Jack Bauer Vs. The Olympics

Usually, I’m not concerned about the other shows on TV at the same time as 24.  However, right now, it’s up against the Winter Olympics, and when there’s an event like snowboard racing, biathalon or curling, I’m torn between Jack Bauer and the games. Fortunately, tonight scheduled against Jack was the most useless of the competitions, figure skating, so my choice was easy.

I have a feeling though, that the producers of 24 thought more people would be into watching the Olympics, so they had Jack Bauer try his hand (or legs, as it were) at an Olympic mainstay, the paralell bars:

For some reason, I don’t think he got high scores from the Russian judges.

So Papa is now out of the way, the IRKian President is drunk with power, and Agent Dana seems ready to shoot her rube ex-boyfriend.  But most importantly, we’ve just had an episode that focuses on Jack.  We actually got more than a few seconds tonight of Jack-based action.

Jack escaped torture with some nifty gymnastic moves, killed yet another bad guy with his legs and took out a bunch of henchmen while staging a power outage.  More than that, he also has the first major villain of this season, Papa, in custody.  Meanwhile, Papa’s one living son, the villain formerly known as Sark is taking Papa’s place as the nuclear materials merchant.

Something that 24 has done in the last few seasons is rotated through it’s main villain more quickly.  In the show’s earlier seasons, you’d have an Ira Gaines or the Salazar Brothers last a good 12 hours before being taken down.  Now, it seems like penny-ante operators like Papa or Ike (from last year) are only good for four or five hours of antagonism before it’s time to move the plot on to the next bad guy.  I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.  I only know that once Jack took Papa in custody, it was predictable that Sark would take Papa’s place.

Still, it’s good to see Jack the focus of things once again, and the bit players relegated to their bit player status.

Some other thoughts:

-Why did the rubes go to Jersey for their, um…entertainment?  And how did Dana get there so quickly?

-If I were Jack, seeing what Renee is now capable of, I wouldn’t be taking credit for her kills.  If Renee ever finds out Jack told Papa that he stabbed Vlad in the eye, Jack’s going to be in big trouble.

-Agent Freddy told Agent Dana that he also had some things in his past she didn’t know about.  If I were him, I wouldn’t start sharing stories of the days he hung out with the talking dog.

-That CTU “agent” that Freddy buckled up- is he part of the CTU high school intern exchange program?  If I were a betting man, I’d say he’s dying next episode.

-“I’ll defer to Jack’s judgement on this”  … smartest thing Hunchback Hastings has ever said.

-The Russian torture guy Jack killed is not the first person Jack has killed with his legs.  He is at least the third.  I want to share something I found while trying to find out how many people Jack Bauer has killed with his legs.  I used Google, and the results of their auto-complete were quite telling:

Hopefully next week Jack will kill some more people with his legs.

What did you think?