Muuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnch!
Damn, my last post took a long time to draft. I started before you posted and finished 20 minutes later! Yoik!
Re: Soulpatch being good, you can almost always depend upon the one who is most obviously the bad guy not being a bad guy at all, but being (as in this case) a hard-ass.
Kinda like me. 
Ah, the voice of youth.
Son, I ain’t recovered yet. Next year, it’ll be me watching four hours a night for six nights. That’s about right.
Now hush up while I finish cleaning my dentures.
Riiiight. However, in the first episode, I had a twinge feeling that Nina was dirty. I should have stuck with it, as I’m a firm believer in the Agatha Christie “the first non-main protagonist is the killer” school of thought.
Actually, now that I think of it, it wasn’t Soulpatch I was wary of most of the time, it was the guy whose name I can’t remember. Jack’s boss. Not the top guy in charge of district, but the other guy. Walsh? No, that’s not it. He looks like Matt Walsh from Upright Citizen’s Brigade. C’mon folks, help me out here!
We shoulda had Billy Baroo make us some flashcards or a picture list of characters and their names.
Everyone feel free to contribute your own:
Little things they did right:
[ul][li]Took it easy on how dirty everyone got. It would have been really easy to get everyone filthy dirty with all the running around, hiding in the trees, L.A. smog, etc., but they went easy on it. Good.[/li][li]Kim’s adolescence. I found the actress’s portrayal of a girl torn between wanting her independent and needing to be taken care of by her parents very believable.[/ul][/li]Little things they slipped on:
[ul][li]In one scene where Palmer and (I think) Jack are riding in the car, there is a visible discontinuity in the film running behind them that shows trees moving. I don’t remember what hour it was, but there can’t be many scenes like that. Watch over Palmer’s left shoulder.[/li]Jack had, by my count, 3 cell phones during the day, one of which was, shall we say, specially modified. Would that I could get that much talking time out of my cell phone batteries.[/ul]
Mason?
Yeah, she took that $300K I think to sell out her friends in the CTU and hook up the bad guys to CTU’s cameras. That lead to the death and capture of quite a few folks.
That’s bad 
Independence, that is.
In the interest of saving the server from the burden of repeated searches, here are the previous 24 threads I’ve been able to locate, by hour:
12:00 a.m. - 1:00 a.m.
“24” Analysis and Predictions- Hour 1(Spoilers)
1:00 a.m. - 2:00 a.m.
none found
2:00 a.m. - 3:00 a.m.
“24” 2:00-3:00 a.m.(Spoilers Abound)
3:00 a.m. - 4:00 a.m.
24: Hour 4
4:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
none found - probably lost due to The Winter of Our Missed Content
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
‘24’ - The New Thread (Spoilers)
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
How do you get to that point in only 15 hours?(24 spoiler)
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
‘24’ - 4pm to 5pm (spoilers)
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
‘24’ - 5pm to 6pm (spoilers)
6:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
none found
7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
24 - 7 - 8 p.m. - SPOILERS
8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Pre-emptive 24 thread
9:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
none found
10:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
24: 10-11 PM
11:00 p.m. - 12:00 a.m.
The 24 Season Finale (SPOILERS!)
Final “24” episode… SPOILERS!
And, just for completeness, here’s the link to Fox’s official episode guide.
I wonder if they’re going to use that “This is the longest day of my life” tagline for the second season too?
“Man, I thought that one day where my family was repeatedly kidnapped and evil villains tried to blackmail me into assassinating a major presidential candidate and my wife was killed was a long day…”
I think they’re gonna need a new tagline.
Done, and done. And I mean done. How did you spend your holiday weekend?
So instead of stringing 24 hours across 7 months, I saw 7 months of TV compressed into 24 hours. Especially weird was seeing everyone on TV have such an exciting day, while I spent the day, well, watching TV.
A) The over-plot doesn’t hold up without a week of suspense between episodes. Example: first scene, an agent in Kuala Lumpur has information that Palmer is a target. Later, we find that Palmer was incidental – that Jack was the real target (for revenge, that is).
B) Does anybody remember a 747 blowing up over the Mojave Desert around, say, 1 a.m.? Because nobody mentions it after 1:30 or so. The news reports at 6 and 9 both lead with Palmer – his breakfast plans and the assassination attempt at 8. And the plane was blown up so that the assassin could impersonate the photographer? Not likely. If you can sneak a bomb thru airport security, why not just use a bomb to blow up Palmer??
C) So, Alan York was murdered so that Kevin Badguy could hang around Teri, then wait 5 hours before he decides to drive her out to the compound? (“My daughter’s missing, too. She probably went to a rave at this orange grove…”)
D)For that matter, was the entire compound set up for the express purpose of holding Teri & Kim hostage? If so, why all the vans & hardware? And why were they so bad at holding prisoners? And wasn’t that Asian henchman killed in the botched robbery at the Nakatomi Plaza?
Still, it was gripping enough to hold my attention for the entire day. I appreciate how it shifted in tone as the day wore on – from paranoid thriller to fugitive action to hot chix in jail. I was even moved by the finale, when Jack is told he’s lost the thing he’s fought all day to preserve. (But I could’ve done without the “Yelena” angle. Sheesh.)
Man, I remember reading about “24” and how it deeply affected America’s consciousness when everyone found out that Herb Stempel and Chris Van Doren were being fed the answers prior to the show just to keep it interesting. Jesus! Thank goodness for Bob Barker’s homespun wholesomeness giving game shows a new lease on life in America’s heart.
Huh?
OH! It’s Twenty-One not Twenty Four!!! Boy is there egg on my face!!! At least I think it’s egg…
TheeGrumpy, am I to understand that you actually took me up on my invitation to join the 24 Club?
Just answering a few questions here from my brain-frazzled memory:
Palmer wasn’t incidental - he was the one that okayed the mission. Palmer was just as much a target as Jack was.
Bombs aren’t smart, and their ID isn’t nearly as effective against Secret Service. A bomb would be found, and Palmer would be taken out of range, while an assassin can get close. But you’re right about the explosion not being in the forefront of the news.
If he had immediately kidnapped Teri, then Jack would be immediately tipped off. It was all very well orchestrated.
The vans and hardware would be for that large military operation of infiltrating a secret government prison to rescue Victor Drazen. I think they were so bad at keeping them hostage because at that point, they had other priorities (gearing up for the rescue).
Yippeekaiya.
I loved seeing this guy in the show! It was the perfect homage to Die Hard. Munch, I thought of you immediately!
Whoops. Shoulda previewed.
I’m still waiting for Die Hard V: Oh, For the Love of God, LEAVE ME ALONE!.
The inimitable character actor Al Leong. In Lethal Weapon, he had forgotten more about administering pain than you or I will ever know. He sure did add a lot of credibility to the henchmen.
I agree, Billy. Even though he looked a little too much like Mr. Miagi.
Our local station has been re-running ‘24’ one hour every night. It just started last night, and I got a chance to see the first episode all over again.
I’ll tell you - now that I know Nina was bad, I’m picking up hints of foreshadowing all over the place. But that’s probably just me seeing what I want to see - the actions of most of the characters are so complex and yet inscrutable that you can read all kinds of motivations into the simplest acts. I’m sure that was intentional.
One thing that jumped out at me, though. Mason HATED Jack at the beginning, and then Jack shot him and blackmailed him. 20 hours later they were quite civil with each other, and at the end Mason was actually acting like he really supported Jack. That seems a little far-fetched. In real life, 24 hours after someone shot a tranquilizer into you and threatened you with blackmail, you’d want to tear his head off. That was easy to forget when the last show was months from the first one, but when you see them together it kinda stands out.
It was kind of strange seeing Jack and his family interacting so normally, knowing the hell they were about to go through.
What a horrible last day on Earth for Teri. Let’s see… her daughter vanishes, she gets kidnapped, she escapes, she gets caught again, she gets hauled to a compound where she is raped, she is hauled out to a field and has a gun put to her head and thinks she’s about to die, gets hauled back in again, kills a man, escapes, goes to a safe house, gets attacked again, escapes, thinks her daughter is dead, has amnesia, goes home, gets attacked AGAIN and sees her friend get shot, gets taken back to CTU, gets caught AGAIN, and then is tied to a chair and shot in the back.
They sure put that character through hell.
I think it was the longest day of Teri Bauer’s life.
And the last one. She almost had to die to give the whole series any credibility.
The main liberties the writers took were: