User:Blue Rook

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Blue Rook and Wiki 24
By looking at the older history of many of the entries here at Wiki 24, I was conveniently able to peruse, armchair-style, just how much this wiki had grown, without having done any of that hard work myself. I came to this place after most of the sloppy kinks had been worked out, and know and regret that I completely missed out on a gritty mini-epoch of pioneering in the 24 microcosm. I am thankful for all the dedication of the dedicated admins and users whose sweat and countless clicks of Show preview have made this wiki a store of knowledge that towers above the myriad of embarrassingly disorganized (and downright ugly) wikis out there.

I attempt to make up for my late arrival by doing my best to make only quality contributions. I pay careful attention to detail, and work to have my edits as concise and formatted as possible before hitting that all-important Save page button. I practice diligence in my efforts to be as objective as possible without stepping on any toes.

I visit (and sporadically contribute to): http://en.wikipedia.org/ (handle is Blue Danube), and the wiki for Glen Cook, http://en.glencook.org/, author of the Black Company novels (handle is Rook Fasthands). My contributions there have petered off and will remain that way given my interest in remaining right here on Wiki 24.

Update: As of 2007 June 5, I am an administrator here at Wiki 24! Although I have much to learn, I am eager and proud to be available as a resource to any 24 fan and user here who has legitimate concerns and questions. After looking around a bit to see if your concern has already been addressed, you should never hesitate to drop your question (and sign it with four tildes!) on my talk page. Oh God not the gas!

Editing focuses

 * Watchdogging the latest intel
 * Creating and maintaining minor character pages
 * Scum and villainy: minor terrorists, hostiles, and antagonists of all kinds. You may hate to admit it... but without masterminds and murderers, radicals and religious fanatics, professional assassins and mercenaries, traitors and moles, conspirators, bomb-makers, saboteurs, hitmen, and muscle-for-hire... there would be no 24. If each of the latter took their respective days off, our favorite show would be a stale character drama free from explosions, gunplay, car wrecks... and any need for a digital countdown clock at all. My first primary focus was to ensure that each one of the named villains (from the aimless goons to the self-serving geniuses) gets his or her own page and whatever recognition is available... just so I have some leverage in case I'm held hostage by one of them some day.
 * Making grammatical and sentence fixes
 * Maintaining character lists such as categories and the Day # antagonists pages

Editing bête noires

 * On 2007 July 27, I removed my partial list of character page creations, and, more importantly, decided against posting my contributions in userspace when people can already see them all and judge for themselves by visiting the User Contributions tab over in the Toolbox. No one needs a biased list, and encyclopedias were never meant to be exercises in unabashed vanity. It is a dusty habit borrowed from Wikipedia. The absurdity is as follows: a number of the pages this wiki will indicate that I "created" were merely material shifted from other pages, and there are huge, original contributions of which I am very proud but show up as merely another line in that page's history. As such, I view it as arbitrary and egocentric.
 * I feel similarly about the practice of edit tallying. It is overall a comically self-aggrandizing behavior: constantly updating one's edit tally often counts for a significant percentage of one's edits (often higher than 10%), and no one discounts their updates from the total tally.

The Villains @ Large ranking
Any good action-drama series leaves some antagonists on the run, and 24 is no exception. But for every 24 maleficent who still breathes free air, there seems to be something like 30 who get killed or captured, making these a precious cesspool of only the best and most dangerous. I've collected all of my favorites from a larger list of at-large antagonists and placed them here.

Again, to be a villain at large, you need to be A) not dead, and B) not in custody.



Villain Factor 1: It's game over man, game over!
From mastermind to moron, VF1 is where all the dead and arrested goons wind up in my scale. Make no mistake: this is very much a race to see who gets removed from the list, and who stays in its higher echelons on that wretched day when the 24 microcosm closes shop and goes off the air.

Villain Factor 2: Dumb luck
Here we have unexceptional villains who happened to be blessed by the capricious wink of Lady Luck. Last time we saw each of these, they were forehead deep in a quagmire of trouble.

2.1: Frank
 * On a good day, Frank may aspire to be a low-level thug's sidekick.

2.2: Sabir Ardakani
 * It's only a matter of time before this pawn is caught: CTU pulled up his dossier, got his girlfriend on their side, and raided his house. C'mon... lying persuasively to your girlfriend/boyfriend about your not-so-Kosher activities is a basic skill that any villain should master.

2.3: Andrei
 * Adept with technology but barely above a basic goon, it's a miracle Jack didn't shoot this guy. I really think he was written off because of contractual issues between the show and the actor. (see right)

2.3: Sergei Voronov
 * The name of this East European Dawn Brigade terrorist was dropped in a recorded confession of Jacob Rossler. It's only a matter of time before he's tied up in a dismal industrial sub-basement in Turkmenistan, covered in soap-bar welts and missing his fingernails while he waits for the next boat to Guantanamo Bay.

Villain Factor 3: Ridiculous
This is where I've placed all the characters who take exceptional risks in the field. One misstep and any of these guys could have been demoted to factor 1.

 3.1: Phillip Bauer 

3.2: Jonathan Matijevich
 * You know you're hard core when you get plastic surgery to look like a guy who may or may not be successfully dispatched on the same day you have to carry out an assassination that may or may not go to hell in a hand-basket at any second. And he can run from authority faster than Nikola Tesla could run from a woman: Jonathan escaped from a building chock-full of Secret Service and security agents without a hitch.

3.3: Dar
 * Dar was one smooth operator. He wrecked a train, retrieved secret cargo, and delivered it without a hitch. Plus we only get to see his face for a matter of seconds, and that's it. Poof. (see right)

Villain Factor 4: Slippery
Though my favorite character in this ranking is at the very end of this list, my favorite category is right here at villain factor 4. This space is reserved for conspirators who had all the tangibility of a puff of smoke: they are never verifiably seen or implicated by the good guys, and may possibly never get caught because of it. So wise are they that in nearly each case, they confined themselves exclusively to safe places and cell phones; if field work was ever done by them, it was never gritty or risky. Cowards, you say? Of course... we're talking about villains. Cowards, yes... but smart ones. 4.1: Abad
 * Abad's name was dropped just once in a throwaway line from Hikmat Palpatine to Habib Marwan. He's quite possibly still over in New York, scheming away. Or eating twinkies.

4.2: Alexander Trepkos & his unnamed buddy
 * Alex and the man who always appeared with him managed to keep their heads despite the fact that their co-conspirator and their man in the field got bagged. Alex doesn't make the top grade, however, because he simply wasn't in the loop for Plan B, which seemed to be business strictly between Max and Mandy. (see right, on cell phone)

4.4: Ghost employers of Nina Myers 
 * During day 1, Nina was employed by mystery Drazen supporters, not the Drazens themselves, who may / may not have been the ghost Germans she contacted while she tried to flee. (Max was a German, but that doesn't guarantee anything.) Then in day 3, she showed up working for god-knows-who when she bids on and wins the Cordilla virus.

4.5: Ron (Day 5), Robert Joseph, and their colleague
 * Co-conspirators with Graem Bauer. Ron had the cojones to openly doubt their plan. The other two were so shadowy that even we the viewers didn't get to hear their names (Robert has been identified in the 24 Trading Card Game). Both Charles Logan and Graem trusted them with their lives and reputations. (see right)

4.6: Bryce Moore
 * Just who the hell is this? Fifty bucks says we will never know: Phillip and Graem, the only two who knew, are both dead.

Villain Factor 5: Diabolical
What are a fan favorite and a near non-entity doing in the superlative category? Read on...

5.1: Mandy
 * An obvious choice for any real 24 fan. She has the highest seniority, too, qualifying for my list since the first hour of day one. She has the second highest villain's body count as well, with 257 dead after blowing up Flight 221 plus a boatload of other unfortunate folks (second only to Abu Fayed who managed to nuke more than 12,000 Americans).

5.2: Robert Morrison
 * Nobody remembers Robert Morrison. I even had to make the page for him. Why does he get a Villain Factor of 5, then? For giggles, start with the small stuff: he has enough roots to have access to at least one professional hitman who does emergency house calls without question. Now let's see what Morrison really did: he launched a modern hydrogen bomb on a stealth missile at LA. in exchange for money. Not for religious beliefs, or anything. For dollars. It was in the air, and was only shot down by good fortune. Think about that for a good long while. Get back to me if you still think Mandy is better. Unlike Mandy, he was never caught, and although Marwan probably never got to pay that last installment, Morrison still walked away with a few cool million for his villainy.


 * I'm creating a separate category for him (Villain Factor 6: God cowers in fear) if Morrison turns out to be C an ad ia n.