At this point in the run of 24: Live Another Day, we’ve all but exhausted the usual stack of 24 truisms. Depending on how you feel about the series, this familiarity is either exciting or tiresome. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between. Jack doing his thing is never not entertaining, but the show is starting to suffer from the same fatigue seen toward the tail end of its original incarnation. Circumstances are tweaked slightly thanks to Jack’s issues with the Russians, but the show is clearly relying on trying to execute its same playbook its had for years. Fortunately for them, there is few shows better at executing their playbook on network television.
Naturally, most of the elements that worked really in this episode involved Jack in hot pursuit. After Navarro take the override device at the end of the last episode allowed this episode to jump off with an exhilarating pace that it struggled to maintain in spots. As big bad guys reveal themselves, exhibition is usually forced to follow. Because last week the show got reset with one simple toss out a window, this week forced us into long conversations with people who really haven’t been that interesting throughout the course of the season. Once Navarro was captured, the pace grinded to a halt as Aidan Cross attempted to explain to Chloe all the reasons why he’s awesome for now having the override device. Of course, his reasons no longer matter considering some Chinese guys came in and started running his show. His presence won’t be missed. Also, it’s not entirely clear why Chloe is still alive considering every single other person is dead, but asking those types of questions defeats the purpose.
The other massive downer in the episode involved Boudreau and his continued involvement with the Russians. A few episodes ago, I applauded the show for making me feel for the guy considering he put his marriage at risk to help the President commit suicide-by-hellfire missile. It seemed like a nice moment of redemption for a character who had come off like a smarmy weasel for the majority of the season. Now that’s all been undone. Watching a chief political official for the United States government give up a top field agent because he’s jealous of the agent’s past relationship with his wife really hurt my feelings. I don’t think government officials are immune from petty jealousy, but I do like to think petty jealousy would not cause them to jeopardize national security. There are numerous other ways to get the Russians involved pursuing Jack. It didn’t have to completely ruin a character on the show. I’ve never really been a Tate Donovan fan through the years, but he deserved far better than what he’s been handed to play in these 10 episodes and counting.
Considering there are only two episodes remaining, there seems to be a lot of loose ends for Jack to wrap up. Hopefully the exposition is out of the way, and Jack can go do those Jack Bauer things we came to see.