1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

My friends and I have always wanted there to be a season of 24 that was just like a regular workday. Maybe Bill would bring in bagels for everyone, Chloe and Morris would get in trouble for taking too long of a lunch break, Nadia and Milo would fill out a Mad Libs during a slow hour, Kiefer Sutherland wouldn't be in the season because he never actually works at CTU. But this is clearly not that season, and it's not one we'll ever see, but the idea lives on in my mind.

Anyway. The first of two episodes last night begins with Jack in a chopper looking for the car that is carrying Morris away to Fayed. Chloe is supposed to be doing satellite coverage on this but keeps messing up because she is worried about Morris. It was kind of nice to see Chloe crack under pressure because she is worried about someone else. According to some fan "chatter" a lot of people miss snarky Chloe. But new Chloe who has the ability to actually interact with other humans is really growing on me. This came out more in the two episodes tonight. McCarthy, being ever so observant, notices that a chopper is following him. They drive under an overpass and switch cars. While McCarthy is out of the car looking for one that works, Morris tries to appeal to Rita to let him go. He tells her that CTU knows who McCarthy is, but they have no idea who she is and she can let him go and get away without any repercussions. She thinks about it, but gets back in the car with McCarthy.

McCarthy calls Fayed and is given an address to bring Morris to. He pulls over, taps it into his GPS and is read to roll when Rita shoots, kills him, and leaves him on the side of the road. Morris is super psyched by this, until he realizes that Rita is still going to bring him to Fayed and keep the $7 million that was promised McCarthy for herself. Meanwhile, Jack does something I've never seen him do before while trying to figure out what car Morris was switched into: he uses speed dial to call CTU. NO ONE on 24 ever uses speed dial. It makes no sense to me, I haven't dialed a number since I was like 6, and I always have enough time. Now Jack usually goes through about 20 phones a season, so maybe he doesn't get the chance to program numbers into each new phone. But the rest of the staff has no excuse. Shame on them.

Anyway. Morris is delivered to Fayed and they begin torturing him to get him to fix the device to activate the nukes. This scene may best be summed up with a comment my mom made to me via e-mail this morning: "I'm not a fan of the torture. That's for sure. Too much torture. I'll say no more." That's how Morris felt too, and he agrees to activate the device after Fayed pulls a running drill out of his shoulder.

Meanwhile, Jack stumbles across McCarthy's body, and they use a cell phone found on him to trace Fayed's call back to an apartment building. They can't figure out which room he's in though so they set up a perimeter around the building and set off the fire alarm. Chloe's back in control of herself at this point, and uses infrared to see who's left in the building after the evacuation. They figure it out and storm in. Jack takes out pretty much everyone with this gigantic shotgun and they save Morris.

Jack finds the activated suitcase nuke and calls Chloe to have him walk through disarming it. This is how awesome Jack Bauer is, while he is disarming a NUCLEAR BOMB, he is telling another field agent to keep looking for Fayed, who got away in the raid. Now that is multitasking. This was a nail-biting scene if you ask me. The audience is sure that Jack's not going to die this early in the season, but his hands are shaking and Chloe makes mistakes telling him how to disarm it. He does though and sits down with a sigh of relief, thinking it's all over. Morris shoots down that thought pretty quickly though, when he tells Jack that Fayed can now activate the other three nuclear bombs with the device he gave him.

While all this is happening, back in Washington, President Palmer the sequel is meeting with Lennox about the fact that he shot down his proposal for a second time. Lennox throws a huge hissy fit to his lapdog Reed and asks him to draft a letter of resignation. Reed calls a shady business-type man and they discuss plans that they have made. Reed goes back to talk to Lennox and not-so-subtly hints that maybe plans have been made to assassinate a second Palmer. Lennox is appalled at this, and at this point Lennox isn't all that bad. He firmly believes that his actions are in the best interest of the country, but he won't do anything that would hurt the country or the president to implement his policies. But that lasts for like a second, because once he hears Fayed has the ability to arm the nukes whenever he wants, he's on board with Reed's plan.

Lennox is also not happy about the fact that Palmer is meeting with Assad in the batcave to try and discuss peace talks. He wants Assad to address the world, and get radical extremists to see his new way of thinking. They start drafting the speech, and I'm beginning to like Wayne more and more. Especially because now, he is all alone in his administration on what he stands for. Even when David Palmer was keeping to his unpopular convictions, he would have one person on his side. Now that Karen's gone, all that Wayne has is Assad, but they're not exactly BFF's.

The episodes are kind of blending together a little bit since I watched them back to back, but I'm pretty sure that that's where it cut off before episode number 2.

Such a delayed entry. The Beanpot went into OT, and I'm proud to report that at least NU didn't come in dead last by beating Harvard 3-1.