A lot can be said about 24; it’s formulaic, it borders on convolution, and that it’s melodramatic, and all of that would be true to a point but another thing that can be said about the series is that it’s consistent. While other series go into lull periods where there’s a good bit of filler waiting for sweeps or that big cliffhanger to come at the end of the season, 24 keeps the pressure on, moves at a breakneck pace, and doesn’t feature any real “filler’ episodes. One thing that I like about the series is that while it is highly serialized a new viewer can pick up at the beginning of virtually any of the seasons and with only a bit of background, jump right into the show. This season for example started with Jack coming back from a Chinese prison. A new viewer may not know why he was there or how he got there and that really doesn’t matter because the real mystery is what the President had to do to get him out. Now, that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of nuggets in there to tie the seasons together for the viewer who’s been with the show from the beginning. For instance, what started with last week’s episode and continues this week seems like the typical introduction of another villain who just happens to be Jack’s brother. That’s exciting stuff, but those that watched last season know this guy as the man who was running the show behind the scenes against Jack all of last season. Now, we know this guy is Jack’s brother! I didn’t review 24 last week because there was so many series to cover but believe me, I was blown away by this revelation.
Jack has discovered that his brother and father run a company that was responsible for putting the nuclear weapons in the terrorist’s hands so he forces his brother to take him to the office of the man that is specifically responsible for the act. There Jack finds his father (James “That’ll do pig” Cromwell) with a security force from his company searching for the man responsible. Jack convinces his father to run the operation through CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) and that’s when Jack’s brother Graeme reveals his real intentions. The security force turns on Jack and his father and kills Jack’s back up team waiting outside. Then before leaving, Graeme orders the team to kill his brother and father.
As I mentioned earlier, I agree that the series has its own formula and one part of that is that there has to be a bad guy in the White House. Now, last season there were a couple of true bad guys in the White House, this time it just seems that Thomas Lennox isn’t necessarily a villain but instead a power hungry and paranoid politician who will do anything he ahs to in order to make sure his policies come into play. The only person standing between him and the President is Homeland Security Director Karen Hayes who believes that setting up detention centers and holding people based on ethnicity and race will do irreparable damage to the United States. So, Lennox digs up enough dirt on her to force her to tender her resignation and she gets reassigned to CTU in Los Angles. The series has some potential here for some interesting political commentary by examining the repercussions of setting up these detention centers and what the potential outcome of such an act might be. The secondary story dealing with company employees being held just because of their race or religious background and now the covert profiling of CTU agent Nadia Yassir has already started the ball rolling for what I hope will be an interesting examination of this situation which is already happening in “the real world” at airports and other high security locations. They’ve really taken the “don’t judge a book by its cover” to an extreme by informing us that Nadia voted Republican in the last election!
This episode does everything right, it features some great suspense, more plot twists, and deepens the story and behind the scenes conspiracy happening in the White House. If this series continues at this pace, we are in for one of the best seasons yet.
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