24, DH4 and CEOs

So now I’ve finished with “24” season 2. I was waiting for the final line, which should have been Jack Bauer saying “Now I really, really have to go to the bathroom!!” It ends with a cliffhanger, which I thought would propel the team into season 3. One agent said “Now the next shift is coming on.” Who are these guys? They weren’t even called up when a nuclear threat still hung over the city.

Who are they? The competent shift, apparently. I saw the first episode of season 3. The “B team” solved the cliffhanging crisis quickly and without difficulty off camera.

The cliffhanger on season 2 exposed just how incompetent Jack’s team was. President Palmer gets some kind of poison from a hot chick assassin (and aren’t all assassins hot chicks?) via a handshake (yes, the headline should read “Palmer Gets Palmed”). Anyway, he collapses, and everyone around him is like “Call an ambulance!” Now I’m no secret service agent, but I think that procedure is to chuck the Prez into the car and high tail it to the hospital yourself. Instead, they leave him on the ground fading from consciousness, meanwhile service agents beat on some random civilian nearby. Off camera, the B team is like “Great, now we’ve got to clean this up – again.”

A loose end of season 2 is exactly what happened to Sherry Palmer’s (the First Lady’s) disappearing bodyguard. She goes to this house with a body guard. Jack Bauer punches the dude, and then he’s never heard from or mentioned again. The vanishing guard wasn’t the most competent of people anyway. He was looking in the garage of a house to see if a car was still there. According to 24’s real time count clock, he returned 23 minutes later to report that the garage was empty. How tough can it be? You’re looking for a car in a house.

Another big theme was how the Counter Terrorism Unit cut off contact to Jack Bauer (yet again). They said they didn’t want to waste resources on him, and everyone should get back to work. Work on what? The bomb had been found. If it weren’t for Jack tracking down hunches, there was nothing to do. The whole CTU is horribly overstaffed. There are only 4 or 5 people there that actually get anything done, and half the time even they are sabotaging each other. 29 CTU staff were killed in an attack on HQ, and within an hour or so they were back up and running like normal. That tells you that the head count is way too high. Personally, I would have used pink slips rather than C-4, but that’s just my managerial style.

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In the same vein, I saw Die Hard 4, in which of course, the bad guys started shooting their own guys close to the end. Those who were shot didn’t even fail at their job, they were winning. The evil boss just figured that they were no longer of use. He shouldn’t have done that, though, since Bruce Willis was steadily blowing away henchmen. In the climax, there’s only Bruce Willis versus the one evil guy. The chief evil guy really could have used a few extra helpers then, eh?

DH4 is also similar to 24 in that it is an action scene followed by less plausible action scene followed by another even more far fetched ending in the impossible. But unlike 24, Die Hard starts at night, goes into day, goes into night, goes into day, and I think it ends up at night or day or something. I lost count how many days apparently passed, as I’m sure the guy in charge of continuity must have.

The whole plot of DH4 is that the computers are shut down all across the country. Mysteriously, almost all the people disappear. I learned from DH4 that 99% of the population is CGI. The action takes place at huge, sprawling industrial and computer facilities. The baddies shoot 5 workers and then place is deserted. Ergo, the rest of the workers must’ve been computer generated. The highways are chock full of abandoned cars. The cars are strewn about the highway as if the drivers suddenly experienced the rapture and left their earthly possessions. Die Hard… or Left Behind?

The bad guys also had to threaten John McClane’s family. Die Hard 1, 2 and 4 all featured threats to clan McClane. What the hell is wrong with the producers of part 3 where they couldn’t figure out some way to shoehorn in a subplot against his family?

But, I give DH4 credit for poking fun at itself. There is a hot chick assassin, of course, and as Bruce Willis is mowing through the ranks of bad guys, he tells the chief bad guy that he’s got to be running low on bad guys by now. “What, do you call 1-800-HENCHMEN?” And, he also says that he knocked off the hot action chick. “I bet there’s not too many of them around, right?” Bruce Willis doesn't watch 24, does he?

I presume that this has to be the absolute last of the Die Hard series. Willis’s age notwithstanding (what kind of a word is “notwithstanding”? It’s three words and they don’t even belong together in that order), the escalation of high value targets has a finite end. In the first one, the bank thieves were stealing $600 million in bearer bonds. In #2, the issue was ransom for even more money. The third plot raided all the gold kept under the Fed Reserve in NYC. This one was for trillions in the world financial markets. I can’t imagine a higher value target than the entire global financial market.

But, even my wife pointed out “Gee, if you steal all the money in the world, wouldn’t it make it pretty obvious that you’re the bad guy?” The bank: Hmmm… Something is fishy here. Aha! $80,000,000,000,000 is too much money to hold in a bank account earning so little interest. Any good financial advisor would know that! And, except for the first $250,000 it’s not even FDIC insured. Call marketing and see if we can sell this guy some of our risky financial products!

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Speaking of money and stupidity, I’ve been reading about huge salaries being paid to dead CEOs. Yes, as if the living ones aren’t scamming the sh!t out of the companies they work for. Occidental Petroleum will pay its CEO a package worth $115 million upon his death. The company defends it this way: "It isn't a death benefit per se -- it's what his family would get upon his death.” Thank you. Now it’s all very clear.

Occidental also defends the amount by saying that it is due in large part to the excellent performance of the stock during the CEOs tenure. So if you’re looking for a culprit for high gas prices, forget blaming China or India. Don’t blame Bush, the Saudis or instability in the Middle East. The oil slurping American consumer is blame free. It’s all due to Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum. He’s the one.

Eugene Isenberg is CEO of Nabors Industries. He would get $288 million upon his death and he’s 78. Nabors total market cap is only $12 billion, so that’s 2.4% for a dead guy.