En route to their rendezvous with Nichols to deliver Motobo, Jack gets personal with Emerson, asking him how exactly he got Tony out of CTU. Emerson explains that he was working with Christopher Henderson, who purposely missed Tony’s artery when he injected him so that he would appear dead but could be revived. Emerson’s job was to extract him, revive him and eventually use him as leverage against Jack. However, Jack caught up to Henderson and killed him before they could follow through, making Emerson’s mission a moot point. When Jack asks why they simply didn’t just let Tony go, Emerson explains that Tony eventually chose to stay with him because of his grief and desire for vengeance. Emerson talks of how he was a confidante for Tony, listening to him talk about his pain over losing Michelle, and eventually turned Tony to his way of thinking. When Jack inquires further, Tony interjects. His voice dark and husky, he explains that the rules had changed, and that there was no such thing as honour left. The only choice he had was for he and Emerson to look out for each other, like brothers. In this moment, we see Tony reliving all this pain in his mind and reconciling for Jack the reality of his life the last four years, tears welling in his eyes, even now still wrestling with his inner demons.

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British network Sky1, the affiliate carrying 24 in the UK, has aired an 8-part series chock full of interviews and sound bytes from the cast and crew about Season 7.

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Carlos discusses his return to the series and elaborates on Tony’s character motivation and state of mind.

Carlos Bernard talks with Zap2It about Season 7’s momentum and the Brotherhood relationship arc as the driving force behind the season.

If you have nothing better to do on a Friday night than stay home and watch Late Night TV, don’t forget that Jimmy Kimmel will host Carlos Bernard as his guest on tonight’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which airs on ABC.

As part of this week’s Carnival of Bauer, hosted by our perennially hilarious affiliate site The Jack Sack, I present to you AlmeidaIsGod[dot]com’s Top 24 Bad Ass Jack Bauer Moments of 24.

24. Jack shoots George Mason with a tranquilizer gun, knocks him out so he can break protocol, then blackmails him with the information he obtained while doing so (Season 1: Episode 1)
Ahhh, Jack’s first moment of the first episode of the first season where we first glimpse just how badass Bauer can be.

23. Jack, in hot pursuit of Arthur Rabens, the final virus courier in Los Angeles, chases him into an elementary school and engages in a hand-to-hand battle to the finish with Rabens, then chops off Chase’s hand to secure the virus and contain its release (Season 3: Episode 24)
The Rabens battle is priceless (as I mentioned in the Top 24 One Episode Characters of 24, you gotta love a character who can elude authorities, take an agent hostage and then kung-fu fight with Jack all without uttering a single syllable of dialogue), with Jack at his most ass-kicking, which is quite the feat considering he was about to stick a needle filled with junk into his arm a mere 24 hours earlier.  Then of course the brutal amputation, one of 24’s grittiest and most gruesome scenes to date, despite the lack of depicting the actual friggin’ huge axe lopping off Chase’s already gunshot-wounded hand.  Finally, Bauer’s ingenuity kicks in and he throws the virus into a refrigerator in the school’s staff lounge and watches it detonate in a harmless “poof” of white powder.  The people of America are safe once again, thanks to Jack Bauer, its faithful servant and badass action hero.

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The new season of Project Runway Canada premiered tonight on GlobalTV, and they announced that next week, Elisha Cuthbert will appear as a guest judge/client on the show.  The tagline for the promo: “The star of 24 becomes the judge and jury.”  Never mind the fact that Elisha has done exactly 2 episodes of 24 in the last 5 years.  But it’s all good.

I dug up this Lorrie Lynch interview with Carlos Bernard from January 9 on The Who’s News Blog.  It’s a bit outdated, as it ran before the premiere of S7.  It’s pretty much more of the same type of thing we’ve been reading in Carlos interviews ever since the press reels for S7 went out.  Nonetheless, highlights:

On the show’s approach:

The show can really go two different directions: one being a more personal level-type storytelling, and then the other one is this huge explosion-type direction where they are setting off dirty bombs. And sometimes we get a little too carried away with the explosions. For me, the show doesn’t work as well if it isn’t rooted in some sort of personal story. This year it all definitely comes back to being very personal for the characters. I really think this year’s ending is one of the better ones.

On Tony’s arc:

I don’t want to refer to him as the bad guy because I think he has reasons for doing what he is doing. In my career, I have always been attracted to darker characters and I really like exploring that side of life. Especially with a character you have lived with for so many years, you can really track the traumatic events that he has been through. People will start to see Tony’s character unfold starting as early as the third or fourth episode but the whole scope really unfolds throughout the season. You’ll just have to wait and see.

As a side note, Carlos seems to be inundated with press dates this year.  He’s always given a great interview, especially in person because in print his personality isn’t able to shine through quite a much, but in past years the big press focus has been on Kiefer Sutherland.  While Kiefer is certainly getting his own fair share of press dates for Season 7 promo, he and Carlos really seem to be sharing the spotlight this year in terms of media exposure.  I have never seen so many interviews and articles with Carlos in any past season as I have this year, and I think it speaks to how important a place the character Tony Almeida has come to hold in the fabric of the popular culture of this series, and in general.  Viva Almeida!

Already the nitpicking and naysaying is ramping up with regard to some of the plot points and backstory revelations from last night’s episode. While all of the Brotherhood/DEEPSKY character scenes were fantastic, with Carlos Bernard’s performance continuing to up the ante, the episode did bring up some stuff that seems at the very least somewhat nebulous and at the very worst totally inexplicable.

I’ve been saying since we first learned of the circumstances surrounding how Tony was extracted from CTU and revived that we couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility of a pre-existing connection between Emerson and Henderson, so I’ll get this out of the way now — I fucking KNEW IT!!!!!  Emerson and Henderson were both ex-intelligence operatives who became independent mercenaries working out of Los Angeles.  In all likelihood they ran in similar circles and probably shared many of the same contacts and resources.  Coupled with the probability that Emerson was particularly interested in Henderson because of his history (busted taking bribes and forced to leave CTU in disgrace), it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that they crossed paths, and possibly even worked together on occasions when it suited both of their interests.  Does this mean that that the conspiracy between Logan, Graem Bauer and Christopher Henderson in Day 5 is connected to David Emerson or the conspiracy in Season 7?  Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t think it had to be for Henderson and Emerson to have had dealings with each other in the past, or for Henderson and Emerson to have symbiotically used each other’s resources to pull off the Almeida resurrection in Day 5.

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I apologize for the delay on these. The Ghost of Victor Drazen was wreaking havoc on my system last night in a major way and my computer crashed 4 times while I was trying to cut and export the debrief videos. Anyway, I had to go to sleep before the videos were fully uploaded, so I couldn’t post them last night. Blame TGOVD!

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