Season 8, 4-6PM: Plot twists right from Day, errr, Hour 1!

 [Catchin' up here.  Here're my thoughts about the season 8 premier.  I started this blog after I sent these out to a friend.  You can thank her foresight in saving them for posterity/your enjoyment.  I was gonna save this to tide you over in case I'm away from the TV for a week or so later this season, but by then the 1st 2 hours will be little more than a dull memory, so I figured this post would be more interesting now.]

This season just looks just waaayy too good.  You're not gonna believe this.  The twists and turns are happening all ready!  Jack is alive (OK, that's not surprising).  And he's given up the spy game (that's not surprising).  But get this--he's a great grandfather (I don't mean it THAT way--I said twists and turns, I didn't say flat out unbelievable, impossible, hopelessly contrived plots).  And he LIKES it.  OK, he's still having a bit of a tough time communicating with his daughter, but he patches that up pretty fast--all before the end of the first hour--Unbelievable (not in a contrived plot line way, though).  Then there's Chloe.  First off, she's the least competent analyst at CTU.  Then, when SHE connects the dots (rather than just providing the dots), no one (except maybe Jack) believes her, she turns the tables on Jack when he wants to walk away and fly into the sunset (they've shown us the nearly setting sun already, and they've told us this happens in real time) to LA.  Oh that was really classic--"Jack, you've asked me to do stupid things and I've always come through for you, can't you do this for me?"  Wow.  Followed by a tender meeting with his daughter making every argument she can find to tell him to stay and help Chloe, almost saying (did she say?) you can fly out tomorrow (somehow knowing that these adventures last only 24 hours).  Who could imagine that she would ever try to convince Jack to save the world?  Only a really and truly sick writer--sick like a fox!  And even with all those plot twists and probably others I've forgotten or missed, here's the biggest one: just as I was thinking Jack's gotta be outta bullets, he actually says, "I'm outta bullets"!  I never saw that one coming in a million years!  Just after the Human Target preview premier in which Christopher Chance and the bad guy run out of bullets at the same time (Human Target looks like fun, alas--another hour a week lost--hmmm, it better not be up against Lost!).

And the characters--wow, there's the blond with the hair always on the shoulder away from the camera, and the way too many curves (nice that her voyeur coworker notices her curves and she notices him noticing and she tells him to stop, she's getting married soon) and the too thin waist line in the LBD, who is really too good to be truly that nice and competent.  And yes, she's not as we start seeing she's hiding something before the end of the first evening (I don't get this 2 night 4 hour premier--wasn't tonight the premier?).  And the CTU boss who has too much tunnel vision for me to believe he can be in charge.  But he has some potential, even though he's already starting some intrigue trying to get an agent to cover something up.  Same agent as who nearly got blown up already (Jack saved him, after agent already thanked Jack for all he's done), same agent as about to marry LBD.

And we have pouty Chloe (no Janie, or whoever Garafalo played last year; Renee comes back Monday night), who really does have to come up to speed quickly on systems new to her (been outta the biz for 4 years).  But she hasn't lost her nose for how the 24 world works.  They do some pretty good hacking and find a smoking gun in the second hour, and Chloe knows that's not how things work in that world (or in the world of TV drama generally)--"that's too easy.  She's not the real mole.  She's a setup to distract us!"  She convinces only Jack, so he's gonna miss his LA flight.  Seems like there have been plenty of other discoveries in seasons gone by that came too easily for my liking that wound up being dead on.  I just hate that, "that was too easy" shtick.  I think that points simply to poor story-telling.  Sure, that's the way I do physics all the time--wait that experiment was too easy, it must be wrong!

And here I thought I wouldn't have much to say about this episode, especially because this was a weird Fox show ending at 11pm.  Probably some more I forgot, like how the media recording this season looks different from other seasons--I'm not sharp enough to be able to tell what kind of film it's on, but it has a different look.  And it seems like it's spring time, maybe--not winter because there's no snow, no heavy coats, no seeing people's breath outside--but with the sun setting before 5, seems like it should be near dead of winter (well they didn't show the sun setting, but there was a scene with the sun maybe 15 min from setting, and the clock said 4:48pm, or right about then.  Funny the one outdoor scene I remember from the 5-6 hour was about 545, and it was still daylight outside.

Oh, yeah, then there was the Islamic president's affair that the adviser told Pres to disavow, noting that the president probably wanted to do the honorable thing and tell the truth.  I'll have to think about that one a bit.  It has the chance to convince me that there might be cases where denying is better, even though my experience (though through the newspapers, not personal experience) says the affair will always see the light of day eventually, and it's stupid to deny it, better to get out in front of it.

Oh, wow, and the biggest plot twist of all, so big I nearly missed it: it took till the very end of the second hour for a baddie to threaten the life of someone and wound a hostage in an effort to try to coerce a specific action.  Here I thought those things happened every 15 minutes in the 24 world.  Don't they know that they're dead meat whether or not they give the guy what he wants? Sphere: Related Content