The Jack Bauer Hour

Ok, so it took me a year, but I have finally caught up on all six season of The Jack Bauer Show. I must say, while I still enjoyed it, season 5 was my least favorite. It just seemed that the writing got a little bit lazy. And some of the mid-season episodes were pretty boring. Which was disappointing because the shocking way the season started and the first 4 episodes were VERY promising. Here is a short list of the problems I had with this season:


#1 - The Romance with Audrey Raines. Come on - it was unneccesary to the story and totally gratuitous. And unrealistic - He kills her husband in the last season, fakes his own death, disappears for a year and a half, and then they pick up right where they left off? It's absurd. Plus Jack works better as a loner - I mean, come on - his own WIFE only lasted one season, why should the girlfriend last two? Plus I just don't care for her. If they absolutely MUST have a love interest in his life, I would have rather seen the Connie Britton character (can't remember her character's name)

#2 - The "Kim" problem. Is Kim a character or not? She keeps popping up in these useless scenes. I think she needs to be kidnapped in the next season, killed at the end of the season, setting up Jack for another revenge-filled rampage like like he did during season 2. Either that or she should spend the season being stalked by a couger for no apparent reason.

#3 - Loose ends. There were a lot of loose ends in this season. For example, remember the woman who worked for Mrs. Logan and made the recording? What happened to her and her daughter. Did Henderson let them go after he got the info he needed? or did he kill them? We were never told. In previous seasons we were never left to wonder (or at least I don't remember them all). What happened to the traitorous CTU guard that let Bierko escape the final time? Was he captured? Killed? We just never saw him again. And what about Dr. Romano and all of the other mysterious bad guys? Who were they? What was their purpose? They just didn't quite fit the plotline very well.

#4 - Technical Difficulties. Ok, now I don't expect 24 to be "real". Obviously it is an unrealistic show, and they throw a lot of technical jargon around that is mostly nonsense to anybody who knows a little bit about computers and networking. However, that's not really what bothers me. I can accept that stuff, but there were a lot of inconsistencies that bothered me.

For one thing, How is it that an Arms dealer has all kinds of fancy security and surveillance stuff to prevent intruders, and to make sure they are unarmed and not wearing a wire, etc... and yet he has somehow completely neglected the possibility that somebody could saunter up the fire escape and climb on his roof??!! Come on. Have some armed guards that jack has to fight or at the very least a security camera.

And could somebody please explain to me how a submarine with 12 live missles on it could possibly be docked anywhere without a battalion of MPs guarding it? I know it was at a civilian dock, but still. I once worked at a company that owned it's own airport, and one day an F-18 developed some sort of mechanical problem and had to make an emergency landing. Immediately there were a whole bunch of heavily armed Military personnel circled around it.

The recording that Jack spent most of his time chasing also bothered me. In previous seasons whenever they got their hands on something like this, there would always be some magic way to plug it into his phone or PDA and download it immediately to Chloe. Why was this not possible this one time? or why couldn't he at least play it over the phone for CTU? I understand that it was crucial to the plot, but it was a weak plot.

And the cliffhanger ending was maybe the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. You have this super-agent who is so good and so cautious about everything, constantly on the alert for traps, ambushes, etc - basically anything that doesn't add up. And yet there he was surrounded by all manner of hi-tech communications equipment and it didn't strike him as odd that they would route a phone call from his daughter to a land-line in an abandoned warehouse? I was flabbergasted that the season would end so stupidly. That was just plain lazy writing at its worst.

All that being said, I am really looking forward to the new season starting.