I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it but I recently got the wife started on watching 24. We watched the first series at the start of last month and she’s just started on the second series this week. (From memory, I think series 2 is the weakest of the lot so far but bear in mind I’ve only seen up to season 5 and I gather that season 6 may have jumped the shark.) Anyway, we were watching some after supper tonight and there was one scene which really grabbed my attention (I think it was hour 4.)

Basically (and without giving too much of the plot away), Tony Almeida calls up George Mason and asks him for his password which (without a care in the world for even the most common sense security protocols) George gives him.

Now both of these are returning characters from season 1. Mason’s character has already been set up and defined. He’s a stickler for following the rules, he doesn’t like Jack Bauer’s loose cannon approach, he’s ambitious and while not incompetent, you get the impression he’s perhaps a bit of a weaselly coward and not actually that good at his job. There’s more to it than that but essentially, he’s a straight laced pen pusher with aspirations that are beyond his capability and neither Jack nor Soul-Patch like him that much.

The password he gives Tony is “Hendrix”.

That single word tells us so much about Mason’s character - far more than a 5 minute casual chat with Tony or Jack in a downtown L.A. wine bar ever would. Just to be sure we’ve understood, Tony asks “With an X?” to which an affronted Mason replies “How else would you spell it?”

So, George Mason - Hendrix fan. Suddenly there’s an image of him at home sitting on the couch with a bottle of beer and unplugged electric guitar in his lap, listening to “Machine Gun”, strumming out “Foxy Lady”, dreaming of the rock career he never had. You wonder if every time he heard the Star Spangled Banner at CTU family days whether he was imagining the Hendrix live version. You realise that behind this officious grey exterior is someone who’s unconventional at heart and the impression you’ve already formed of him has been well and truly challenged.

All that with one single word.