place a mole within any government agency without anyone knowing about it, but Spenser squeals without resistance. Jack heads to the Presidential retreat outside L.A. to give Walt Cummings a good seeing to and Erwich catches Schaeffer tampering with the canisters at the Port of Los Angeles and sees to him. But Cummings fesses up to the President before Bauer even gets to them, telling him that it was all about providing a smoking gun of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Central Asia and guaranteeing the flow of oil for a generation and pretext to increased military presence in the area.

Ivan Erwich hooks up with a shady engineer, Jacob Rossler (Patrick Bauchau) willing to reconfigure a remote trigger for an Sentox chemical delivery system. CTU finds this out and sends Jack with a tactical team and he find him with a teenage sex slave Inessa Kovalevsky (Angela Sarafyan), but he’s wholly unwilling to help CTU unless they give him full immunity and he gets to keep Inessa. Lynn McGill is unwilling to listen to Jack and tells him to take the deal, so the moment she gets a chance, she kills Rossler with one of his own guns.

Walt Cummings appears to hang himself (the White House chooses to cover it up of course ) just before Lynn McGill gets rolled for his CTU access card by his junkie sister and her dope-fiend boyfriend. Ivan Erwich gets his canisters prepped for Rossler, killing the unlucky guy he coerced into precision cutting them open for him. With Rossler dead, Jack is able to meet up with Erwich’s people posing as him. Under Chloe’s guidance, he is able to reconfigure the chip and Erwich’s men force him to come along to a shopping mall so they can disperse the nerve gas to makes sure the triggering mechanisms work.

Despite saving numerous lives and managing to follow Erwich’s man, he commited suicide to avoid capture and interrogation, leaving CTU with nothing. Erwich confirms with his financier and leader, Vladimir Bierko (Julian Sands), that the Sentox gas was genuine. But Bierko, upset that Erwich wasted time and resources on killing American civilians to make a point rather than attacking Moscow, kills Erwich by stabbing him with a knife. He decides it best to kill Nathanson and refocus on using the canisters on Russia. Nathanson contacts Jack Bauer, seeking protection from others within the government involved in this conspiracy.

Concurrently to this, Vladimir Bierko was already coercing President Logan to provide the itinerary for Russian President Suvarov so that Bierko’s soldiers could ambush them. Logan’s wife tried talking him out of letting him have it, but he acquiesced and she tagged along for the ride in hopes that he would stop it, but he didn’t. Meanwhile, Chloe had tracked a company called Terra-Dyne, which had amassed a large stockpile of strontium isotope, which is used in the manufacture of Sentox nerve gas as part of the Sentox Project for their parent company, Omicron International, a major defense contractor who manufactured Sentox for the Department of Defense. Jack right away asks about a man named Christopher Henderson (Peter Weller) whom was unnamed but vaguely referenced as a corrupt CTU operative back in Season One, happens to be a Senior Vice President of Omicron. Though he was never indicted, Henderson, whom was the individual that originally recruited Jack to CTU, was implicated in the sale of classified intelligence to defense contractors.

  • RAND/Tavistock/Stanford mind fuck: true lies on televisionNoam Chomsky often discusses public perception of government vs concentrated private power. Whilst the people continue fighting over a not so subtle fake narrative of a left vs right ideological struggle within our government, the private sector continues their encroachment at every level of our government. Weapons manufacturers of every variety whom receive billions in public funding to subsidize their risk (R&D) are spending almost as much as they receive for free from you and me to avoid paying taxes back into the system that shielded them from the free market. Yet, they still continue selling to other players around the globe in the so-called free market, which isn’t actually free when you protect them from it and they still sell to our enemies. While Americans are bickering over capitalism and socialism, the difference between the national interest and special interest gets hazier and hazier. However, when you realize that weapons manufactures are officially part of the “national interest,” and schools, roads, bridges, women and minority groups, the elderly, etc., are considered “special interest,” concepts of what’s vaguely known as national socialism truly is can become clearer. Maybe if Americans evict those stupid swastikas from their creativity bereft imaginations, we might be able to stop our constitutional republic from becoming an unaccountably brutal corporatocracy without a face and a regenerative head. I don’t blame you, dear reader. This comes from decades of well funded think tank social engineering.

Jack, with the help of Chloe O’Brien and Audrey Raines makes his way into Omicron to question Henderson, but Henderson plays it off well, says he’s going to get help from I.T., as Lynn McGill has a meltdown at CTU, having already fired or placed half his best staff in holding. Curtis relieves McGill of his command when he steps over the line. Meanwhile, as Logan prays for his wife to survive Bierko’s attack, Jack realizes he’s not as smart as he thought and just might be losing his touch.

CTU’s last second intervention doesn’t stop the attack on the Suvarov’s motorcade. But after his wife and the Suvarovs survive the attack, Martha informs Secret Service Agent Aaron Pierce (Glenn Morshower) that President Logan knew it was going to happen and didn’t stop it. Jack Bauer, bee-lines straight over to Christopher Henderson’s home to say hello to Mrs Henderson. Curtis takes point when data comes in that a hospital is about to be hit with a nerve gas canister and begins evacuation procedures moments before CTU figures out a billionaire radical post Soviet Era terrorist named Vladimir Bierko even exists. Curtis shoots the baddie, locating the armed canister just as Henderson gets home, removing it from the building just in time shortly thereafter.

Jack brings Henderson back to CTU for interrogation, having already asked Audrey Raines to bring his daughter, Kim (heavy sigh) in so he can hopefully see her to let her know he isn’t dead, which doesn’t quite work out for him. They go right to work on Christopher Henderson through the use of pharmaceutical interrogation to attack his nervous system by sending pain throughout his body. When Bill Buchanan informs McGill that his junkie sister was found murdered, and when he blames her boyfriend, Buchanan informs him that they killed by a professional and finally he lets it out that he got rolled, but it was too late.

  • RAND/Tavistock/Stanford mind fuck: torture normalization – if you were paying close enough attention, all those computer nerds at CTU were listening in to the whole kerfuffle without remark or judgment when Jack shot Mrs Henderson in the leg. Christopher Henderson was “willing to endure a tremendous amount of pain” to protect someone, even letting his wife get shot in the leg for it. However, the American mind is desensitized just a little bit more towards apathetic amoralism. The urgency of the situation also adds to the social engineering mechanism that is counterterror entertainment television. (A.K.A. torture porn)

With 40% of their personnel killed by the nerve gas, (Edgar dying choked me up) Karen Hayes (Jayne Atkinson) at Homeland Security suggests personally overseeing an emergency restructuring. POTUS & Vice-POTUS discuss implementing martial law to stop the terrorists. Needless to say, Jack, Chloe, and Buchanan get everything handled just before Tony, grieving from the death of his wife, tries killing Christopher Henderson but he was faking his coma and sticks Tony with a needle of something or another and escapes as Tony dies in Jack’s arms. But Jack learns that Chloe scored information about an information broker who works freelance named Collette Stenger (Stana Katic) whom is connected to Bierko. Subsequently thereafter, President Logan declares martial law and implements a military enforced curfew in the Los Angeles area despite his wife’s suspicions that the VP is setting him up to take a political fall. When Karen Hayes and her mincing sidekick Miles Papazian (Stephen Spinella) arrive to CTU, it’s hardly a smooth transition.

  • RAND/Tavistock/Stanford mind fuck: crisis normalization – I could be reaching here, but multiple times this show pushes the idea of the necessity of implementing martial law, only this season is the first time it’s actually done and enforced by the military. Television programming is a subtle method of softening the minds of people. One could even go so far as to consider it a mechanism of psychological warfare. In the USA, psychological warfare is not necessarily limited to military conflicts. Engineering of public opinion is as old as commercial advertising itself, older perhaps.
    • Obfuscation – Here’s the thing, and this is just me talking. The VP often moves in the shadows and you never really know what he’s up to. Did you really think George W Bush was in charge? What about Ronald Reagan? Did you think he was in charge? Cheney ran W and HW ran Reagan. Just saying. There’s also been suspicion by man that Johnson whacked Kennedy and HW tried having Reagan whacked. #JustSaying
  • RAND/Tavistock/Stanford mind fuck: crisis normalization – DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is a completely new department that was implemented by the Bush Administration and developed by people who claim to be proponents of smaller government, people who felt the government was too large and unyielding, yet it operates like a 21st Century Gestapo (secret political police) and more recently the Schutzstaffel (SS), as in a racial police, which is more than just a problem. Yet it remains wholly unaddressed and continues to function with impunity.
    • crisis normalization reiterationif you pay closer attention, Homeland Security holds position ABOVE CTU and can step in to take over altogether and all CTU seems able to do about it is bend over and take it.

MORE TO COME…

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