WhoAmIWorkingFor

It is rather difficult to make hints about the identity of the female Titan without being too obvious about the whole thing, so I'll leave it at that. The Wikipedia entry on the Mongols suggests that it would be possible to maintain a very high average speed if each trooper had three or four horses available as alternate mounts. So if you assume that the scout force has a larger horse supply than is shown, it could work. The yo-yo kill is kinda morbid. The punt kill totally turns into comedy when it's shown in a long shot like that... the only thing missing would be them disappearing into the distance and then a little speck of light.

All of them are valid possibilities, except "Someone hates Hange." Because she's lovably weird.

I wonder if Kiefer being okay with Jack's narrative arc ending in Russia for the foreseeable future is going bump into other people's ideas for bringing the show back. He did get to be Executive Producer, after all. I'm okay with Jack not being a main character in a continuation, but I'm not entirely pleased with ending it with him being eternally dumped on yet again. Settling his story with being retired with Kim and the grandkids would be enough after this season's tragic ending on top of last season's tragic ending. Having him killed offscreen would be supremely annoying. Having him come back just to get conveniently killed onscreen would be even worse. (Fortunately they don't seem to be that stupid.) To think of another franchise... Harrison Ford wanted Han Solo to die in Return of the Jedi, which didn't happen, and now that Disney has their claws into that I can't possibly imagine what they're doing with him in the new movies. (Plus the on-set ankle-breakage.) So... I don't know what I'm getting at here, really, aside from thinking that I don't really want to see Jack come back just so he can go through hell again.

Star Trek Optional Colon Into Darkness angry rant of your choice goes here. Ah, that was one of mine. Since I can't quite let the Khan references go, "You still remember, Admiral. I cannot help but be touched." With a couple of extra days to get my dander up, the whole business there also feels like unnecessary character incompetence. Version 1: Chloe tells her that they're all busted, she makes the attempt, something goes wrong or Cheng's sniper is simply good enough at the job, Audrey doesn't make it, Kate feels bad,. Version 2: Chloe tells her that they're all busted, she makes the attempt, everything's swell. Then some random guy materializes out of thin air and shoots Audrey because they're conveniently strolling around. Kate feels bad. One of those is a natural result of actually running out of time, which hardly ever happens on this show anymore. The other one is just a cheap audience yank that requires an astounding lack of competence even to be possible. (It also reminds me of a FPS game scenario where I managed to get some NPCs through a barely-survivable situation without cheating, but the game decided that I shouldn't have them anyway, so they spontaneously died around the next corner.) Kate had four people with her, and probably their ride hiding a couple of blocks away. The moment that the shooting started, that car should have been driving up to them for them to get into, and they should have gotten into it. There were clearly enough personnel around for them to have a driver at the ready, considering that Jack was worried that too large a team would be obvious.

As you said in the post preceding mine, "he's always going to have the death of loved ones on his mind. Any further deaths is overkill." From that I'd also say that killing Teri was enough. Jack was pretty screwed up at the beginning of Season 2, he wasn't going to be someone that a viewer would think had gotten over events. Need him to go Judge Judy And Executioner on a neutralized opponent? He blows away Nina in the next season. Season 8's post-Renee rampage is different in terms of the level of sustained violence, but doesn't reveal anything especially new about Jack; it's a vehicle for a vicarious multi-episode killing spree. (The scene where Chloe snaps him out of it redeems it slightly.) But you could also look at the S1 finale where Jack singlehandedly tore through all of Drazen's guards and Dennis Hopper's Ridiculous Accent and see the same thing, just shorter. Need to see Jack doing a bunch of gray morality things for the greater good? There's hacksaws, prison riots, shooting Chase in the head with an unloaded gun, and The Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. Hmm. That may have been some four-year-old latent crankiness about Renee being killed. Back to surrendering: Since I can't rewatch, it's not easy for me to remember that scene verbatim either. Heller says that the Russians would be unhappy to know that they had Jack and let him go, Jack says he can turn himself in afterward. I suppose it's possible that Jack expects that he might end up in Russian custody; he's never really lied to Heller in the past (well, aside from the whole affair while she was married to Paul Raines), so it probably wasn't just a ploy to encourage Heller to let him back out again. Again, though, even if it wasn't a ploy, letting himself back into US custody is a long way away from letting himself back into US custody so they can immediately turn him over to the Russians. There's no extradition treaty with Russia in real life, and no reason for there to be one in the 24 world; he goes into US custody, Russia never sees him again anyway despite diplomatic protests and saber rattling and all that kind of stuff.

While Jack must have known that the Russians were still angry with him, I also figured that when he said that he'd turn himself in, it was to the USA, not "to the USA so I can end up in Russia," because it would be stupid to turn a one-man army over to the Russians. At least, Jack should have some domestic charges of his own for shooting his way to Charles Logan, deposed President or not. Jack's doomed love interests, to use the terms of the classic tropes, started out as the Cartwright Curse, but Audrey's death this season on the heels (in the viewer timeframe if not Jack's) of Renee's last season is headed straight toward Stuffed In The Fridge. As multiple people have already mentioned in this thread, Jack didn't need Audrey's death to spur on any of his actions in the bottom half of the episode. Margot, who he had absolutely no prior history with, got tossed out the window on general principles; Cheng had already tortured Audrey once, so his chances for survival were none and none. And after seeing them together for about six seasons, the viewer already knows that Jack would do anything for Chloe, even if they don't talk about it that much. Killing off Audrey is just piling on the trauma by picking on an easy target. (This is on top of all the other tragic figure choices Jack's had to make in the cases of people that he didn't have intimate relations with, like Chase's hand and Paul Raines. If I type that out as glibly as possible it doesn't look like a weird sex joke.)

As best as I can figure: 1. Simone: As best as I can recall, while being woken up for interrogation resulted in her having a seizure, she wasn't totally dying. Since the CIA building wasn't bombed or gassed, she could have made it through (to spend a lot of time in prison anyway). 2. Navarro: Presumably still in custody. 3. Cross and the override: Developed it with Cheng's financial support. Yates was working on it as well, though in the later conversation with Chloe, Cross said that he personally was more involved with actually creating it. Margot just got really lucky that Yates was a greedy backstabber and stole the thing; Cheng wanted it the whole time. 4. Cheng: Did it for the lulz, and because Kirk left him marooned on Ceti Alpha V. 5. Heller: Probably not far enough along that bits of his memory are totally lost, but events like not recognizing Audrey's picture were what got him to notice that he had a problem. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that moving things to London meant that they could really screw with time and space in ways that most of us wouldn't recognize (or at least it obfuscates it for more people, since fewer US viewers will have experience with London than LA or NYC or DC). I mean, the show abandoned the inconvenient geographical realities of real-time many, many seasons ago, but I have absolutely no idea where they were for 98% of this season. Which is also a bit silly, since they transported the show to a great new location only to show it in tiny slices; might as well have been back in LA then.

Except for the three times that the silent clock wasn't a death: David Palmer survived Mandy's Handshake of Doom, S6 ended on a silent clock for vague reasons, and Redemption ended on a silent clock (I never would have remembered this one without the wiki). The S2 silent was a cliffhanger, and possibly they were thinking that since they ended S1 with a silent, they'd do it again. S6 to me felt more like them saying that the season they'd just had was terrible.

Speaking of tracking devices, didn't Jack have something implanted into the back of his hand that he used to signal Belcheck from deep inside the CIA building? Because this something escaped whatever search the CIA gave him when he was arrested. Speaking of Belcheck, Branko Tomovic is Belcheck.

Kim still counts... though the last time he saw her in person was some time between Season 7 and Season 8.

The extra shooter got away cleanly, along with whoever was driving the getaway car. But that could have been handled during the 12 hours that were skipped. Since we never really know what happens on this show after the 24 hours is up and a new 24 hours begins, five seconds after the episode ends Belcheck could have summoned Godzilla to grab the helicopter out of the air, or Jack jumps out the door with the Bat-Glider, or... aliens. Not that plausible, but sure, it's possible. (This reminds me again that the Season 3 to Season 4 transition was massive in terms of new characters and suddenly seeing Jack in some sort of relationship.) Speaking of which, if the show comes back, I'd rather that Kate not do the horizontal hula with Jack. Mostly because she'll be left open then for the Screw Jack And Die problem. (Diane Huxley still wins! Jack left before she could actually do anything with him!) For any putative later seasons that may or may not have Jack in them, is Kate too much like Jack now? Her husband is dead off-screen, betrayed by her old boss. She feels a lot of guilt for screwing up and getting Audrey killed. She's already a clever agent willing to do suicidal things for a mission to work. That could cookie-cutter into a Jack-like role later on, though it wouldn't make her a very original character. As a working partner with Jack, some contrasts and conflicts would need to exist, otherwise the two of them would have to be fighting aliens or the entire nation of Australia to make the threat large enough, plus they'd seem like one character split into two people. There's the gap between just starting to go Over The Edge and already being Way, Way, Way Over The Edge, but Jack starts off the second season with the hacksaw thing, so it's just the first step of Over The Edge that's the doozy, it's a smooth ride the rest of the way down. They also did the Over The Edge with Renee Walker's "My, you've changed" reappearance and actions in Season 8, so there's the problem of covering old ground (not that that's stopped them before), and as my previous paragraph rambles about, Kate's almost already there. She could perhaps be backed off from being too much like Jack, but that would probably seem like a character neutering. (And if she reappears and she's trying to raise a family somewhere and there's a threat, it looks like... Season 1 and Season 2 and parts of Season 3 and... yeah, need something new, show?)

I can envision an irony: A scenario during the missing 12 hours where Heller, who is in an extremely bad mood (and maybe there's actually more useable evidence left over on Walrus's phone), wrangles the Russians and Chinese into a US-agreeable position. Unfortunately, since Jack didn't tell anyone that Chloe was being used as a bargaining chip for him, Jack still gives himself up when there might have been another way to get her out.

I'm going to guess that Jack persuaded Heller to give Chloe full pardons also, since even if the deal to get her back from the Russians did work, he probably wouldn't want her to have to continue living as a fugitive for the rest of her life. Something that handled itself in the 12-hour gap; usually an entire terrorist plot and a half would fit into that space. I can only imagine a very awkward set of conversations between President Heller, Jack, and Kate during that span. It was also mentioned several weeks ago on this forum that Jack probably still knows too much to be left alone walking the earth, so I can only guess that he had to slip away in order to make the trade with the Russians. Not to mention that once again Americans blew the hell out of a Russian diplomatic site and everyone in it, so it would be really odd for the US to just let Jack roam around again. Maybe Heller got his dander up and decided to play hardball with the Russians about their attempt by proxy to start a war between the US and China... but then Jack turns himself over to them anyway. The things that happen when this show actually skips time...

It's occurred to me before after previous seasons, but now, after 206 hours of this, it feels like the show's lasting theme after all this time is that Jack's job sucks, because the price for saving the world is having most of his friends killed, betray him, get killed by him after they betray him, getting sold out by his country, spending lots of vacation time in foreign places with no good views, and generally not have anyone actually know about anything that he actually did. It's some Biblical level of selflessness there. That would be mind-bogglingly hilarious.

That would make three of us.