11.5.14

Jack's Kill List

Back when it was originally on the air, I had a simple test for determining whether a season of 24 was fully successful or not - did Jack kill an average of 1 person per episode, for a total of 24 over the course of the season. Unsurprisingly, no season was ever completely successful - it's an action show, but it's not THAT action-y, but a few of them got close.

It seems that the producers of 24 understood that I wasn't the only one engaging with the show that way, so they included an Easter egg in the first episode of season 9, letting the audience have a look a Jack's list of 'Confirmed Kills'-
Which is a lot of fun, but just amazingly inaccurate for two reasons. First, it's kind of hilarious that whoever was putting the list together just went by the character names from the scripts (or possibly IMDB), so we quickly come face to face with the fact that the majority of the people Jack killed either have first or last names, but generally not both. Would it really have been so hard to make up some additional names for those guys so the screen looked a little better?


More importantly, though, the numbers are way, way off - let's just assume that this list is based on the start of his tenure running CTU, rather than all of his confirmed special forces kills (of which there were many), he certainly killed more than seven people in that first season, definitely at least one before Ted. Jack killed five people in the last episode alone.

I was going to try to figure out how many people he'd actually killed over the years, but luckily the internet already did it for me-



I don't know how they ended up with these numbers - did they not count stuntmen without lines? Maybe, but how do you miss Goren, the paedophile that Jack shot and beheaded at the start of Season 2? Hopefully they'll keep better track this time around! I know I will! For example, while Jack killed no one in the first episode of season 9, in episode 2 he killed three people-

1 - Used as human shield.

2 - Shot.

3 - Viciously stabbed.

That's three so far Jack - you need 9-10 more to make this a successful season!

(I don't actually know how many episodes this year is going to be!)

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