I was a fan of 24 from the very beginning.  However, despite my long-held allegiance to the show, I have not once regretted my decision to sit season eight out.  I had become so frustrated by the show’s descent into endlessly recycled story-lines (to a degree that verged on self-parody) that I felt it was time for me to move on.

But having followed the travails of Jack Bauer since his very first really bad day, I couldn’t resist tuning back in for last night’s series finale.

Even though I hadn’t watched any of season eight so far, it only took me a few moments to figure out what was going on.  24 is never that complicated, and it was pretty clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.  In some respects, I think I probably enjoyed the events of this installment more than I might have had I had to sit through the previous 22 hours of circular storytelling and familiar 24 tropes of moles in CTU, double-crosses, assassinations, and Presidential moral conundrums.  It’s sort of like tuning in to the final few minutes of a close-score basketball-game — I can get a lot of enjoyment from the tense final minutes without having to have watched the whole two-hour back-and-forth that got us there.

I found myself quite enjoying the first hour of this two-hour finale event.  There were some great tense sequences, such as Jack’s kidnapping of Pillar (and let me say that it was a pleasant surprise to see Dollhouse’s Reed Diamond) and President Taylor’s manipulation of Dalia Hassan.  It was interesting to see how far President Taylor had slipped towards the dark side since I’d last seen her, and it’s always fun to see Jack when he’s in full-on Righteous Hand of Vengeance mode.  I felt like this was the fun, fast-paced 24 that I’d loved years ago.

Unfortunately, things slowed down significantly in hour two.  I had no patience for all of the silliness with the data-card that everyone was after, and Chloe seemed unusually hapless (particularly considering that she somehow seems to now be in charge of CTU).  Most problematically, though, was how quickly Jack got taken off the board.  After his confrontation with Chloe, he’s completely passive for the rest of the hour.  I can’t say I thought that was a wise narrative choice for the final hour of this action-adventure series.

I don’t want to spoil every detail of the ending, but to me it was a big let-down.  It felt like a series finale, not a season finale.  Yes, Jack is in a difficult spot when the hour draws to a close, and he’s forced to make a tough sacrifice and say a poignant good-bye.  But somehow this felt much less momentous than many of the previous season finales.  Yes, I know that a 24 movie is in the works, so there was only so much finality that the writers could bring to this final episode.  But still, I think they needed to try a lot harder to find an ending that felt more like an ENDING to the eight-year saga of Jack Bauer.  C’mon, raise your hand if you don’t think that Jack and Chloe will be reunited soon in the 24 film?  Yeah, that’s what I thought.

I was also expecting some attempt, in the final hour, to have some sort of reflection back on the series as a whole.  I thought maybe we’d see a familiar character or two (I was really holding out hope to see Mike Novick or naked Mandy), or perhaps to see Jack in a situation that somehow brought things full circle to where the series began.  No such luck.  That was more than a bit surprising, and more than a bit disappointing.  It feeds into what I was just saying about this episode feeling far more like a season finale, rather than a SERIES finale.

I enjoyed this two hour episode.  It certainly wasn’t as head-bangingly frustrating as I had often found 24 to be, these past few years.  But as a finale to this once-great television series, and as an episode that I’d hoped would bring a little bit of closure to the struggles of Jack Bauer, it fell short.

Dammit!

By now, you’ve all probably heard that this season will be the last for 24.

I was an enormous fan of 24 when it began.  I still remember, a few days after the premiere episode aired, my folks sitting me down and insisting that I check it out.  (Fortunately they had taped that first episode.)  I was blown away, and I remained gripped throughout that phenomenal first season.  The production values were extraordinary — it was like a mini-movie every week, filled with incredible action and nail-biting suspense.  I was also really taken by the “real-time” conceit of the show: that each of the twenty-four episodes of the season was one hour in the no-good, terrible, very bad day of beleaguered super-agent Jack Bauer.

I still hold the first two seasons of 24 as two of the finest seasons of television ever forged.  (The gutsy death of a main character in the season 1 finale remains a high-point for me, and it helped cement my love for this dark show.)  Sure, there are some weak spots in those first two years (mostly pertaining to the misadventures of Kim Bauer), but having watched those seasons through several times, over the years (bless you, DVD — let’s not forget that 24: Season 1 was one of the first-ever full-season DVD sets ever released), I think they hold up remarkably well.

Things began to go awry in season 3, when the writers decided to abandon all of the dangling story-lines left hanging by the cliffhanger end of season 2, and instead create an entirely new scenario, with Jack involved with drug-dealers in South America.  In hindsight, I respect the writers’ attempt to find a whole new paradigm for the show (something that, sadly, they’d never attempt again, much to the show’s long-term detriment), but at the time, Jack Bauer’s adventures in South America seemed like a big mis-step.  Things picked up in the second-half of the season, when suddenly the show became about stopping the release of deadly nerve gas in LA (the first but not the last of the show’s mid-season story-telling about-faces).  But looking back this signaled the end of the show’s ability to create a unified story for  each season that could sustain over the full 24 episodes.  It also signaled the unfortunate end of the writers’ interest in maintaining any semblance of plausibility to the “real-time” aspect of the show’s story-telling.

Though I kept watching, with each subsequent season I became more and more frustrated with 24.  It boggles my mind why the writers continued to re-use the same tired story-lines again and again and again.  How many moles in CTU could there possibly be??  How many ill-fated trips back to the dimly-lit server-room do we have to sit through??  Just what the hell was Chloe doing each time she “opened a socket,” anyways???  Each time the show cut away from the main story-line to delve into one of the side-characters’ ever-escalating ridiculous personal problems, a little bit of my love for the show chipped away.

Ultimately, this once ground-breaking series became a cartoonish caricature of its former self.  Which is why every episode of season 8 sits, unwatched, in my Tivo queue.  And there they will remain.  I’ve decided that I’m a much happier person NOT watching the show and banging my head in frustration.  Maybe I’ll tune in to the series finale, for old time’s sake, but that will be that.

However, I am intrigued by the idea that the show will return as a feature film.  I’ve been excited by that idea ever since they first started floating it, several years back.  I’d pay ten bucks to see Naked Mandy cavorting on the big screen — wouldn’t you??

Back in October, I posted Camp Ramah in New England’s Lost parody video (from summer 2009), and last week I posted our parody of The Office (from 2008).  Now, I’ve got one last silly Camp Ramah video to share with you all.  (For now, that is!)

Back in 2007 we kicked off our Staff Week at the start of the summer with an elaborate program based on the TV show, 24.  Here’s the intro video:

This lead into a multi-element competition in which the counselors had to complete a variety of tasks in order to plan a trip for their campers.  Of course, just as 24 seems to totally change track every 8-or-so episodes, in which whatever bad guy we thought was the real villain turns out to just be a minor player in a much larger scheme, after 30 minutes of our program we called all of the participants back to our CTU (”Camp Trip Unit”) headquarters and revealed that our counselors had a bigger problem to deal with:

That sent the counselors scurrying around camp, searching for life-size paper cut-outs of their “missing campers”. And then, just to be mean, we switched things up again only moments before the program was scheduled to end, and revealed the true nature of the threat facing our camp:

Pork Saturation Bomb?  That’s quality humor, folks.

Good news, everybody!  Futurama lives!!

So Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) is joining the cast of 24 next season?  Time for the Battlestar Galactica actors to learn what the members of the ensemble from The Wire have discovered: they’ll never again be in a TV show as good.

Did you see The Daily Show’s John Hodgman’s uproariously funny speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner?  Not to be missed.

A nice farewell to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles can be found on Composer Bear McCreary’s excellent blog, as he lists his 15 favorite moments from the show.  (They are all excellent choices.)  This show had its flaws, to be sure, but I am really disappointed that we won’t be getting a third season.  (By the way, Bear was also the composer for the reinvented Battlestar Galactica throughout its run.)

Speaking of The Terminator, the fine folks over at filmschoolrejects.com have posted an interesting list of 20 Things We Didn’t Like and 10 Things We Did about Terminator: Salvation.

I don’t play videogames, but I must admit that this trailer for Lucasarts’ new Star Wars: The Old Republic trailer is ridiculously cool.  I wish we’d seen half that much bad-assery in the prequels…

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog has made his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien!  Watch him make fun of some hippies here.

Have a great weekend, everybody!  See you back here on Monday!

Not to distract anyone’s attention from MotionPicturesComics.com, but I wanted to point out to y’all that Drew McWeeny, one of my favorite writers over the years at Aintitcoolnews.com, is now writing for HitFix.com and his blog (about movies, DVD, and lots of other fun, related stuff) is definitely worth checking out.  I’ve always enjoyed Drew’s writing over the years (he was known as “Moriarty” over on AICN), particularly his articles on all of the many many DVDs that he watches.  Those DVD pieces, in particular, were among my inspirations when I started this blog.  

McWeeny’s new blog attracted a lot of attention last week when he posted a lengthy open letter from one of the producers of Watchmen about the on-going litigation between Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox over the film (and Fox’s attempts to stop Warners from opening the film as scheduled in March).  If you are at all interested in this story, you should click on that link and read this fascinating letter.  Another recent post of interest drew my attention to a phenomenal evisceration of Ben Stein’s recent “documentary” Expelled (if you haven’t heard about this film, it’s a defense of creationism and an attack on the theory of evolution) by none other than famous film critic Roger Ebert.  This is an older article (Expelled was released last year), but it is a terrific read.

But enough of all that — let’s talk about the first four hours of 24’s much-delayed seventh season (it was supposed to have launched LAST YEAR at this time, but was scuttled by the writers’ strike), which premiered on Sunday and Monday nights.

I have made no secret of my opinion that, for some time now (since, oh, I’d say about season four) 24 has been crying out for a total reinvention.  Keep Jack, keep the adrenaline-pumping real-time format, but start telling some entirely different types of adventures.  For too long now, 24 has been telling the same types of stories over and over and over again, usually involving some variation on the following themes:  a terrorist captures someone and forces them to help with a nefarious plan… Jack tortures someone for information… there’s a lot of technical talk about access codes and opening sockets and someone gaining access to a weapon or a code or a piece of equipment that they can use to menace the United States… Jack winds up on his own with no one to trust, because there’s a mole or multiple moles in the government agencies trying to stop the bad guys… and meanwhile there’s a lot of intrigue in Washington involving the President trying to make some big decisions about important world affairs but getting undermined by personal business and/or the machinations of his various staff members.  Any of this sound familiar?

Upon viewing the made-for-DVD 24 movie Redemption a few months ago, I was at once encouraged to see Jack in a new locale in some new situations (involved in a brutal conflict over in Africa) and disappointed to see the reappearance of too many old 24 tropes (torture, moles in Washington DC, etc.).

So how were these first four hours of 24: season seven?

Well, as with Redemption, it’s quite a mixed bag.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like.  There are some interesting new faces, such as Annie Wersching as FBI Agent Walker, Colm Feore as first-man Henry Taylor, and Bob Gunton as White House Chief-of-Staff Ethan Kanin.  In particular, I thought Cherry Jones acquitted herself very well as the new President, creating a very different type of chief executive from the ones we’ve seen on 24 in previous years (even though she’s confronted with a lot of the same plot developments).  John Billingsley was one of my favorite things about the rather mediocre Star Trek: Enterprise, and I enjoyed seeing him as the hapless sucker kidnapped in the exciting opening moments of hour one.  I hope we see more of him.  

I am intrigued by some of the mysteries raised in these early episodes, and I was pleasantly surprised by some nice connections with Redemption — in particular, after getting to know the President’s likable son in that DVD-movie, I was much more engaged than I might otherwise have been in the story of the circumstances surrounding his mysterious “suicide.”  Best of all, I am thrilled to see Tony (”soulpatch”) Almeida back on the show.  As ridiculous as his resurrection might be, he is a dynamic and beloved character, and his presence brings a lot more oomph to all of the standard bad-guys-make-threats-and-do-menacing-things-using computers-in-small-dark-rooms scenes that might otherwise be rather boring.  I was pleased at how early on the writers got Jack and Tony face-to-face — their scenes together were a ton of fun. 

I also enjoyed the number of nods to events in previous seasons.  From the questions asked of Jack before the Senate committee to Tony’s reference in an argument with Jack to the death of Teri from way back in season 1, I really enjoyed that attention to detail.  While I think 24 needs to abandon the story-lines that have characterized all of the previous seasons, that doesn’t mean I want the show to ignore their existence.  I like it when there is some sense of continuity to Jack’s adventures.

So what’s not so good?

Primarily I am disappointed that, in just these first 4 hours, the show has already fallen back too often on the old, familiar story crutches of the type discussed above.  OK, we’re not in CTU anymore, but the set-up in the FBI office seems to re-create almost exactly the same dynamic.  We have all the same computer monitors and ringing phones and “quirky” (read: annoying) agents.  (I guess Janeane Garofalo really studied the acting of Mary Lynn Rajskub when they both appeared on The Larry Sanders Show, because Garofalo portrays quite a Chloe-clone here.)  And yes, there’s apparently yet another mole.  Jack wasn’t back in the field for five minutes before he was convinced that he and the newly-introduced Agent Walker had to do everything on their own because NONE OF HER SUPERVISORS COULD BE TRUSTED.  I have seen this story a billion times on this show so far, and I am beyond bored with it.  Give me something new, please!

I was also disappointed by how quickly the story of Jack on trial for his crimes was jettisoned.  OK, I know he wasn’t really on trial, he was just appearing for questioning, but I was intrigued by the idea of some of Jack’s actions finally coming to light, and in seeing how he would defend himself.  But we only got 2-3 minutes of this in the first hour, before Jack got pressed into service to help the FBI.  What a waste of a great story idea.  Obviously Jack is going to get back into action sooner or later, but I would have really liked to have seen that pushed back a bit so that we could have spent more time with the Senate interrogation.

Frankly, for several years now 24 has been exhibiting what I can only term storytelling-attention-deficit-disorder, and the quick abandonment of the Jack-on-trial idea is just one example of this.  The show has become so pre-occupied with being fast-paced and twisty that it can’t seem to stick with any given storyline for more than a few minutes.  (BIG SPOILER ALERT now, so proceed at your peril.)  Here’s another example: after the first night, I was starting to get excited by the idea of Tony Almeida as a terrorist.  24 lives or dies, in my opinion, on the quality of its villain, and I was enthusiastic about the idea of Tony being Jack’s nemesis this year.  But only a short time into night two we found out that, surprise surprise, he’s not really evil he’s just undercover.  What a letdown!  Why couldn’t we have let Jack and Tony face off for a few more episodes before getting this reveal?  Bigger question: why couldn’t the show have displayed some guts and let Tony ACTUALLY BE EVIL?  Wouldn’t that have been a much bigger twist than the “revelation” that he’s really a good guy after all?

I must also note that, while I praised some of the nice connections with Redemption, there were also a lot of inconsistencies.  For example, hour one’s opening Senate scene didn’t flow at all from the end of that movie.  In Redemption, Jack seems to be consumed by guilt over all that he has done over the years.  Yet, in the opening minutes of this season, when he’s testifying, we’re back with the old familiar I-am-right-and-you’re-a-fool-for-daring-to-question-me Jack Bauer.  I had thought, after Redemption, that maybe we were finally seeing a little depth in Jack, that at last he was beginning to wonder whether the ends really do ALWAYS justify the means.  But there was none of that questioning, none of that complexity, in the Jack Bauer we were reintroduced to in season seven.  This Jack Bauer doesn’t seem all that different, frankly, from the Jack we met back in season one — tough, stubborn, and willing to do whatever it takes to get things done.  Maybe that’s what makes the character so popular, but I for one would prefer to see some additional colors added into that characterization, here in the seventh season of his show.  

Finally, there’s Tony’s plan to smash up some airplanes by fooling them into thinking that he’s air traffic control and then directing them to make course corrections that put them on course to crash.  I might think that was a clever, ingeniously evil plot if I hadn’t already seen it in Die Hard 2 back in 1990.  Sheesh.  (They should have gone full-out and just hired Colm Meany as one of the airplane pilots!!)

Bottom line — these first four hours were four hours of reasonably well-executed 24 adventures.  There is a lot of excitement to be had, but there’s no denying that we’re seeing just more of the same familiar 24 stories that we’ve been seeing for six seasons now.  Without the major re-invention that I’d been hoping for, I am concerned at just how long the show can sustain the energy of the stories currently being told, no matter how interesting things might seem in the season’s opening hours.  (Finding a way to sustain the excitement throughout all 24 episodes of the season has always been the show’s greatest challenge.)  For now, I’m still on board  – let’s see where things go.

When the new TV-movie 24: Redemption begins, television super-hero Jack Bauer is in Africa, helping out at a school for orphans and trying to avoid a subpoena that would summon him back to the States.  However, this being 24, it isn’t long before a perfect storm of evil warlords, conniving businessmen, and some pretty bad luck result in Jack being stuck in the middle of a coup, determined to protect the school’s kids and get them safely to the American embassy.

And, hey, I sort of remember why I used to like 24 so much, back in the day!  

For the record, my position on 24 is as follows:  the first two seasons were pretty much genius (except for the occasional stupidity with amnesia and Kim Bauer in jeopardy); the first half of season 3 (Jack Bauer fighting drug lords in Mexico) was dumb, but the second half (which, as I recall, dealt with the potential release of a horrible toxin) was better; season 4 started off great with some interesting new characters (”Behrooooz!!”) but quickly got bogged down in ridiculousness; season five was pretty much the same; and season six was, for me, just unwatchable.

But this new installment is pretty entertaining.  Not phenomenal, mind you, but better than 24 has been for years.

What’s good?

The story is stripped down — gone are almost every familiar character and location.  This enables the writers to jettison all of the baggage of the last several seasons and concentrate on telling a tight, exciting story — Jack’s mission to protect the kids and get them to the embassy.  It’s a very linear action-adventure.  (The only two characters other than Jack who we’ve seen before are Powers Boothe as President Daniels, on his last day in office, and Peter MacNicol as his advisor Tom Lennox.  Frankly, I wish the writers had gone all the way and gotten rid of these two characters as well.  First of all they remind me of annoying past storylines that are far-better forgotten.  Secondly, both play one-note, unlikable characters.  Its good to have villains, but that’s not these guys.)

Wait, I was talking about what I liked!  Robert Carlyle does some great work as Jack’s old friend Carl Benton.  Its nice to see another character on 24 who is as capable and heroic as Jack.  I liked seeing Tony Todd (Worf’s brother Kurn from Star Trek: The Next Generation), although he has a very small role here as the evil Colonel Juma.  Hakeem Kae-Kazim gets a lot more time on-screen as the Colonel’s right-hand man, and he’s a lot of fun to watch.  Note to Powers Boothe: this is how you play a villain — not with over-the-top moustache-twirling, but with a scary, menacing intensity.  

There’s a lot of action — hand-to-hand combat, gun battles, a helicopter attack — and all of it is well-staged and very exciting.  What originally captured my attention about 24 was its intensity, its relentless action, and its production values — how each week seemed to be a mini-movie.  There’s a lot of that craft on display here.

What I keep coming back to is the simplicity of the story.  Without a lot of mysterious characters and sub-plots and double-crosses and evil Presidents and opening up sockets in CTU, this seems like a back-to-basics 24 adventure, and that is good.

So what’s not-so-good?

Well, while I have been praising the simplicity of the story, the down-side of that is that there really aren’t any surprises to be found in Redemption.  Ask my wife: I guessed pretty much every plot point well before it occurred.  And if the powers-that-be thought there was any suspense to be found in Jack’s decision at the film’s end (that sets up the upcoming season seven), then they were sadly in error.  Also, like Powers Boothe and Peter MacNicol, there were still too many demons of bad-24-past that reared their ugly heads here.  Once again we see Jack getting tortured.  Once again there are mysterious evil figures manipulating events for their own ends.  And, dear lord, once again we’re introduced to a mole in a position of power.  I have had it with moles on 24!!!  Every season there are like three or four moles!!!  Enough all ready, please??

Do I worry that season seven is going to fall right back into all the old traps that the last several years of the show have suffered from?  Yes sir, I do.  BUT, judging 24: Redemption as a production in its own right, I must say that over-all, I was rather pleased.  I had fun watching it, and from 24 I don’t ask too much more than that.