"....did the American government, and particularly the same President and Department, have the power to unilaterally determine my guilt of such an offense, and execute me at the will of the pilot of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle? ~ Chelsea Manning
This week continues the primary, tactical-expediency themes of
24 -Live Another Day with the multiple twists per episodes, although the narrative arc is problematic with regards to sovereignty, which may be the primary message of this season: the use of US drones on non-US soil to kill innocents and/or US citizens. Missing in this episode is the cooperation or resistance of Britain's MI-5 or MI-6 as well as London's Metropolitan Police which by implication seemed marginal in prior episodes, as this episode only shows the relation between Alistair Davies and James Heller as heads of state with the only agency doing military action other than the CIA being the US Marines, who at the grunt level want to kill Jack Bauer, despite his accuracy in shooting two guards at the US embassy.
We get the ruthlessness of the terrorists as they target the CIA's tactical team by switching the IP address of their supposed lair leaked via Naveed, whose loyalty to his wife, Margot's daughter, is ultimately betrayed as Margot kills him when she feels her son Ian is capable to piloting the successfully hijacked drones. The number of such drones number only six rather than the ten targeted due to the collaboration of CIA field agent Kate Morgan, still a pariah and Chloe O'Brian, whose relationship to the Anonymous-like master-hacker, Adrian Cross is more than collegial. Casualties are created in the first drone strike of that half dozen as Jack gains favor with POTUS Heller only because of the way he finally achieves getting the override code evidence via Morgan and O'Brian. Amid this is the emotional tension between Audrey Heller-Boudreau as she finally encounters Jack. The economy of interior scenes remains although the explosion of the decoy terrorist hideout has some scale, otherwise CGI mediates our understanding of the looming threat.
Several variables remain in play - Serbian arms merchants, the effects of mass panic since the general populace knows of the threat with a message from Margot revealing the collateral damage of child non-combatants in the original US drone strike on her American-born terrorist husband that prompts this season's crisis. Hopefully the twists will be less formulaic in upcoming episodes with the counterproductive intervention of MI5/MI6 or the FSB, since Jack is wanted by them from the prior season. The calculus of acceptable collateral damage rationalized by US foreign policy continues and if it can proceed to expand topic variation such as a Mossad drone, some anti-EU terrorist cell or a Ukrainian element into the narrative, it will get too predictable in terms of agency as we can expect at least one more betrayal within the US government of the CIA this season, for example Kate Morgan's husband may play a role with the return of the PRC into the narrative. She does get tortured in the next episode...