BLUE MAG

A Google search for “Where is CTU?” yielded no good results, so I’m going to go ahead and assume (definitely probably incorrectly) that I am the first person ever to mine this question for its comedic ore. With 5+ seasons of “24,” in which every minute is accounted for, even when driving on the streets of Los Angeles, it should be relatively easy to figure out where exactly the CTU headquarters are located by triangulating travel time from various locations as revealed throughout the series.

In the first hour of last night’s 2-hour special, it took 12 minutes for the car carrying an abducted agent to reach the address 4332 Florence Avenue, which doesn’t appear to exist, but Google maps thinks is closest to 3298 West Florence Ave, which is just north of the Inglewood Park Cemetery. It’s also almost precisely in the center of the 10, 405, 110 and 105.

That info puts Downtown, Culver City, Marina Del Rey, El Segundo, Gardena, Compton and South Gate as possible starting points. I think it would be cool if CTU was in El Segundo but I guess Downtown is the most likely choice. Maurice (see previous post) was in his car for a short period of time before he was picked up by McCarthy so that changes things slightly. We’ll know more every hour as Bauer traverses the Southland to catch the baddies and bring them to Bauerjustice.

First of all I have to mention that we start out looking for the male agent O’Brian, and I have a bone to pick with other TV writers. Said missing agent is everywhere else referred to in print as “Morris,” but if he’s a British man, as he appears to be from his accent (I am very observant that way), shouldn’t his name be spelled “Maurice”? For example, the other guy from The Bee Gees is Maurice Gibb…you spell Maurice, you say Morris. From here on out I will refer to him as Maurice O’Brian.

This was another great episode, full of the usual jargon–uplink this, tac teams that, reconfigure the whosit, encrypted whatsit. Maurice has been abducted by weasely dealmaker McCarthy in the car that Vincent Chase gave to Eric, and Jack is immediately retasked to find him. McCarthy switches cars and is backstabbed by his girlfriend, who I always thought something was up with, that what turns out to be blinding greed and stupidity, and she is dead within like 15 minutes of making the biggest decision of her life. Fayed convinces Maurice to rejigger the nuke trigger, and by convince I mean coerce by torture. It’s so hard to get good engineering help these days without having to take a half-inch metal drill to their shoulders.

Continue reading 24: Day 6, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

So next week you’ve got “24″ up against “Heroes” Mondays at 9. That’s a tough call: One show has a bunch of people doing fantastical things to save the world, bending time and space and breaking the laws of nature. And the other show is “Heroes.”

But I kid the Bauer. During the 4 hour premiere a terrorist does make the 48 miles from Palmdale to Valencia in 9 minutes, but other than that and a few hundred other impossibilities, it was a superb premiere for what looks like a fantastic sixth season.