24: Day 2 10:00-11:00 pm (SPOILERS!)

[PillowRock]

Well, the 50 mile radius was based upon:

1) detonation in the bowl of the LA basin with nothing to impede the shock / heat wave.

2) unknown bomb siize / power

3) also including long term casualties due to radiation.


The mountain ridge would protect him from the immediate shock wave, and most of the heat, so I think that Bauer would likely survive in the short term. He would, however, take an unhealthy dose of radiation. I think that at this point he is just accepting that he will die early from a radiation induced case of cancer. To continue the Sheridan / Lorien comparison that someone else made; Jack didn't get his whole life expectancy back, he just got roughly a couple decades.

In regard to the time from jumping to hitting the ground: Remember that Jack Bauer is *not* a recreational skydiver. His training would have been for night jumps with the vast majority of the jump done in free fall, only opening the shoot at the end. He would have the training to get to the ground in a shorter time than most people would.

[B5_Obsessed]

I don't think they'd irradiate Bauer after we just spent like 13 weeks watching Mason cough up blood. Been there, done that.

[ElScorcho]

At least we know he'll live another year.

[PillowRock]

There are degrees of radiation exposure between "you'll be dead within a day" and "you'll be just fine forever with no long term side effects".

I would expect Jack to be in there somewhere. Which John Wayne movie was it that was filmed out in the dessert, not too far from one / some of the early US nuclear test sites? A survey of that cast and crew 20 - 30 years later showed that a large number of them had died of cancer, and their agregate average life span was not nearly what it would be for a national random sample of their contemporaries. This is the kind of group that I would put Jack Bauer into after that blast. His life expectancy (barring premature violent death; which, with our man Jack, is making a pretty big assumption) is now something like 60 or so instead of being somewhere in the mid-to-late 70's like it was the day before.

[Chilli]

When the bomb goes off, we see, from Jack's position, a bright flash of light. And we hear an explosion.

On a big scale, sound is damned slow. In one second, it travels something like 330 meters (thats ~360 yards)..the only way Jack would see and hear the bomb going off at about the same time would be if he where withing meters of the bomb.

[PillowRock]

Well, yeah, the effects and / or sound editing people clearly got that wrong. They probably just didn't like (from a purely "artistic" POV) playing the flash in silence, or from other observer's POV's first (if they had shown Palmer's and Kim's reactions to the flash first [without blast sounds], for several seconds each, and *then* cut to Jack they could have realistically had his surroundings lit by the fireball and had the roar of sound around him).

However, that's a whole different topic than the original contention that at approximately 14 miles from the blast (based on how long before the blast he jumped out of the plane) he should have been killed outright.