In the ’24: Legacy’ recap, Carter tracks down the money to pay Grimes, Rebecca is found out at CTU and another potential mole is revealed…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
As ludicrous as some of the plot twists have been throughout the history of ’24’, the new series titled ’24: Legacy’ is wasting no time delivering on quite a few of those during just the first two episodes.
Perhaps it’s the condensed version of the show that no longer documents all 24 hours in a given day so the need to toss in faster movie stories are a necessity when you only get half the time to tell the story.
Either way, ’24: Legacy’ definitely turned up the pressure cooker in episode two as Eric Carter — former Army Ranger and special ops leader who is one of only two men remaining alive from his garrison of men responsible for killing Sheikh Ibrahim Bin-Khalid — had to go on the hunt for $2 million to pay off the other remaining member of his team who has extremely valuable intel on a group of sleeper cells tasked with a major attack on American soil.
Eric’s former commanding officer at CTU, Rebecca Ingram, has been helping him this entire time but she’s no longer the woman in charge after retiring to help her husband John Donovan during his campaign to become president. Speaking of Donovan, he runs into problems of his own when it’s revealed that a member of his staff has a history he didn’t know about.
Plus the twist at the end reveals another potential mole, but it’s still very early in the series so it’s tough to tell if this one is the real deal or just another piece of misdirection until we find out who is really screwing over Eric Carter and his men.
With that said, let’s recap ’24: Legacy’ from 1:00pm to 2:00pm…
Million Dollar Baby
After taking out three of Bin-Khalid’s men, Eric is now tasked with finding his fellow Army Ranger Ben Grimes, who made off with the USB that contains all the information about the sleeper cells spread across the United States along with activation codes to bring them online. Eric gets a call from the wayward Grimes, who has been struggling since even before the mission to take down Khalid overseas.
Grimes tells Eric that he wants $2 million in cash in exchange for the USB drive. If he doesn’t receive that cash in one hour, Ben will then contact Bin-Khalid’s men and offer them the same exact deal, knowing full well they will pay him every dime (or just kill him but that’s neither here nor there).
Eric calls Rebecca for help but unfortunately gathering that kind of cash on short notice is nearly impossible, but even more so given the fact that this entire operation is being kept off the books because someone inside CTU may have been the leak that gave up Carter and his men. Add to that, Rebecca has new CTU leader Keith Mullins strapped to a chair in interrogation until she can prove that he wasn’t the leak that gave up Carter and his men.
While CTU’s trusty analyst Andy uses Mullins’ codes to navigate the system to find out who searched for information on Carter’s mission, Eric is forced to find his own way to get the money to pay off Ben. Luckily, Eric’s brother Isaac clues him into a big drug bust that happened just days before where over $4 million was seized as part of the operation.
Isaac was half kidding when telling his brother about the money, but Eric takes it as serious information, which means he’s going to have to get that cash from the evidence room of the local police station.
And he’s going to get access by riding in the back of a police car.
A Woman Scorned
Speaking of Isaac, he’s been put in charge of protecting Eric’s wife Nicole but that situation is about to turn a lot more volatile.
Isaac’s gang has been losing ground lately so he’s struck up a deal with a local Dominican crew to split the territory so they both get an equal part in the criminal activities going on in this D.C. neighborhood. The whole negotiation was brokered by Isaac’s current girlfriend Aisha, but that soon goes south when she hears him pouring his heart out to Nicole and explaining how their relationship is over as soon as this deal goes through.
That pushes Aisha to double cross Isaac both with his top lieutenant and with the Dominican crew he’s dealing with. Isaac is going to this meeting alive but at this point there’s no guarantee he’ll be leaving the same way.
Teacher’s Pet
At the subplot in the high school, Amira — the student who was being accused of plotting a terror attack via text message — confronts her former boyfriend Drew and explains to him that this entire situation was a big misunderstanding. Amira lies her ass off and says that after they broke up, she was lonely and ended up talking to a boy from back home in Chechnya.
The boy was a radical with extreme ideas regarding America and she was so hurt after breaking up with Drew that she just went along for the ride. In the end, Amira cut ties with him and now realizes that perhaps she made a mistake by not sticking with Drew.
Minutes later, Amira visits her current “boyfriend” — a science teacher named Mr. Harris — who has been cooking up a batch of explosives for this sleeper cell just waiting for orders to strike. Mr. Harris is starting to get cold feet but Amira decides to convince him with a little mid-afternoon delight but before she can get his pants unzipped, Drew discovers them together and realizes that her entire story was a lie.
Mr. Harris stops Drew from escaping the classroom but in the midst of trying to keep him quiet, he ends up bashing the boy’s head against the floor and killing him. Now Amira and Mr. Harris have to clean up a body — in the middle of a school day mind you — to prevent their affair and more importantly their intentions to blow up the school before anybody can find out.
The Man in Charge
This week also revealed the person in charge behind the sleeper cells — his name is Jadalla Bin-Khalid, Shiekh Ibraham Bin-Khalid’s only son, who was Oxford trained rather than plotting terrorist attacks with his father. Now Jadalla has taken up the family business and he’s plotting the course of this attack against American.
But even his father’s right hand man doubts Jadalla’s effectiveness as a leader when he doubles down on retrieving the sleeper cell information rather than just launching an attack immediately to send a message, even if it’s not as loud as they would like it to be.
Ultimately, Jadalla stands up to his father’s right hand and puts the cell back in order as they pursue Grimes to find the stolen USB drive to launch this major attack as planned.
The Campaign
Senator John Donovan arrives at a fundraiser being thrown by his father Harry as they start getting into the home stretch for the run at the presidency. Inside the pat, Harry pulls his son away from the crowd and along with his uncle, he’s informed that his presidential rival Gage is about to run an attack ad on him tomorrow that may bring his campaign down.
It turns out, Donovan’s campaign manager Nilaa Mizrani attended a mosque when she was in college that was a radical home where the death of American soldiers was celebrated. When Donovan confronts Nilaa she confesses to going to the mosque, but only as a protest to the radical imam who was teaching hate and violence to his congregation.
Nilaa offers to tender her resignation but John refuses to hear it.
Instead, he plans to go after his opponent for this attack and still come out on top in the election in November. Then again, John might have some second thoughts after what we learn at the end of the episode…
Attack on Main Precinct
Instead of being arrested to end up in a cop car, Eric takes two policeman hostage when they stopped him for being black (a not so subtle jab at the ongoing issue between law enforcement and the African-American community at large). Eric ends up getting the drop on the cops and takes them hostage so he can get inside the evidence room to steal the money to give to Ben.
At the station, Eric is able to access the evidence room with his hostages still in tow because he posed as a prisoner who was just arrested. Meanwhile, Andy has the surveillance cameras running on a continuous loop “Oceans 11” style so Eric can slip in and slip out of the room without being detected.
Unfortunately the plan goes to shit when Thomas Locke, the new head of field ops at CTU, is clued into something weird happening in the building after Mariana (new analyst cousin of famed CTU computer geek Edgar Stile) tells him that Director Mullins has been MIA for more than 45 minutes.
Upstairs, Andy finally finishes the search for whoever was tracking down information on Eric’s team. He discovers that the code used to access the system was Rebecca Ingram, but obviously she wasn’t the one who searched for the information because obviously she already knew everything about the team.
The trace leads back to a computer being used at Senator John Donovan’s campaign headquarters and the person who logged on was none other than his trusted campaign manager Nilaa. She’s the one who searched for information on Eric’s team.
Of course this could be the first of many moles with Nilaa plotting against her own government or once again this is just a rouse to keep the real culprit from being discovered.
Unfortunately a few moments after uncovering that information, Locke finds Mullins and frees him before they team together to stop Rebecca from completing her off the books mission. Rebecca and Andy are placed under arrest while Eric is comprised because the cameras are no longer showing the other officers in the building the loop of an empty evidence room.
When Eric tries to escape with the money after convincing Ben to give him another 45 minutes to arrive at the location, he’s met with a hail of gunfire from the police. The cops believe he’s stealing the money from evidence and now they’ve got him pinned inside a room with no other exits than the front door that’s currently blockaded with 100 police officers arming up to take him down.
Now he’s stuck in a police station with only 45 minutes to get to Ben Grimes or the information on that USB will end up in terrorist’s hands. And now Rebecca has been placed under arrest and Mullins is back in charge with no way for Eric to reach out to him for help.
’24: Legacy’ returns with a brand new episode at 8pm ET on FOX next Monday.
