4:00 AM - 5:00 AM

One more hour in the life of Bauer. (Pictured at right, with his badass cell phone.)

"Voice-over Jack" seems to take an unusually long pregnant pause this week when he says: "The following takes place between 4:00 AM... ... ... ... and 5:00 AM."

"The recording you are trying to reach has been erased. If you feel you have not reached your recording in error..."

Karen slaps Miles, but not nearly hard enough.

Bierko said something about a nerve gas canister? We're back on that old thread? While he's at it, maybe he could haul out Marwan's copy of the nuclear football from season four.

Bierko waited until about a half hour after his escape to rip his bandage off his face. Because he wasn't wearing glasses, it was the only way he could deliver the time-tested "dreadfully serious line of dialogue punctuated by removing one's glasses" take.

Pierce has been transfered to Washington. "Washington" of course being Logan's code word for "the torture room at the back of the retreat."

Even cuffed and beaten, Pierce totally manages to bitch slap Logan.

Now Logan calls Bald Mastermind on "the BaldPhone," just to remind us all that there is this Bald Mastermind we should care about catching in next week's season finale.

Poor Chloe. It sucks when you're backstreaming, but just come up dry.

Buchanan asks Jack "What would David Palmer do?" I so want my "WWDPD?" bumper sticker now.

Henderson says "you can't touch them, but they can touch you." A really bad touch.

Henderson says breaking Molina would take hours, and they don't have hours. Well... they have two-and-a-half, anyway.

Chloe O'Brian and the Exposition of the Phoenix Shield.

Everybody run... crazy, pill-popping First Lady's got a gun!

Okay, let me see if I have this straight. This Molina guy is so paranoid that he has triple-nested keypad locked doors and a gun/wiretap scanning laser thingy... but he left a convenient "climbing pipe" on the outside wall and doesn't have a single camera on the roof?

Or any kind of alarm that goes off when Jack comes down through the ceiling?

Martha wants Aaron to promise her that if anything goes wrong and he's in danger of getting caught, he'll find a way off the compound and leave. Not a very hard promise to make, if you ask me.

How fortunate that Henderson knows something about Russian submarine warheads. Keeps him in the plot a while longer.

Yet another amazing new aspect of Jack's cell phone is revealed -- you can hear the other end of the conversation even when you're riding in a helicopter. I can't even hear the other end of my phone when I'm at the restaurant on trivia night.

U.S. Naval Officer: "Here, instead of hanging up this phone, let me leave it hanging by the cord so you can hear me get shot in a second when I poke my head up out of the hatch."

Jack tells the helicopter pilot "we need to move." Was he not already flying at top speed for some reason?

Sure, Bierko and his men have gas masks. But we were told earlier in the season that if you're exposed to the gas for long enough, it can be absorbed through the skin. I guess they know Jack is going to so kick their asses before it all matters, anyway.

Which you'll be seeing next week, as Jack Bauer goes where Jack Ryan has been before him -- onto a Russian submarine.

Now, as a short little postscript on tonight's 24, I have to add a quick word about Prison Break, which had its season finale tonight. I've still been having fun with 24 this season, don't get me wrong. But I must say, I've been enjoying Prison Break a lot more for a long time now. It reached a point about four weeks back where I found I was looking forward to Monday night more for Prison Break than for 24.

For almost every episode in this second half of their season, Prison Break has been a tense, 42-minute heart attack every week. It's had me on the edge of my seat, cheering and screaming at the TV in a way 24 hasn't made me do since season three. If you weren't watching Prison Break, it's not too late. The DVD of the first season is being released on August 8th. Plenty of time for you to pick it up and catch up before season two starts. I recommend it highly.

And in the meantime, I'll be pulling for a exciting resurgence of the 24 I used to know and love. Well, that's harsh -- the 24 I still know and love, but used to know and love a bit more.