24/Fridge
< 24
- Fridge Brilliance: All of the stupid shit Dana Walsh did by helping Kevin Wade with the robbery instead of just telling Hastings she lied about her past and identity makes perfect sense because she's The Mole and is trying to maintain her cover.
- What. Revealing Starbuck as a mole makes all of her prior actions inconsistent. Not just straight up murdering Kevin the moment he threatened her cover like she did with the parole officer, assisting in the robbery by shutting down the cameras and giving them an access card using her administrative privileges, an action that would certainly lead to an investigation of her, and not going to Hastings or Cole and saying, "Hey, this guy I used to know is harassing me. Could you take care of that, and make sure not to believe anything he says about me because he'll do anything to stay out of prision? Thanks," so she could consistently stay at CTU and actually assist the terrorists as a mole rather than dicking around with her personal bullshit are all out of step with the Ass Pull of her being a mole. You could make the point that, up until then, she hadn't actually done anything to assist terrorist endeavors such as redirecting CTU Field Ops away from President Hassan so the car bombing actually worked or using her influence over Cole as his lover to keep him out of the field, so she had time for all that, but that strikes me as specious.
- Ultimately, Dana was attempting to stall her inevitable outing just long enough to fulfill her end of the bargain. Telling Hastings about her past would result (in the best case) with her getting fired and thus unable to help Samir. Every time she met with Kevin (except for the last one, of course) she was not in a position to easily get away with killing him, and would jeopardize herself if she caused Kevin to get captured. Don't get me wrong, I join the 24 fans who loathe this poorly-executed subplot, but in retrospect she was given a bad option and a worse option, and she chose the one that would buy her the most time. She wasn't looking to stay out of suspicion forever, just long enough.
- She could have easily just called up her terrorist buddies, said "Yeah, I got a problem I need you to take care of so the mission won't fail" and that would be that.
- It did however seem like she still had feelings for Kevin in the last episodes of that storyline so maybe she wanted to get rid of him without killing him?
- Not that it makes the revelation that Graem is Jack's brother any less idiotic, but having him address a sitting president by his first name was an oddly effective way of conveying the fact that the lone name we were given in Season 5 is a first name, not a surname. The Reveal that his surname was Bauer would've been one of the best twists of the entire show if not for the fact that he and President Logan both referred to Jack solely by his surname in all of their conversations, which suggests that Logan didn't even know Graem's last name and that Graem was deliberately trying to conceal that fact, which seems highly unlikely given that Logan's position isn't exactly one where you can afford to conspire with someone whose full name you don't even know.
- The way President Hassan was killed off was perfect when you consider that the writers had previously been ordered to never kill off a sitting president on screen (see:the ambiguous fates of Keeler and Wayne Palmer, although the latter was confirmed dead in Redemption by way of a newspaper article). We the viewers get to see the internet feed that the terrorists set up, but then Jack and Renee bust in and seemingly stop the villains in time, only to realize that the video is still running and that it was pre-taped; President Hassan is already dead. While we are shown the dead body, we do not see the end of the pre-taped execution video, and so the mandate that no sitting president be killed off onscreen--even a president of a fictitious nation, rather than the United States presidents that were previously grievously wounded while in office--is still technically met.
- The Season 7 revelation that Michelle was pregnant when she was killed, just like Teri was, carries quite a bit more weight when you realize how much Jack and Tony have run into similar situations with their wives. Both separate from their wives in the wake of personal difficulties (Operation Nightfall for Jack, prison for Tony), both are forced to work for terrorists when their wives are taken hostage (Jack is forced to help Palmer's assassins, and Tony is forced to enable Saunders to escape) and both seek revenge against their wives' killers, with the main difference between the two being that Tony always puts his wife first, while Jack tries to Take a Third Option.