Dissenting Opinion

I have now given five hours of my life to Jack Bauer in hopes that he'll be my next favorite superhero. This is going to tick (tock) off some rabid 24 fans I know but...um...I want a little more for my five hour investment.

Actually, Jack is ok. I like Jack. I mean, yeah, he BIT a guy to death in the first episode but c'mon. We've all been there, right? And of course the show is impossibly impossible, but I can suspend reality for a bit. The parts of 24 that really leave me rolling my eyes are not the Jack parts but all the rest. I know I may be nit-picking but here are a few I noticed...

1. The president is negotiating a hostage situation. Really? Does that really happen? And even if it does, do I want that to happen? Don't we want the politician to sign things and leave hostage negotiations to crew-cut, flint-faced, colonels and generals who are just mean as snakes?

2. So not only is the President of the US negotiating a hostage situation, HE GIVES IN! He surrenders an agent of the U.S. military in exchange for a promise of information about terrorist attacks. Puh-lease! The U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists. That's how we roll. And we certainly don't do it with a covert agent who just got out of a Chinese prison, may be mentally unstable, is almost certainly pissed at his country, and has all kinds of secrets just waiting to be shared or tortured out of him! All this president is good for is gritting his teeth, bulging his temples, and speaking in a forceful whisper that makes us think he's really distraught over caving in to terrorists.

3. Have you noticed that Chloe can burrow through 53 million data records, reposition 14 satellites, hack into IBM's website, and investigate a terrorist's family history in, like 12 seconds. But then sometimes she'll be asked to open Microsoft Word and she'll say, "I'm really busy here!" Also, she looks like a Who from Whoville.

4. And speaking of technology, all of the laptops at CTU are Macs. Dumb. I like Macs. But my vote for the most outlandish thing to happen in the first five hours this season is not a nuke going off in LA. It's iBooks booting up in a government office.

Certainly the show is fun to watch, and I know, those are trifling things when there's a world to save out there. But those are the things I notice. I'll give it a few more weeks.

Sanders out.