In this hour, Jack goes further than ever in his quest for revenge, and another 24 villain bites the dust.
This episode picks up right where the last left off, in the middle of Dalia Hassan's United Nations press conference announcing her decision to take her late husband's place and ensure the peace agreement is signed.
If there's an opposite of the U.N. building, it's the dank warehouse where private security company agent Mark Bledsoe (D.B. Sweeney) is currently giving Walsh the water board treatment. And when she won't talk, the advice he offers is chilling, but also darkly funny (if you have a sick sense of humor). "Take short and shallow breaths. You'll recover faster. That way we won't have so much downtime between sessions."
While this looks horrifying, it's hard to feel much sympathy for Walsh after everything she's done, both to Ortiz and anyone else who got in her way today. Yet she's soon granted a reprieve when Jack and Ortiz descend on the building and, working in tandem (with Jack doing most of the heavy lifting), easily neutralize the handful of guards in their path.
When they burst into the water-boarding room, Bledsoe immediately puts a gun to Walsh's head, confidently telling Jack, "You won't take the shot. It's too risky. I'll kill her before..." and those are his last words, because, as we all know by now, there's pretty much no risk Jack won't take, especially if it involves two people he wouldn't mind shooting.
With Walsh in tow, he and Ortiz make their way out of building, taking down the remainder of Bledsoe's goons along the way. As they drive away from the scene, Jack offers Walsh a deal that seems pretty good, considering her recent circumstances give up the evidence and they'll let her just walk away.
She doesn't believe him, so Jack turns to his preferred way of negotiating — a gun to the chest in a back alley, counting down from "three" before he pulls the trigger. He gets to "one" before she spills it: The evidence is in a bank safety deposit box, under her and Ortiz's names (though he, of course, doesn't know anything about it).
When President Taylor gets word that Walsh has been busted out of that super-secure abandoned warehouse, she nearly suffers the White House staff's second heart attack of the day.
But Logan is already a couple steps ahead, and quickly offers his latest plan: put his executive aide, Jason Pillar (Reed Diamond), in charge of the hunt for Jack, so they can be sure someone without "divided loyalties" will see the mission through. And that mission is stopping Jack from getting to the evidence at any cost.
Taylor reluctantly agrees to this idea, but what she doesn't realize is that Logan's backup plan comes with a backup plan. Pillar will be feeding info from inside CTU to assassins under the Russian Foreign Minister's command to help them locate and eliminate Jack.
Pillar's first order upon arriving at CTU (in what seems like about three minutes) is upgrading Jack's designation to "armed and dangerous" and the use of force in apprehending him to "unrestricted." Chloe is clearly feeling a little conflicted about taking the President's side against Jack and she's probably going to feel even more so once people start using that "unrestricted force" against her old friend.
Back at the bank, Ortiz and Walsh receive their safety deposit box and are escorted to a private room, where she gives a heartfelt speech about how she really loves him and she was just a scared ex-con who got caught up in this whole crazy mess.
But Ortiz, smartly, isn't buying any more of her deceit. "There is no us, Dana, there never was. It was a lie from the beginning."
Then she opens the safety deposit box, which contains passports, a gun and a bomb which promptly blows up in Ortiz's face, before Walsh gives him a shoulder check that would a hockey player proud. While he lays unconscious, it looks for a moment like Walsh will just put a bullet in his brain right there, but then she tenderly caresses his face, revealing that she does at least care for her former fiancé, maybe even in her cold, black heart's approximation of love.
Then she turns on a dime and makes a fake frantic 911 call reporting that a man with a gun that she "recognizes from the news" is in the bank lobby. This serves the dual purposes of alerting CTU to Jack's whereabouts and briefly tying him up with the bank's security guards long enough for Walsh to slip away.
She doesn't exactly make herself hard to track, though, running down a busy sidewalk carrying a pistol and firing at random into the crowd. Jack catches up and a chase/firefight inside an under-construction building ensues. But within a couple minutes, he has Walsh out of ammo and cornered like a frightened animal.
Once she hands over a disk (presumably) containing the much-sought-after evidence, Walsh realizes she's finally out of bargaining power. As Jack raises a gun to her head once again, she pleads, "Tell me what I can do." Jack's answer: "Nothing", followed by one shot that puts her on the ground, and another to make sure she's dead.
Stray Observations:
- Logan looks disturbingly turned on after watching Dalia Hassan's speech on TV, saying dreamily, "What a magnificent woman."
- Walsh kept the evidence in the bank where she and Ortiz were applying for a mortgage, presumably for their first home together. Just another little twist of the knife for poor Cole.
- I'm still a little shocked that Jack shot Walsh while she was unarmed in cold blood. Not that she didn't deserve it. But I can't remember another time where he just executed someone without remorse. Sure, Jack's killed many, many people (I'm sure there's a running body count available online somewhere), but this was different. How do you guys feel about it? Did Jack cross the line this time?
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In this hour, Jack goes further than ever in his quest for revenge, and another 24 villain bites the dust.
This episode picks up right where the last left off, in the middle of Dalia Hassan's United Nations press conference announcing her decision to take her late husband's place and ensure the peace agreement is signed.
If there's an opposite of the U.N. building, it's the dank warehouse where private security company agent Mark Bledsoe (D.B. Sweeney) is currently giving Walsh the water board treatment. And when she won't talk, the advice he offers is chilling, but also darkly funny (if you have a sick sense of humor). "Take short and shallow breaths. You'll recover faster. That way we won't have so much downtime between sessions."
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