24 Season 8 Episodes 1-2 4:00PM-6:00PM – review

24 is circling the drain for its (likely last) eighth season, and the two-hour premiere is really bad.  Season 7 finished off with the absolute worst finale in the show’s history, and what better way to pick things up than with the worst premiere?  It’s shocking how the writers seem almost eager to throw any momentum they earn right out the window in favor of story arcs as bland as a bowl of hominy.  This is the first time a new season hasn’t been guaranteed at the outset, so maybe the show is just coasting to the finish line.  New York is the new setting, and New York CTU looks like a gay man’s apartment, but the city is just a backdrop for the same old plot machinations. 

Season 7 ended with Jack on his deathbed, but that is a stupid cliffhanger when we know Season 8 has already been green lit.  He is in New York finishing up his treatment and taking his granddaughter to the zoo.  He’s going to fly back to LA with his family “in an hour” (dialogue is always in hour terms) but then things go wrong.  An old informant from Season 3 (Benito Martinez, Aceveda from The Shield, unable to really pull off a hoodlum role) comes to Jack when his crew is murdered, after bringing an assassin into New York.  Jack is reluctantly pulled into this new ridiculous scheme where every little secret is coming out and everyone is being double- and triple-crossed all the time. 

Idiot President Allison Taylor (unremarkable frumpster Cherry Jones) has divorced the First Husband after sending her daughter to jail for murder.  Her husband was right to divorce her sorry moralizing ass.  Nothing is more unbelievable than a sitting U.S. President sending their own child to prison.  The President would lie about everything for any reason about anything, and not think twice about it, and certainly not have a heated argument about morality with their staff.  Imagine President Hillary Clinton sending Chelsea to jail for murder, meanwhile divorcing Bill, and you get the picture.  Politicians are not moral entities, and it’s time for this show to drop the pretext. 

Omar Hassan (Anil Kapoor, Slumdog Millionaire) is the president of an unnamed Middle Eastern country.  24 never ever puts a name to the Arab states doing evil in the show, but enough hints are dropped to know that he is the Iranian president.  This is such a mind-numbingly idiotic setup that it begs the question what kind of vacuous ideas the writers have about geopolitics.  We see the President and Omar in a shitty U.N. mock-up negotiating face to face about nuclear disarmament.  Just think about President Hillary Clinton at the U.N. negotiating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with him being perfectly willing to give up all of his nukes for some aid.  First of all, the President of Iran is just a figurehead, and it is the Ayatollahs who pull the strings in the background.  Second, I’m real sure that Iran is going to give up its nukes to the U.S., and by proxy Iran’s blood enemy Israel.  Omar has even signaled his endorsement of a “two state deal” which is even crazier than giving up the nukes.  The writers of this show need to take a good hard look at what is really going on in Iran, where elections are rigged, protesters are raped and murdered in jail, and the government’s biggest concern is blowing Israel off the map.  A peaceful Iranian president ready to hand over nukes is bullshit.

The idea that Presidents negotiate face to face at the U.N. the day of a signing ceremony is a fantasy, too.  The President’s staff and minions do all the work; the leaders just do the signing.  At the press briefing, a U.N. official actually threatens the press corps with choke holds if their name tag isn’t visible.  The U.N. set is pretty cheap, not even on par with the White House mock-up from last season.  Everything is very small and miniaturized and fake-looking.  To make matters worse, President Omar has been sleeping with a New York Career newspaper writer Meredith Reed, a thinly veiled Maureen Dowd type from the New York Times.  It is implied that she may have been working with terrorists, but what else could we expect from such a left-leaning rag.  Fox News is actually used in the background, complete with right wing blowhard Monica Crowley making a guest appearance. 

Omar’s brother Farhad (inexplicably his right-hand man) knows about the affair, and the bickering and drama between Omar and his ugly wife and noble daughter and scheming brother is just so boring.  As a side note, Farhad (Akbar Kurtha) should immediately be given the role of Darken Rahl on Legend of the Seeker (you know what I’m talking about).  This badly acted Persian soap opera shtick is dead on arrival, and really kills the scant momentum.  Even worse, this political and familial wrangling takes up the majority of the running time, and we haven’t even gotten to the CTU infighting.

Freddie Prinze Jr. plays Cole Ortiz (with an awful New York accent) as head badass at CTU.  This is the worst casting call possible, at least since Ricky Schroder played the emotionally unbalanced effeminate CTU commando in the abysmal Season 6.  I don’t know why they hired washed-out nineties teen drama stars to fill out the character roster.  Still, Ortiz doesn’t say or do much, and the accent is the only gripe so far, besides his actual presence.  Chloe is back, now playing the single income working mom who is seriously behind on her tech training.  This is an interesting take on the character–her stupid husband “downsized,” a kid at home, and she can’t run all this new ridiculous technology.  Who would have thought she would turn out to be the tired middle-aged mom desperate to keep her job from being outsourced?  Maybe next time you won’t have a kid with that alcoholic asshole from Season 6.  Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Glactica) is Chloe’s younger, faster, and all around better tech supervisor.  There is a little subplot here where she is about to marry Freddie Prinze but isn’t sure about it, then her crazy redneck boyfriend, who just got out of jail, from her crazy redneck past is threatening to reveal her “secret,” which is probably that she was a meth using stripper who left her white trash life behind to become the greatest data analyst at CTU New York with no problem.  I liked seeing the show depict the trailer trash mom taking care of her kid and doing infinite dishes, but this is all a little off kilter. 

In fact, Brian Hastings (Mykelti Williamson, from Forest Gump and The Final Destination) is the only actor and character who even tries to liven up the show.  The typical asshole CTU director does his level best to make sure every situation turns out as bad as it possibly can.  I like Hastings, because he always talks with a cadence, and seems to be impersonating Timbaland dance moves while remonstrating every person who says anything to him ever.  He is the only one trying this season, everyone else just falls flat.  CTU also has armed Predator Drones flying constantly over the city, which provide perfect static video surveillance, while one can assume it hovers perfectly in one place.  Drones over U.S. cities are pretty far-fetched, especially in New York, and even for this show.

Honestly, Jack hardly gets any screen time, and doesn’t do a lot while he’s there.  The only good things that happened in this episode were (a) Jack chopped a guy in the chest with a fire axe and threw his buddy down a stair well, and (b) a helicopter blew up.  This show used to be known for the crazy things Jack would do to the bad guys, and in past premieres he wrecked everybody’s day over and over again.  Jack may be getting old, but his kill count is really low in this episode.  He needs to kill double or triple the terrorists for the rest of the season to make up the deficit.  The two kills were new to the show and well done, but the whole episode, especially as a premiere, should be about Jack’s human tidal wave of destruction, not a footnote to Clancyesque political intrigue. 

This will be a sad last season if things stay like this.  24 has been a zeitgeist show of the 2000s, and maybe the flavor has just worn off with the new decade.  Anyhow, let’s hope the show gets better after this abysmal opener; things can only get better, since they sure can’t get much worse.  Please, can we send this show off with some dignity?