Season Premiere (Part 1)
(7:00 A.M. - 8:00 A.M.)
Review/Commentary
Reviewer: J
Annnnnnnd, we’re back. For those of you who read the Unauthorized 24 Page regularly during the 24 season, thanks for swinging by and remembering us. If you heard about us through a friend, well, before long you may want to drag that friend outside by the hair and beat him mercilessly. We implore you to resist that urge.
We’re back for Season Four (or “Day Four” as Fox likes to call it, but I make the rules around here) and once again the shenanigans appear to be taking place in Los Angeles. How about a little love for some other cities? Like Flagstaff, for instance.
Regardless, the result of Fox showing four hours of 24 in two nights is that I need to write the reviews for the first two hours pretty quickly because once we move on to the next couple hours, I won’t be able to keep the reviews contained to what happened in their respective hours. I know, I know, since when am I organized and logical, right? Good question. I don’t really have an answer. So let’s just move on.
As luck would have it, Jack happens to be in L.A. on this specific day to meet with the new head of CTU, Erin Driscoll, on behalf of his new boss, the Secretary of Defense, James Heller. We’re reminded about fifteen times during the first hour that Jack was fired by Driscoll, although we don’t see any flashbacks or anything to the Day Four preview that D reviewed a couple weeks back.
Speaking of Driscoll, let me talk about her for a minute. Is she perhaps the previously unseen wife of Ryan Chappelle? She is just as much of a tight-ass, if not worse. I guess my issue with this is what the protocol is for a CTU director; is it supposed to be a field agent or a bureaucrat? We’ve seen both, with Jack/Mason/Tony being field agents and Chappelle/Driscoll/Any Tightass From Division being suits with budget concerns. So which is it? Wouldn’t you think a government agency would have some sort of specific protocol as to who is supposed to run a division of intelligence? I guess the way we can suspend disbelief on this is that CTU is both an intelligence gathering/analyzing agency as well as a field ops agency. But still, it seems a little weird that we go from gun-toting field agents, skilled in special ops and interrogation to stuffy, uptight wonks who would wet themselves at the sight of a gun. Oh well.
Anyway, as mentioned, Secretary of Defense Heller (we’ll just call him Heller from now on because I don’t like typing “Secretary of Defense” any more than I have to) has assigned Jack to meet with Driscoll to discuss the defense budget and how it relates to CTU. Ah, yes, great idea. Send the guy who got fired from the department to discuss their budget. We’re taking a leap of faith here that Jack harbors no ill will, which even for a professional person is a significant leap. But anyway, I have a question – why isn’t Heller able to take this meeting? He’s in L.A., isn’t he? If he feels strongly about this budget, shouldn’t he be there? No, no, J, don’t be silly like that and apply logic – if he were in CTU, he wouldn’t be easily nabbed by this season’s baddies, who appear to be of Muslim faith. Ah, good, because that’s not going to offend anybody.
But before people do fly off the handle about Fox and 24 stereotyping Muslims as terrorists, let’s not forget that last season’s main bad guy was British super-agent Stephen Saunders and I don’t recall the Brits getting their collective panties crimped. (One might argue that British people’s panties are perpetually crimped, but hey, I’ve probably offended enough people today.)
Before I get back to the happenings at CTU, I guess I’ll mentioned what happened in the first minutes of the season. A train is traveling along, a man is drinking coffee, another man has a briefcase chained to his wrist… and suddenly there’s a pickup truck on the tracks that the train collides with. Now, I realize they keep calling it a train “bombing” which I guess it must be, because colliding with an old pickup truck shouldn’t be enough to not only derail a train, but also to throw passengers out of it. Because that’s what evidently happened – there are people lying around, including one woman who complains that she can’t move and needs help. Well, yes, dear, that’s because you have a passenger car lying on your abdomen. That can’t be good for the digestive track.
Anyway, the man with the briefcase is located by a dirt bike rider, who promptly shoots him and takes the case. Was shooting him really necessary? I mean, did he look like he was going to put up a fight? And what’s in this briefcase? It had better not be something we don’t learn anything about for three months or I’m going to become very difficult. Perhaps it’s a schedule of some sort? Maybe it helped them determine where Heller was going to be so they could nab him? Who knows.
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