24 Season 8 Episode 7, 10:00PM-11:00PM

24 Season 8 Episode 7, 10:00PM-11:00PM – review

Column, Review, Television | Eli | February 9, 2010 at 9:59 am

24 is finally gaining some traction with the first genuinely good episode of the season. It should be noted that the writers borrow liberally from previous seasons and rehash several generic 24 plot twists to get things going again, but they should be forgiven considering how boring things have been. The obsession with Dana Walsh’s redneck boyfriend problem is still a needling issue, as too much time is spent on this lame subplot again. Aside from that, the balance of the story is equally split among competing threads of intrigue and suspense which generates some feeling of actual danger for the first time this season. The bad guys have seemed a little too shiny and plastic, like CSI style villains, to create any real fear for the protagonists. The writers fix this problem by giving Jack and Renee a dangerous Russian criminal gang to go up against. By going back to the bad guy staples of unmarked cargo vans and transport through sewage tunnels, 24 feels like, well, 24 again.

Up front, the Dana Walsh redneck bit has to be acknowledged. She spends this episode guiding the two country bumpkins into an NYPD evidence warehouse. The warehouse is set up in an unlikely Splinter Cell style infiltration layout, with multiple numbered rooms and keypads. I’m glad to get this nonsense over with, as well as the “things go wrong” moment when the two criminals knock out a police officer with a baseball bat (they were carrying around a shotgun, but killing cops must be too much for the show) and escape with their money. At one point, one of the crooks turns on the other with a gun, then it turns out to be a water pistol (what a joke!), which was in the evidence bin next to hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and drugs. This seems like an almost season-2-cougar level of stupidity, but it strangely works. Dana Walsh is letting her fiance Agent Ortiz in on the secret next episode, so hopefully these two schmucks will be dead in a coffin before long.

President Omar and President Taylor fill up the next story vignette, in which a British ambassador has to assure the US President that Britain and the States share a “100-year-old history.” This bullshit political talk between world leaders is severely lame, and the thought of a low-level ambassador coaxing a President with paltry reassurance is ridiculous. President Taylor (Cherry Jones) has lost all of her charisma from last season, maybe because the character has been relegated to the background; she just isn’t very Presidential anymore. President Omar is finally being portrayed in a realistic light, as a ruthless autocrat, which is the only kind of leader to be found in the Middle East. Omar is busy rounding up the family of his trusted aid for a torture session to root out the political dissidents in the Islamic Republic of Kamistan. But now that Omar is acting real, his bodyguard starts spouting nonsense about the President’s ideals and principles, and how he came to power so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen anymore. A lowly bodyguard would probably be killed if he ever questioned a dictator-style President like Omar, and probably wouldn’t have any guiding moral principles to begin with. Still, he is sleeping with Omar’s noble little tart of a daughter, and she will surely save him from a painful interrogation. The acting is really atrocious, as the characters try to juggle the Persian accent and culture in hand with an awful script.

Finally, Renee and Jack’s plight takes up the last half of the show, when things really take off. Low-level gangster Vladimir has such a headache trying to control Renee while massaging his underworld contacts for enriched uranium rods. Vlad is such an incompetent that there is almost a comic quality to his macho bluff. Hell, he can’t even afford a new cellphone, much less pull off a nuclear arms sale. There is some awful symbolism and foreshadowing as Vlad instructs Renee to cut the sausage thicker in front of Jack, before talking big about his new conquest. The joke’s on him, though, because Renee stabs the asshole right in the eye. This is the level of violence the show needs to be at. After Renee goes batshit stabbing Vlad to death, she accidentally stabs Jack. In classic fashion, Jack pulls the knife out of his stomach and throws it into the throat of a hapless goon. After the bloodbath, Jack and Renee share a tender moment, because beautiful women are all alone in the world and need a sympathetic man to cling on to.

This doesn’t last long, as Jack is kidnapped by some slightly more serious Russian thugs and is spirited away underground. CTU should really figure out a way to deal with this escape by tunnel problem, since it happens damn near every time Jack is kidnapped. The trademark quality of this sequence is a throwback to season one, but it is welcome for how bad things have been. Next episode we get the generic Jack torture session, this time with some jumper cables. The story is shaping up to be a buddy cop routine between Jack and Renee, and the dynamic works pretty well, since Renee is the only female character crazy enough to challenge Jack. Renee has completed her transformation from JC Penny’s business casual model to off-her-rocker badass. Keep it up.