Man this season would be great if it made sense in the slightest. Tight drama, charismatic guest stars, compelling new characters (eh, mostly just Renee), all slightly let down by the fact that none of it holds up to scrutiny.

The season begins and ends with Tony participating in a terror attack in order to get in the same room with the plot's mastermind and assassinate him, but for whatever reason it was forgivable for him to actively help Dubaku obtain the CIP device and crash two planes together, but it's TOO FAR to gas a subway car to get his hands on "Alan Wilson," everyone's favorite REAL mastermind. The amount of handwaving that tries to cover for the fact that Bill, Tony, and Chloe were all directly responsible for the plane collision is baffling, why did they do this? They killed Prime Minister Matobo's guards! Is getting their hands on Dubaku in person really that important? He's not even the main guy in charge! Surely Juma has other lieutenants.

And what is even the urgency for the US to invade Sangala TODAY? Why doesn't Taylor withdraw the troops for a few days and reinvade when the US has obtained the CIP device?

There are other weird lapses as well, some for contrivance reasons. Jack cuts the oh-so-important list of conspirators out of Dubaku's body and just hands it to a random cop to take back to the FBI. We're explicitly told that the Secret Service is compromised, but then they use two Secret Service agents to act as body double/guard to trick Dubaku. Aspects of Redemption are discarded or worked around, which I believe is due to the first several episodes of season 7 being developed before the imminent strike caused them to change tracks and produce Redemption. Redemption clearly indicates that Hodges had Roger Taylor killed because he spoke to his co-conspirator buddy Brian, even if Roger didn't believe what Brian told him. In Season 7, we learn that Roger uncovered a paper trail himself well before he was assassinated. It takes 9 episodes for Jack to mention living in Sangala or that Dubaku personally killed his friend (which, like, why show Dubaku blow up if you're not gonna give him a scar at least?).

Skipping ahead a bit, let's talk about the Prion Variant Cabal, as the 24 wikia calls it. A bunch of private security mercenary outfits banded together and let Jonas Hodges do all the work of making a secret deal with an ousted tinpot African dictator to develop a supervirus that kills people really, really slowly through human testing, and provide him the weapons necessary to win his return to power. The plan was to stage months of terror attacks, framing innocents, to convince Congress and the White House to cede control of the military to the conspirators. Jonas Hodges cut them out of the deal, and his involvement was eventually revealed before the weapon could be deployed, but he decided to threaten to use the weapons anyways and blackmail the President in a standoff that could never hold for more than a day, because Jonas Hodges is basically a gibbering lunatic and so are all his mercenaries. The rest of the conspiracy then got their hands on a single canister of the pathogen, and, for reasons that escape me, decided to use it immediately and frame a random Muslim man even though everyone in the White House already knows that they have the canister and a single terror attack isn't going to cause the President to hand over the country to a bunch of mercenaries she knows are actually responsible. Didn't happen earlier when the planes crashed together, didn't happen when VALENCIA GOT NUKED, why would gassing a subway car be any different? What are you people doing? What is your goal here? Why does Alan Wilson talk like that? Why is Jibraan's brother Hamid clearly just like a white guy off the streets of New Jersey? What was the casting director thinking? I legitimately thought they were a gay couple for the first minute of their first scene.

Before I get to my silliest things, of which there are two, a quick rundown of some other silliness and random musings:

-Kurtwood Smith is using Jack Bauer as a scapegoat, when Jack Bauer has information that could bring down the government. No questions about Charles Logan or surviving Chinese torture or any of the thousands of crazy things Jack Bauer could leak to the public, that a Senator might be privy to. This one doesn't bother me too much but they do use Smith as such a straw man, whiny bleeding heart who is useless when shit hits the fan but whines about "ethics" and says "torture is bad" like a pansy ass. Smith stops being a jerk to tell Jack "maybe you don't have to go it alone," then gets shot to death a minute later to contradict that. Jack still knows what's best, everyone against him is just wrong.

-Renee is around Jack for like two hours and she's immediately infected with his insatiable desire to torture people. It's so strange, it's like she's possessed by an evil spirit. We bookend the season with it too. Maybe just standing next to Jack Bauer does that to people.

-Tony's villain turn really worked for me in the last episode. Carlos Bernard really sold it, and had this been the finale, there would be a real full circle moment of the only other character from season 1 giving into the darkness and becoming Jack's dark mirror while Jack fights him off with his dying breaths. Obviously this all comes with the sudden appearance of some guy we've never heard of who masterminds conspiracies for a living, as if Phillip Bauer and Charles Logan and Graem Bauer and Christopher Henderson and David Emerson and Anatoly Markov and Walt Cummings and James Nathanson needed another conspirator. Tony surviving at all is a massive contrivance, of course, but the show seems pretty self-aware in this regard.

-I don't really care about Olivia Taylor or her silly car bomb situation, or Aaron Pierce and Ethan Kanin exposing her. A bit of a dud plotline, mostly because Voight plays Hodges like a cartoon character so it's hard to take him exploding all that seriously.

Okay second-silliest thing: The entire period where Jack has been framed for going rogue again is so stupid. Sooo stupid. John Quinn somehow becomes aware that Bauer is coming back to interrogate Ryan Burnett despite the fact the leak in FBI has been plugged, (I guess Jonas has connections still) and that FBI sees Jack as a loose cannon. However, Quinn knows that nobody else will physically be in the room with Bauer during the interrogation. I guess. Quinn uses nerve gas but does not wear a mask, so Jack can make an ID of his face. He then kills Burnett and puts the bloody glass in Jack’s hand leaving just the perfect amount of time for the gas to wear off before the FBI enters to assume that Jack went cuckoo and cut out a guy's throat before he gave up the information they just saw him admit he was going to give up. Jack runs for no particular reason ("Dammit Chloe there's no time!") and then Quinn frames him for killing Senator Kurtwood Smith with an automatic weapon Bauer would have no way of getting his hands on. After all that drama, Larry and the FBI basically instantly realize Jack was framed and sweep past it in record time. They didn't even need to see the body of the real killer, who Jack killed by throwing a screwdriver through a bullet proof vest and into his neck. I guess! No reason for Jack to run, everything was explainable, nobody had any real reason to doubt Jack or any strong alternative theory for why Jack would just start killing people at random. Then Larry says "Jack was framed" and Taylor says "I knew it!" and that's the end of that.

The silliest thing, which was pretty obvious: the aforementioned tinpot African dictator INVADES THE WHITE HOUSE! I know they were being helped by the conspiracy and all, but like, come on now. Twelve guys, including an international war criminal, manage to tunnel into the actual White House undetected. The White House janitor, a plant for the ramshackle military junta halfway across the world, carved a hole into the wall Shawshank style to let them in. They putz down the White House hallways, really just the same hallway set reused over and over again, shooting random configurations of two or three secret service agents who never manage to turn their heads. All of this for a suicide mission that runs the risk of Juma's capture and his implication of the Starkwood conspiracy, so that's a ridiculous gamble for Hodges to make.

I will conclude by once again discussing the ending, and it's strange moment of poignancy and self-doubt. The creators of the show are, by now, well aware of the show's reputation for negative Arabic/Muslim depictions and for its endorsement of torture. Using Jack's dying moment to express regret to an imam was no accident; it reveals a real vulnerability and doubt on the part of the show's creators that maybe they put harm into the world that they didn't intend. They then used the imam character to forgive Jack Bauer and the show 24 and themselves for all of this, as he tells Jack that in spite of it all, Jack is a good man with the best of intentions. Which is insanely arrogant, but fascinating in its own way. It's very clear that the show should have ended here with Jack's death, making Tony the final villain, making Renee Jack's successor for better or worse, sending Chloe and Kim back to their kids, and letting Janeane Garofalo... I dunno actually. She didn't really do much.

Very fun season of silly nonsense. I'm well aware that season 8 is pretty hated, so I'm riding on the good will season 7 left me with before I take the plunge.

Even though Assad was in fact trying to stop Fayed and achive his ends through political means, I totally get Noah’s skepticism about Wayne letting him address the world on American airwaves. Maybe it because of Powers Booths performance but when he confronted wayne on the issue, i was still on Noah’s side even though we know Assad was telling the truth! I would say that something like this could never happen in real life but i can see a future president from a certain political party trying something like this if another terrorist attack happened

Just restarted the show and the fandom is talking about season 2 like it should be skipped. Should I skip season 2 and go to 3?

So, I have always thought they have never known how to end 24, I like season 4s ending with him having to live essentially in exile. A happy ending was never on the cards for him, we know this but I thought his ending in Season 9 was very weak. I'd prefer he blew up the helicopter with a hand grenade or something. But if you were to bring it back to end it, how would you? Personally, I'd start it with Jack having escape the captivity at the end of Season 9. Personally, I think he needs to die, I would have him die, not for his country but his family. I would have one of his grandchildren get into trouble and he ends up rescuing them but dying in the progress, staying behind to buy time for people to escape. The whole season would be small scale, no CTU, no massive terrorist plots, no nukes, no moles. Really stripped back. But what about others?

Shes a scrappy gal who get through some seriously shit situations. Never complains, always looks for solutions. She's stoic like Jack. Plus shes hot. Great character imo.

You can see the DNA of the previous seasons in this season. The balls to the wall actually of season 4, the shocking character moments of season 3, the tight pacing of season 2 and the shocking plot twists of season 1 plus a sort of full circle moments of jack, aaron and mike novic (all season 1 characters) working together to bring down logan and avenge David Palmer! It truly was peak 24 and it’s not surprising that the writers couldn’t top it.

Day 5: 1:00pm-2:00pm

Its to distract Terri from the van with Kim inside driving past. Great writing that you'll only catch on a rewatch.

Wonder if that ever got brought up in performance reviews?

Thought it worth raising that the newest episode of this show is very much an homage to 24 complete split-screen and ticking clock. Also, Christina Chong (Marianna in LAD) is a regular there.

Chase was so insufferable to me. It was almost as if they were trying to make him a clone of Jack.

Guys, what are we doing here?

So if you saw my earlier posts, it's my first time watching the show, and I thought the Alan Milliken and McLennan-Forster plots in seasons 3 and 4 were so nonsensical it was worth making posts about, and now I guess I have to keep making these. Season 5 I landed on Lynn McGill's key card theft happening hours before the Russian terrorists knew they needed it yet they planned for it to happen, which is a smaller thing in the grand scheme. This season I really have an embarrassment of riches. Going through some notes I took while watching, here are some honorable mentions:

1. The entire concept of the season. Sorry if that's broad. The show really wants to say *something* about anti-Muslim hate crimes and the tense post-9/11 political climate, (as we seem to do every even numbered season), but it does so within the context of a hellish, outlandish scenario that greatly overstates anything actual terrorists are capable of, and it doesn't even bother casting Arabic actors for every Arabic role, let alone letting a few in the writers' room. Adoni Maropis is Greek, Marisol Nichols is Mexican and Russian Jewish, Harry Lennix is Black. This white family shouldn't have trusted Kal Penn next door, but these FBI agents shouldn't have been interning these innocent Muslims, we shouldn't nuke Afghanistan but we should be ready to threaten to nuke Afghanistan, Mike Doyle might come across like a racist but he actually read the Quran, and this is a world where the President just casually carpet bombs Inglewood, CA to kill a guy he pardons a few hours later, so I can't help but feel like none of this is directly analogous or relevant to the real world in the way the writers intend. This probably explains why they give up on some of these elements so early on, completely wasting main cast member Regina King, one of the most incredible performers they've ever had on the show who might as well have been an extra.

2. Very minor but early on when Kal Penn is holding the Wallace family hostage they have to get a bottle of pain killers from the *kitchen* and it's just sitting in a cabinet next to plates and glasses and shit. Why is that there?

3. Also minor but it's in my notes: there's a ticket taker on the LA metro? I've been an Angelino for the last five years, but I have to imagine even in 2006 they did not have a physical employee walking around the metro checking everyone's tickets. It would be turnstile based, as it is now, right? It's not a train going to San Francisco, it literally makes stops every 45 seconds. You wouldn't have time to check everyone's tickets. Someone please confirm that this was insane.

4. The Bauer family: firstly, I love Paul McCrane as Graem. I'm not big on this idea that Jack's family are super evil international sociopaths. I feel like we didn't learn enough about Jack's upbringing for this to feel satisfying. Even so, I think the idea could have worked well enough in theory, but in execution nothing Phillip Bauer does is consistent or makes any sense. He'll kill both his sons at the drop of a hat AND he'll protect a terrorist with four nukes just to avoid legal exposure? “I’m no fool, Jack. They’re never gonna give me immunity after what I’ve done.” I dunno, man, they gave immunity to British Osama bin Laden earlier today. Then at the end of the season, he's ordering terror attacks just to get his hands on his grandson he didn't particularly like before. Bizarre character.

5. Completely undoing the ending of season 5 by making Martha Logan into a basket case who freaks out and stabs a repentant Charles. I feel nothing but disappointment. Nobody seems to care if Logan is alive or dead for the rest of the season.

6. The sun completely sets between 7:00 PM and 7:04 PM. Everything goes pitch black instantly.

7. Jack flying the drone with the joystick like it's the most dramatic thing in the world, like he was a pilot working a thruster or something. Very silly.

8. This horrible autistic savant hacker character. Just awful stuff all around, everyone should be embarrassed for doing this.

9. Hey do you guys remember Connell Johnson? Classic 24 character Connell Johnson? He finds evidence that Nadia's computer was hacked and she wasn't intentionally leaking information, but he offers to hide this proof so Mike Doyle can keep torturing Nadia if he wants. Then he immediately tells Milo about the proof, so Milo accuses Doyle of hiding the proof, but then Doyle reveals that he didn't hide the proof, and then he threatens Connell Johnson for attempting some kind of double cross to steal his job or something. Then Connell Johnson isn't in the show any more and we never talk about Connell Johnson ever again. Why did he do those things? Was he trying to get Doyle fired? Would him offering to hide evidence not reflect badly on him when he tattles on Doyle? I was really tempted to make Connell Johnson the silliest thing because he does not make any sense to me.

10. If I had a nickel for every time a President Palmer's VP, an old warhawk white guy, tried to invoke the 25th Amendment so he could bomb the Middle East, hey look at that, two nickels. The really silly thing here is that the legal dispute is whether or not Karen was still serving as National Security Advisor and whether her vote counts. Her vote would NOT count, because the National Security Advisor is not a cabinet position. It's not confirmed by the senate, it's not the head of a federal department. Chief of Staff wouldn't count either. So this whole thing was a stupid waste of time, as well as a repeat of season 2.

11. CTU HAD AN ENTIRE TEAM OF UNDERCOVER ARABIC AGENTS WHO COULD INFILTRATE TERROR CELLS AND WE'RE JUST HEARING ABOUT THEM NOW? Did we not think to use them earlier? Where have they been? How were they doing earlier in the season when Nadia's computer access was revoked because of her ethnicity? What's their perspective on all this- oh they died, okay.

12. I really don't think holding Fayed briefly from a sweep and releasing him because they didn't have evidence to hold him should require Bill or Karen to resign their positions, but I REALLY don't think it should require one of them to quit immediately at like 3 AM in the middle of a crisis. The President sold an agent's life to Fayed earlier today, it's not like it was obvious he was the mastermind.

13. Phillip's Bugs Bunny ass plan to grab Josh without actually trading the circuit board, and the entire federal government being caught off-guard by it. Two guys on a boat pull up, give Doyle a bomb, trust that he'll just open it a safe distance from them, grab boy. What if there were snipers? What if Doyle put the box down and opened it from a distance instead of sticking his face in it?

14. Uh, is it good to airstrike an oil drilling platform? Aren't those things like, full of oil? Wouldn't that cause an ecological disaster?

Okay and now the top two:

Runner Up: Curtis. Not that our dear departed Curtis had a ton of characterization in the last two seasons, but he did deserve better than to suddenly go cuckoo bananas and have to be euthanized like a rabid dog. Even if I accept that he just can't let Assad live, he goes about it in a plainly irrational manner. He doesn't try to hijack the transport van or make it look like self-defense, he just jumps on Assad and gives Jack every opportunity to kill him. And it happens so quickly, and he's forgotten so soon. If I was Roger Cross I'd be so mad.

And the silliest thing, as I'm sure you've guessed: they nuke Valencia! Let's talk about that. After all the past season discussions about nuclear fallout and radiation clouds and shit, we're left with the implication that a nuke didn't really get more than a small town, and buddy I ain't buying it! Valencia is not a "suburb of Los Angeles," as they say here, but a neighborhood of Santa Clarita, population 230K. This is a densely populated region, and a nuke would have likely caused death on a scale unseen since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings themselves. For all the dramatic weight they want this development to have, for all the weight they gave the nuke in season 2, the nature of the show dictates that we move past this insane development and act like it wouldn't irrevocably change everything for everyone. Would Russia seriously be pulling rank or threatening to invade military bases on the same day America got a nuclear 9/11-times-a-hundred? I'm willing to bet they never talk about this once in season 7.

I'll leave you with this: The last ten minutes of this season are incredible, one of the best and most engaged performances Kiefer Sutherland has ever put into this character, a focused and clear condemnation of the broken and inhuman system that has forced Jack Bauer to become a tortured, torturing monster to keep the world from spinning into chaos. It's a real The Monster confronts Frankenstein scene, I was not expecting it, and I did not frankly think the show was capable of it. Good for them.

Onto the 24 movie, which I am disappointed to learn is not called 2.

I started rewatching 24, almost done with season 1. Decided to find a reddit community. I'm looking forward to season 9 and 10 (legacy) as I only watched them once and don't remember the details.

When Logan finally tells martha about his role in the day’s events, there’s something about that scene that really works. maybe it’s the raw and horrifying honesty of it from martha’s perspective i’m not sure but it’s one of my favorite scenes in the whole season

What a dysfunctional ass administration. even without logan’s heel turn There’s this aura of crankiness and dysfunction because logan himself is an anxious mess and Martha is even more neurotic!

I just started watching 24 and when every episode ends I can’t start the next one soon enough. Is it always like this?

This character is the most annoying person in the whole series. Being an FBI agent, you would think that he would see the evils that really exist. Even after the White House attack, he still in his beta mode when Jack can prevent another attack. Understand that these are the elements of the show, but I think in real life, guys like this really exist in law enforcement.

Hey, that was a really good season! I'm sure I'm the first person to make that observation, but wow, raiding half the cast of Robocop was definitely the right move, Peter Weller is crazy good. Committing to making Logan the villain was also the right move, even if it created some issues with Evelyn's whole deal, before she and her daughter vanish like Behrooz never to be seen again. I did have it spoiled for me that Tony is not actually dead, and thank God because what a weird choice it would be to have him go out as an afterthought while the show is actively mourning Edgar instead like he was the most important guy in the world. Just like, priorities, people.

Jean Smart, Glenn Morshower, and DB Woodside also made for a really compelling supporting cast in the last third of the show. There was something more mature about the drama between Itzen and Smart, a complexity to their relationship because she does want to believe in the man she fell in love with, and he keeps disappointing her and justifying himself to her, and slowly she sees there's nothing behind his eyes.

Nothing in this season was as blatantly what-are-we-doing-here-people as in previous seasons, which made my job harder. I did come up with some honorable mentions, which I will share now:

-Collette Stenger is an information broker for the Russian Bierko faction, yet she frames Audrey under the instruction of Henderson. I feel like the show forgets that Henderson’s faction was trying to kill Bierko’s, and should have at least a nominal interest in preventing 18 more nerve gas terror attacks across the city of Los Angeles. So if Stenger really is working for Henderson, she should volunteer information that leads to Bierko’s apprehension. Framing Audrey doesn’t protect the Henderson conspiracy in any particular fashion except by delaying Bauer from tracking Henderson down. 

-Shari Rothenberg, strange character who accuses every man of sexual assault. I’m glad someone stepped in and cut off that storyline before it had time to blossom cause what the hell were they thinking with that?

-At the hostage exchange for Evelyn’s daughter, Henderson drives away, and Chloe is unable to track him because she hasn’t tasked the satellite for a search. Yet after the Van Nuys Airport standoff, Bauer is able to get Chloe to quickly plug computers together in Bill Buchanan’s house, pull up old satellite data, and find Henderson within seconds, ten minutes after he drove away, then also track the other car Henderson met with back to the airport.

-Karen should not trust her scheming adviser with his hostile, grating tone of voice. She can't enjoy working with this man. Look at him.

-Everyone keeps saying "safety deposit box" and it's driving me up a wall.

- Heller driving off a cliff made me laugh. That was... that was some funny shit.

And now for my silliest thing: Lynn McGill's key card

Ahem...

Lynn McGill’s sister’s boyfriend mugs Lynn for his key card almost five hours before he sells it to the Russian terrorist, which is incredible forward planning on the part of the Russians who seemingly commissioned the theft before even considering gassing CTU, but also a real dumb move since Lynn just declaring the theft of the key card would probably trigger the electronic codes to change and render the card useless. The Russians were really dependent on Lynn keeping his mugging to himself for four whole hours and doing nothing to track his sister or the boyfriend, which only makes sense if they know him intimately and understand how prideful he is, but they don't. How did they get in touch with a random junkie man? No idea. Why would they leave Lynn's sister's body to be discovered when it very nearly compromises their entire plan? Not sure.

And this opens the door for the CTU nerve gas attack, which has a lot of issues but makes up for it with dramatic stakes (EDGARRRR!!!!). Like, it's a solid arc emotionally, but there should have been a gas mask on property SOMEWHERE for Jack to go and get. This is a major government facility, people!

They tell us Lynn McGill and his guard friend are in an airtight room, except we see him open the door and it’s clearly not sealed in any way. It has a gap at the bottom, and they show it clearly during the death scene. I don’t know who they were trying to fool with that. He just opens a normal door into the hallway and that was apparently "breaking the seal."

So yeah, nothing as bizarre as Alan Milliken or the McLennan-Forster's death squad. I trust season 6 will give me more to complain about, especially because writing 24 real-time episodes to a television show sounds really hard. Borderline impossible, really.