I know this is the wrong forum, but I pit my 8-month old daughter for keeping me so out of it that I was unaware that tonight was a two-hour 24. As I watched the little clips at the beginning, I was like, “Why are they showing things that are going to happen, rather than already did?” Then my wife remembered it had started at 8. Doh!
Nor has any minor/unknown character accompanied Jack on an tac team and lived to tell about it. Nor has anyone ever not given into extortion or blackmail, or realized that the bad guys are going to kill you or your loved one regardless of what you do.
I must say that one thing that has me very disappointed this season is the lack of "protocol"s and "socket"s being bandied about. I was all set this season to play drinking 24 with my wife but at best we have gotten a couple "trust me"s from Jack. It used to be “Set up a protocol to decrypt that file”, “Sure, I’ll open up a socket on the subnet” or “Somehow they broke through the hard perimeter, yet again. Write a protocol to find them!” or “Don’t worry about that knife wound Jack. Just slap a protocol on it.” This season: nothing.
And what was up with SIL? I would have been all like “I understand, ‘Susan.’ Oombye, ‘Susan.’ Hey Jack, that was your father. He has George Mich – er, Josh, and is going to kill him if I tell you what I’m telling you. It’s a trap. You can deal with it, right?”
Ah, but if you watch closely, you’ll see that Pop had one of those little Universal Phone Scrambler Devices that bad guys on 24 always use when they want to make incriminating phone calls. He also used the official CTU Mole Shadowy Corner of Secrecy (akin to *Get Smart’s * Cone of Silence) to ensure that none of the dozens of CTU agents in the vicinity heard what he was saying or even came within 50 feet of him.
Also, Fayed is quickly earning his place in the “Marwan Hall of Fame” for his dazzling and impossible escapes. I think he made it out of that building, into a helicopter, and clear of CTU’s “perimeter” in less than five minutes. I wonder, in 6 seasons has CTU ever, even once, successfully caught a suspect by setting up a perimeter? For that matter, have they ever, even once, done anything right without Jack there to save their asses? They’re about as competent as the Gotham police in the old Batman TV show.
And Marilyn is really something, isn’t she? Opie’s corpse isn’t even cold and she’s already trying to relight the old flame with Jack! (Still, better her than Audrey.)
Like I said, dumb dumb dumb, but better than last week, and at least Jack got to employ some serious ass-kickery again.
To fill in a bit more, he is a CTU operative who is so keenly genius at programming any computer, anywhere, any time, under the most intense pressure, that he spent over four seasons as a shoe salesman.
Makes you wonder what Al Bundy is really capable of.
A drinking game with a sufficient number of events and catchphrases would have
rendered me stone cold comatose on the floor by this point, drool slowly leaking out
of the corners of my mouth as the flies gather.
And I don’t even drink.
Well I had the revelation to beat all revelations last night, vis a vis Jack’s sister-in-law
and her little game of indecision: the reason she didn’t tell Jack right away about
his Dad’s threat and the decoy house is not because she is dumb, in a blind panic,
selfish, or just plain indecisive, it’s because it was convenient to the plot, pure and
simple and no other explanation needs to be offered.
I imagine, in the last scene in the very last episode (or movie), that Jack kicks in a
door, and finds the various producers, directors, and scriptwriters of the show
grinning madly at him (and also pointing submachine guns at him, but that’s BTP):
“Congratulations Mr. Bauer you have finally tracked down the real masterminds
behind the events of the past decade! And don’t say you’re surprised, because
you really shouldn’t be. After all, only in a fictional universe could said events have
ever actually come to pass.”
The problem is that the 24 hour format of the show DEMANDS that the writers put
their characters through these various ridiculous gyrations so as to pad out the
show’s length. If the crisis got solved after the 4 hour mark because everyone
actually bothered to be a little proactive for a change (and in the case of this season
just a few judicious actions by a few sober-thinking individuals would have done
just that), what do you do for the remaining 20 hours? That’s bad enough but to
also not have a single original idea this season is inexcusable. ::::sigh::::
Right, I forgot about the universal phone scrambler combined with the Mole Shadowy Corner. That’s almost like invisibility. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that haven’t used invisibility.
Technically, he’s the old guy. Outside of Jack, he’s the only character in the show that was there in season one. Where he disappeared to for all those years is anybody’s guess.
Hah, true enough. How about “Not bad for the person in the CTU-role that traditionally involves being devoid of common sense and impeding the people doing the real work as much as possible”?
Right from season one, half the fun of 24 has been cheerfully pointing out the logical absurdities, time warps and repetitive writing*.
The show is completely, thoroughly stupid. That is its glory, and it’s about the most entertaining thing to ever land on a network schedule. If you’re watching 24 and getting angry about the lack of realism, you need to take a break. Seriously.
*Three phrases you can count on:
[ul]
[li]“I understand”[/li][li]“Listen to me”[/li][li]“Fine”[/li][/ul]
I should have said I thought he sucked in that role. I think he was miscast. I like him in the comedy stuff. And I noticed the trash can thing too. I immediately thought “Hmm, I think we’ll be seeing that document again, now won’t we.”
Well, if you really want to get shitfaced, drink every time Jack urgently whispers “I don’t have much time!” into his cellphone. You’ll have alcohol poisoning in one episode.
When watching 24, one has to think “Perils of Pauline” - camp. Utter camp. Or maybe A Series of Unfortunate Events. Or consider that it’s written to transfer directly to a video game, just like Disney movies are made to translate directly into theme park rides. I, for one, await the time that Bill peels his face off and reveals himself to actually be…Fayed! When they started doing that in “Alias”, I hit the floor laughing.
The only possible way we won’t see it is if the writers drop that thread like 3rd period French, and we never find out what happens to it. In other words, 73% chance it will come to nothing.
One thing I’m pretty certain of – Josh is in no danger whatsoever. 24 is ridiculous and graphically violent, but one thing they have never done – AFAICR – is kill children. Not on screen, anyway. Every child that has been on the show has made it through alive, and then was promptly forgotten. Kumar notwithstanding.
So would I be correct in assuming the rest of the season is going to be: 1) Find the nukes but with very little to go on; 2) somehow or other some valuable peice of information is discovered (e.g. we got this fragment of an email off of the hard drive, we overheard a phone conversation, I followed my husband to this house); 3) Vital piece of information leads to the whereabouts of the “bad guys”; 4) Jack rushes to wherever just in the nick of time to i) save somebody and ii) stop one of the bombs; and 5) Fayad escapes through the perimeter; and 6) Goto step one until all nukes are disposed of.
Also, we can probably assume that the First Lady’s advisor’s kid got killed last year. When we last saw them, Peter Weller had hunted them down to that hotel room where Jack and the others stupidly left them alone. Since mom knew all about the conspiracy, and there was no reason to believe Weller’s character had an ounce of mercy, I presume she and her daughter were killed. I wish they would have followed up on that somehow, because I wondered about it for several episodes before finally giving up.
That’s another annoying thing about 24 – they get you involved in the plight of supporting characters and then drop them completely. (Sometimes off stairwells.)
