Jacked Up. (Now with 38% more broken necks!)

Well.

“24 Week” concludes a day late as we examine the Five Craziest Things Jack Bauer Has Ever Done.





This subject matter could have been an entire week in itself – but I’m going to attempt to condense it down to five glorious moments.

Enjoy, and as always, beware of spoilers.

Five: Jack goes all “Lost Boys” on some dude’s neck. (Season Six.)

As much as I hate to repeat myself, I must reiterate – Season Six sucked. It was just flat-out not very good, save for a few key moments.

This, was one of them.

Jack Bauer had gotten himself into another hairy situation, as only Jack Bauer can seem to do. Tied to a chair, with no weapons or even the use of his hands, Jack found himself at the mercy of some terrorist scum with no chance of getting the upper hand, leaving us all waiting breathlessly to see how he was going to weasel himself out of –

HE JUST BIT THE DUDE’S NECK.

There is nothing more satisfying than seeing Jack Bauer take a literal “bite out of crime” and then angrily spit out a bloody chunk of neck.

Jack Bauer is awesome.

Four: Jack goes all “Matrix” on some other dude’s neck. (Season Two.)

For those of you who are unfamiliar with “24” and the character of Jack Bauer, allow me to let you in on a little secret: Jack Bauer hates necks. Passionately. And, more often than not, violently. His weapon of choice seems to be his deadly thighs, which he uses to gleefully snap terrorist vertebrae on a daily basis. This time, though, he took it up a notch, allowing his destructive upper legs a bit of a breather, and opted for a more straight-forwardly awesome neck-crunching super move.

By the end of Day Two, Jack had had enough. He was a tired, broken man, who’s sanity was being slowly depleted, which was of course pushing his violent streak to the max – because that’s how this shit works. It’s science.

Faced with another in a long line of terrorist douchebags, Jack executed a stunning moment of “wtf just happened,” by launching himself at the dude’s neck, running “Matrix-style” up a wall, and breaking said neck in one fluid move of beauty, grace and bloodlust.

It. Was…..killer? *snicker.*

Three: “Get me a hacksaw.” (Season Two.)

Jack was a broken man at the beginning of Season Two as well. After the events of Season One – the murder of his wife, and all – he had kind of given up on, well, everything. The only thing that seemed to matter to him anymore was his job – which on paper was “to protect the country from international terrorists,” but in Jack’s head was something more along the lines of “let’s mess these dicks up hardcore.”

And with that thought in mind, the only realistic evolution from killing an unarmed drug dealer, was to than proceed to cut off that drug dealers head with a hacksaw, to use it as a message or a warning or something towards other drug dealers.

It wasn’t the last time we’d all start to worry about Jack, but it may have been the first.

Two: Jack Bauer almost crashes a plane with his bare hands. (Season Five.)

Not content with the usual collateral damage he’s capable of, Jack Bauer decided to step it up a bit by endangering the lives of an entire plane full of innocent people. Never mind what he was doing on the plane (I can’t remember) or why he decided it was imperative to take matters into his own ands and crash a damn plane (I don’t care) the fact remains – Jack Bauer almost crashed a plane. With his bare hands.

Had he been on the upper deck when the urge to terrify the shit out of 200+ strangers hit him, I’m sure he would have blasted his way into the cockpit and tortured orderd the pilots to bring that bitch down. But he wasn’t; instead, he was locked in the cargo area, and had to get creative with his destructive tendancies.

So he opened up some panels, grabbed a few handfuls of wires or something, and started crashing the plane from there – with his bare hands.

Whatever, though. It worked, and they eventually let him out of there, to continue terrorizing terrorists and civilians alike, because he’s Jack Bauer, and that’s what he does, and besides it’s a little late to get that Creative Writing degree now.

One: “I’m sorry we let you down, Ryan. God forgive me.” (Season Three.)

In Jack’s defense, the terrifying pain and death he doles out on a daily hourly basis, is usually reserved soley for terrorists, criminals and generally bad people. Then came Ryan Chappelle, and we didn’t know what the hell to think about Jack anymore.

Chappelle was alwasy kind of a douche, but he was s douche who meant well, so I guess that’s okay. He certainly didn’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head executioner style by some dude who worked for him on the side of good, is all I’m saying.

But that’s exactly what happened, at the behest of some terrorist mastermind who wanted Ryan dead for some reason. The president assigned Jack to the task, because Jack gets shit done, and off they went to the trainyards to engage in some light bonding and murder.

In all seriousness, it really is one of the show’s best scenes. We realize that Chappelle, despite being a tight-ass and constantly at odds with the other agents, is a good man who was just trying to do his job correctly. He had no friends; just a brother he barely spoke to. He had no one to talk to before the bullet entered his brain, and that somehow made it more difficult to watch. He didn’t deserve this ignoble death, and Jack didn’t deserve to be the one to administer it.

But that’s how it went down anyway.

Well.

That’s it for “24 Week.” Join us this week as we…I dunno. Do something different.

BEEP-BOOP-BEEP-BOOP.

Oh, and as an added bonus…here’s a sweet montage of Bauer related carnage for you.







