So, About Last Night: "24" Edition

If you are tenacious (and kind of a glutton for punishment) like me, you may still be following 24.  We all know it's wrapping up soon, so how has the final "day" (season) been wrapping up so far?



I'm just going to go ahead and get this out of the way: I plan on assuming you are already familiar with this season and past seasons of 24.  The show went through such a slump in seasons 5 through 7 that, let's be real, if you're watching it now, you've watched it all.  Also, this does contain spoilers, so if you haven't gotten around to watching last night's episode, you may want to do that before you read much further.  OK, formalities finished, and onward ever onward!

Last week's episode left us with the pairing of Jack Bauer and Cole Ortiz under the guise of Jack taking Cole hostage (though he is going with Jack of his own accord).  This is quite awesome because it somewhat addresses an issue I have had with the show pretty much since season 4: Why in the hell does no one listen to Jack Bauer straight off the bat?  Dude has consistently proven himself to be right all the damn time, was held in a Chinese prison for a stretch and kept his mouth shut, and has been on a friendly basis with every president in the series.  Jack Bauer is to terrorist threats as the atomic clock is to time: always. goddamn. right.  Hell, he can get the police off of his back (as demonstrated in tonight's episode) by using one as a shield and simply screaming, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?"  And Cole is the only one who seems to understand the weight that this reputation should bestow upon Jack.  Having them team up is about as close as we can get to having two Jack Bauers on screen at once.  Watching them stealthily infiltrate the mercenary base to extract Dana Walsh (more on her in a moment) is a joy, as the synchronization with which they work really does demonstrate that they know PRECISELY what's up.

Jack Bauer is literally the ONLY thing that can make me

consider Freddie Prinze Jr. any semblance of cool.

Last night's episode also briefly touched on the ongoing middle east peace process with "middle eastern nation referred to only as 'your country' or some semblance thereof", but that whole plot line has become somewhat tired and uninteresting.  No one cares about Dalia Hassan and President Taylor is so far up shit creek at this point that all the paddles in the world probably couldn't get her back.  This is thanks to the far more interesting re-introduction to the show of Charles Logan as "Machiavellian schemer".  We all hated him as a president in season 6, but god DAMN if he was not a great villain once they dropped that bombshell.  So when they brought him back in that capacity, suffice to say, I was excited, and every week it gets more and more interesting to watch him take on more and more the role of the puppet master as he subtly maneuvers President Taylor in to an ethic-less corner from which there appears to be no escape.  I shouldn't be rooting for this, but it just plays out so masterfully that every time he comes on screen a little piece of you dies as you realize he is going to chip away at the president's moral fiber once again.  That kind of reaction is not easy to garner, and is a sign that they actually care about the writing in the show again.

The final issue I would like to address is Dana Walsh.  Yeah, you know...

This bitch.

Anyone watching the show at this point has to hate her.  Even when you thought she was a good guy you hated her and when it turned out she was a mole for the Russians, you felt even more vindicated in that resentment of her as a human being and everything that she stands for.  Hell, I woke up my roommate when I screamed "YES!" at the TV after Bauer slammed her face into the desk a few weeks ago.  If I could find an animated gif of that so I could just watch it happen forever it would make me happier than words could convey.  I'm not advocating physical abuse or anything, but I AM advocating about as much abuse of Dana Walsh as possible.

The point is that initially, they actually made me feel bad for her.  Watching her get waterboarded by a merc group that you know is going to kill her anyway was incredibly discomforting, to say the least.  Unlike other (many) instances of torture on the show, Jack has proved almost every time (Nina being the major exception) that he will never use lethal means, but the fact that you know these mercenaries operate under no such code, one can't help but feel shock that something like this is going on and has the go ahead from the president who we used to like so much.  This sympathy, however, is about as short lived as a goldfish's memory span. The second she tried to screw with the Bauer/Cole synchronization by trying to get into Cole's head, all I could think was "NO, you do NOT get to screw this up".  And she almost gets away with it too, if it wasn't for that pesky Jack Bauer and the meddling three bullets he mercilessly fired into her chest.

This about approximates how

I first reacted to that.

The fact that Jack killed Dana did bring up some troubling questions for me though: he did give his word earlier in the episode that he would not kill her if she gave him what he wanted (which she did).  Chloe has stated several times in the manhunt for Jack that he isn't thinking clearly, and as I mentioned earlier, rarely do we see him murder people other than grunts or villains (Nina, again being the exception, but come on, she was NINA).  So where WILL this trajectory take him in the season?  Has he truly gone over the edge?  He was all set up to have his happy life with his (thankfully absent from this season) daughter in the beginning, but if he has truly gone loco, will this be the case?  Will Jack Bauer EVER get to be happy, or has he now crossed some kind of event horizon and is now doomed to go down in a blaze of patriotic, bullet spewing glory?  I don't know about the rest of you, but in spite of the show's rut, given the directions this final "day" is taking, I am getting more and more excited to find out.