A fan snapped this picture of actor Tzi Ma with Mary Lynn Rajskub at The Bedford Comedy Club in Balham on June 10th. Mary Lynn was doing standup and her fellow 24 cast members (including Tate Donovan and Gbenga Akinnagbe) came out to support her. But wait a second, why was Tzi Ma there?
24 fans might remember Tzi Ma as the villainous Cheng Zhi in the fourth, fifth, and sixth season of the show (as well as the 24 Season 6 Prequel). Cheng was last seen in the sixth season finale telling Bill Buchanan “My people will not abandon me like you abandoned Jack Bauer” after being taken into custody.
In the first episode of 24: Live Another Day it was stated that Kate Morgan’s husband Adam sold secrets to the Chinese government. We recently found out that it was actually Steve Navarro and Adrian Cross responsible for selling the secrets, with Navarro framing Adam Morgan for the deed. In the seventh episode of Live Another Day, Cross told Navarro that he was simply a middle man. Could they be working for Cheng?
Cheng returning could be what made Kim Raver “gasp out loud” when she read the script for the eleventh episode. In the sixth season we learned that Audrey was held captive and tortured in China for over a year – the season ended with her in a catatonic state and it took years of psychiatric care for Audrey to recover.
Of course Tzi Ma appearing at Mary Lynn’s standup event could simply be a coincidence – we have no evidence of him being on set just yet. But when you think about it, a Cheng return makes perfect sense with the current storyline. It would tie together all of the plots and make things personal for most of the lead characters.
67 Comments
Comments ClosedRebel2477
June 11, 2014 at 11:08 pmMary
June 11, 2014 at 11:45 pmm82a1
June 13, 2014 at 9:58 amMary
June 13, 2014 at 11:35 amGerry Mander
June 12, 2014 at 2:08 amJackBauerFan1977
June 12, 2014 at 3:52 amLAD Fan
June 12, 2014 at 4:38 amJohn
June 12, 2014 at 6:04 am24marathonman
June 12, 2014 at 7:21 amKiki Vanderway
June 12, 2014 at 8:41 amMary
June 12, 2014 at 10:48 amChlojack
June 12, 2014 at 8:43 amAlso, it looks like they’re filming exterior shots in London today, making Jack’s return to US soil less likely:
http://instagram.com/p/pJIEmwRV9J/
Fanta
June 12, 2014 at 10:15 amWhen I first saw that picture, I was thinking that could actually pose for a LA scene, especially with the sunshine and all. Only one problem, If they did the 11 hour airplane back to LA time jump, it would still be night/dark when they arrived there.
However, If Jack and or someone else did flew back to LA, it would make perfect sense if we saw parallel daylight scenes from UK with some of the remaining cast. We still have the CIA, the PM, maybe even the president back on UK soil.
Chlojack
June 12, 2014 at 10:37 amFanta
June 12, 2014 at 11:11 amBy the way, that picture actually looks a plane or drone crash. The debris area seems to be rather long and narrow, with a pile at the end.
Chlojack
June 12, 2014 at 1:10 pmXAM
June 12, 2014 at 8:59 am24: here, have Cheng instead yer cunts!
:-D
Chlojack
June 12, 2014 at 9:43 amMary
June 12, 2014 at 10:53 amLAD Fan
June 12, 2014 at 2:10 pmMary
June 12, 2014 at 4:28 pmAnd you might notice that in the post above here I just said that Audrey and the Chinese are both in the story right now. I said nothing about her maybe working for them. It’s kind of an undeniable fact that we have Audrey in the story and the Chinese in the story, no matter what the end results are. Go find a paper bag to breathe into.
LAD Fan
June 12, 2014 at 6:21 pmAgentRez
June 12, 2014 at 9:45 pmKiki Vanderway
June 12, 2014 at 10:11 pmHeller wouldn’t even let Jack near her let alone Cheng. Who was in prison and whom Heller would have wanted to rip to shreds…. so how could Audrey’s utility as a sleeper agent be sustained over such a long time when her main handler was in prison even if she was functional? Assuming she has been a real sleeper and gets activated now seven years after the fact….
She is in a bad way at least two or three years after the return to tte US and she is somewhat functional by day 8 or else she wouldn’t have told Jack she should have defended him more when she heard what happened because defending him to anyone only makes sense within the first few months of his fleeing the country after that no one is paying attention.
Is Mark then an agent of the Chinese — arguably the one with enough access to her within a time period that makes sense in terms of re-enforcing her “loyalty” to the Chinese but then we have to buy the fact that the Chinese have two agents so highly placed — makes Heller seem more out of it than his actions and diagnosis suggest
— I m having a hard time buying it
Mary
June 12, 2014 at 11:02 pm-We have no idea what happened to Cheng Zhi after he was seen under arrest on Day 6. The fact that he could be coming back now would mean that he probably wasn’t in prison. He may well have been right when he told Bill that his people wouldn’t abandon him the way the U.S. abandoned Jack. (Pretty sure it was Bill, Day 6 is not one I’ve rewatched past Graem’s death maybe, uh, ever. Heh.)
-Audrey could have been activated a lot sooner than seven years after Day 6. It’s been about two years since Heller won the Presidential election and if he was Taylor’s VP on Day 8 as could possibly have been the case, he’s been the President for four and a half years.
-Evil psychiatrists exist on 24. Martha Logan’s disturbing doctor comes to mind. I doubt it was directly Cheng influencing her recovery, if this is even what happened to her in the first place. He’d be maintaining from a distance. It’d be kind of like Marie and Syed Ali. Marie managed a whole other life while funneling money from her father’s company to Second Wave and was honored when Ali trusted her to perform a critical task for the group. These? Are the same people who brainwashed her when she ran away for a month after her mother died and she saw her Middle Eastern friend raped by American soldiers. She came back, Bob Warner was just so happy to have her back that he didn’t question anything, and when she met a new guy (who worked for her dad) and seemed so *normal*, the more time passed, the more no one thought to wonder what happened during the time she was away. Meanwhile, Marie was getting ready to marry Reza and setting it up so that when CTU got involved, it was either Reza or Bob who looked guilty. But to look at her until you knew this? Marie was a spoiled ex-sorority Barbie bridezilla who blamed any conflict on everyone else around her. The point is, Marie lived for years doing comparatively small things for Second Wave (moving money, arranging meetings) through Warner International before she was called upon to help detonate a nuke. Audrey has even more power and influence. She’d be kind of the most perfect spy ever, if you were the Chinese– high-ranking, personal connections to the other high-ranking players so that there’s really nothing that doesn’t pass her by, and with an image of the perfect heroine– the well-spoken, well-educated, lady-like First Lady.
-re: assuming she would have defended Jack if she were functional on Day 8… are you sure she would? She hears her ex-lover has snapped and killed foreign diplomats and her dad is now back in politics. That’s a pretty big choice to make, even if she isn’t a spy. And if she is a spy? She definitely wouldn’t defend Jack. Not just because it wouldn’t be politically a smart idea but because it would blow her cover. If she’s manipulating Mark, she’d need him to believe in Big Bad Psychopath and Traitor Jack Bauer, or else she can’t try to convince him she’s moved on from Jack. If she were to defend Jack, it would raise red flags– just the way it is today.
-I don’t think Mark is an agent for the Chinese. Again, could be totally wrong here on any or all of this but Mark strikes me as pretty much who he seems to be. Doesn’t mean Mark hasn’t done some shady stuff today but he’s done it to try to protect his family. I don’t see him as having any motivation for helping the very country who did this to his wife. It also doesn’t work with his reaction to Heller wanting to talk to Parliament. If Mark was a Chinese agent, he would have tried to make it so that Heller did do the speech, so they’d have a better chance of losing the base. Mark argues vehemently against Heller doing it.
Mary
June 12, 2014 at 10:11 pmFor what it’s worth, I think this is something they actually wanted to explore with Jack on Day 6. They basically had to create Phillip Bauer’s involvement with the Chinese to come up with a plausible reason for why the Chinese bothered keeping Jack alive for twenty months. At some point, they would have had to break him or realize that he was never going to talk, so it’s understandable why all the other characters are wary of him when he returns after so long. It’s like, okay, why did they bother keeping you alive? The writers came up with the BXJ family drama to explain why no one put a bullet in Jack’s head after a month of him not talking. There’s not really a reason for Audrey, sadly, other than to think that they might have turned her.
Like you say, though, there are a lot of other options. Regardless of anything to do with Audrey, the Chinese are mixed up in this and to make it Cheng who is the face of that plot would just be fun and make for good drama with his history with Jack and Audrey.
LAD Fan
June 12, 2014 at 11:19 pmGerry Mander
June 12, 2014 at 11:50 pmI would give Season 6 another whirl if I were you, yes it has serious problems, but they are in the overall plotting (the whole Bauer family melodrama is what derailed that season, and HoGo has stated as much) not the production values, which are second to none. The first eight episodes are gangbusters good, as is the frankly awesome later episode where Jack finally tracks Fayed back to his lair and ends his reign of terror as only Jack can, plus the final episode is seriously good with a brilliant oil rig sequence and the SINGLE BEST ending of any ’24’ season to date… the entire final episode has a hauntingly emotional resonance to it that sticks with you afterwards.
Just my own two cents for what it’s worth…
Mary
June 13, 2014 at 12:48 amI have the feeling they might have known where they wanted to go if Jack went darker in the later seasons but they probably had a lot of resistance at the time to doing that from Fox. They then had to kind of feel around for something of a plot because they had to fill seasons but couldn’t push Jack in too different of a direction. If you notice, a lot of Day 6 came around again on Day 8. Suddenly, Logan (who had been put on hold with that stab wound out of nowhere on Day 6) comes back and there’s a peace treaty, a President who falls from grace because of him… this could easily have been Wayne Palmer’s plot on Day 6 but it doesn’t work unless it happens at the same time as Jack goes over the edge. Somewhere on Day 6, what starts out epically winds up with seventeen hundred hours illustrating all the ways they could give an actor like Powers Boothe absolutely nothing to do in Daniels while half the episodes focused on his aide. It was a lot of driving in circles, as if they kept staving off plots for stuff you started to see towards the end. Tony almost came back on Day 6, Cheng Zhi gets spared death so that Jack can get some revenge as part of the final chapters of his character, Audrey gets left in a coma with the writers saying for years afterwards that they left her out there so they could bring back her and her defense contractor husband… well, here’s Audrey and her husband on Day 9, along with a darker Jack, Cheng Zhi, the Russians in the mix, a high probability of Tony, etc..
I think the first four episodes of Day 6 are some of my favorite of the series ever. I absolutely loved the Jack & Logan at the Russian embassy arc and Graem and the Assad story. When it was airing, I was liking it more than I think a lot of people probably. (I don’t want to generalize but it seems to be the most hated season from what I’ve read.) I’ll probably get around to rewatching it at some point but despite having some of my favorite characters in the series, it wound up feeling like a lot of waiting around for nothing to happen for most of it.
Gerry Mander
June 13, 2014 at 2:30 amCan’t believe I forgot that, muchos gracias for that…
Gerry Mander
June 13, 2014 at 2:44 amOne of the problems with Season 6 was not only were they writing the season on the fly as it went along, they were also working at the same time on the movie script, they really should have kept their full and undivided attention on that season instead of faffing around on side projects, but that’s just my opinion…
Mary
June 13, 2014 at 12:08 pmXAM
June 13, 2014 at 12:34 pmVanilla ice cream
Marshmallows
Chocolate
and also
Pizza
Fried Chicken
Gravy
and Steak
All mixed together into one disgusting paste to make a final product which is quite revolting.
The production values of 6 though are quite incredible I concur.
Mary
June 13, 2014 at 1:22 pmI think the worst problem with it is that stuff that wasn’t the most interesting of plots went on for way too long and stuff that was gripping disappeared in the blink of an eye.
That said, it’s also one of the darkly funniest seasons. Vampire!Jack, Morris and Chloe’s every interaction, Milo Grew Up To Be A Douche plot, everything that ever came out of Graem’s mouth, a nuclear bomb goes off so Aaron Pierce goes to the farmer’s market to get Martha some fresh kiwi… My personal favorite is the appearance of the guy who runs the convenience store behind CTU: LA who doesn’t bat an eyelash at a bloody Morris needing booze. This should have been 24’s spinoff right here– “Open 24 Hours”, the story of the guy who sees it all.
Kiki Vanderway
June 13, 2014 at 3:18 pmJason
June 12, 2014 at 10:00 amPlease be true.
WouldntYouLikeToKnow
June 12, 2014 at 11:19 amMary
June 12, 2014 at 9:12 pmJason
June 16, 2014 at 12:03 pmNew West Virginian
June 13, 2014 at 12:58 amAlexander Trepkos, one of the conspirators in Season 2, was also left alive and might have even gotten away.
Mary
June 13, 2014 at 1:25 pmChlojack
June 12, 2014 at 10:52 amhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt2916074/?ref_=ttep_ep12
Mary
June 12, 2014 at 10:55 amChlojack
June 12, 2014 at 1:12 pmJonathan G
June 12, 2014 at 11:02 amTran
June 12, 2014 at 11:35 amV
June 12, 2014 at 5:13 pmClayton
June 12, 2014 at 5:24 pmXAM
June 12, 2014 at 6:22 pmMary
June 12, 2014 at 9:13 pmChlojack
June 12, 2014 at 5:44 pm@kyagarwood
So sad more cast wrapped today. @Y_Strahovski @24LAD it’s been a great pleasure working with you. See you at the wrap
Kiki Vanderway
June 12, 2014 at 8:47 pmChlojack
June 12, 2014 at 9:37 pmLiveanotherdayseason2
June 12, 2014 at 5:45 pmPat
June 12, 2014 at 9:30 pmAgentRez
June 12, 2014 at 9:47 pmuncle carol
June 13, 2014 at 9:13 amXAM
June 13, 2014 at 2:06 pmThe mastermind of LADs events is: Jack Bauer.
Think about it, Jack probably worked in the shadows to setup the days events to get all his old enemies together in one place. He was behind Adam’s framing and the selling of classified shit to the Chinese to bring Cheng out into the open.
No other explanation would be acceptable. If Cheng JUST HAPPENS to be involved by sheer coincidence… *sigh* then the writers have truly learned nothing from Day 6.
Mary
June 16, 2014 at 12:26 amTrevor
June 13, 2014 at 3:27 pmKiki Vanderway
June 13, 2014 at 6:17 pmJustin
June 13, 2014 at 5:13 pmXAM
June 13, 2014 at 5:43 pmJustin
June 15, 2014 at 8:26 pmSharan
June 16, 2014 at 1:54 pmMatt
June 17, 2014 at 4:08 amShannon Ryan
June 19, 2014 at 7:45 pmI am a bit annoyed about the lack of explanation regarding the outcome of President Taylor’s resignation and President Suvarov’s legal status. Hopefully this will be revealed by the end of the season, since they are apparently going for closure.