Well, the seemingly mild case of the common cold I had last week went into overdrive this weekend. From Friday night onwards I was flat-out sick, and on Sunday I was reduced to a quivering mass of sickly protoplasm as I lay in bed shivering, going in and out of some crazy fever dream. The last few days have been one giant pill-poppin' marathon, as I've been downing Advil, Sudafed, and walking through the Halls of medicine every few hours, with ample dosage of chicken soup, gingerale, etc to help cure what ails me. Monday I took a rare sick day, as my high temperature and overall achiness late Sunday night clued me into the fact that I was in no condition to swim with the sharks of Hollywood come Monday morning. As of today, I'm back in action, but by no means operating at 100%. But hopefully I'll get there. Soon! Dammit all ...
I did manage to have a good time on Friday though, as NBC Pages new and old met up after work for some quality dinner followed by some 80's night craziness. It was great to see some old friends and meet some cool new faces as well. And even though it probably didn't help my then-worsening health any, it was a fun night for sure - can't go wrong with the 80's live cover band either. Good (fast?) times. After Friday though, I was down for the count ...
At the least, this was a pretty good weekend to be MIA. The NBA Playoffs were in full swing so I spent a lot of time just watching some quality b-ball whilst sipping on some chicken soup (thank god for the Togos adjacent to my apartment ...). Anyways, it was a great weekend of basketball, as to me there is NO sporting event more exciting, more filled with storied rivalries and colorful personalities, than the NBA playoffs. And man, some very, very interesting results to kick things off. I mean, you had both Denver and Golden State pulling off HUGE upsets. And it was great to see, as both teams have likable stars who are deserving of some spotlight. Especially cool was seeing one of my favorite players, Baron Davis of the Warriors, having a breakout playoff performance on the national stage, as he and his teammates felled the Mavs, all the while looking not just like a scrappy underdog, but like a legit contender. Denver pulled a similar feat in San Antonio, showing that the playoffs are a time for the stars to shine their brightest. AI and Carmello took it right to the Spurs, and suddenly, the Nuggets look like they are a force to be reckoned with in the West. We also had a few series that look like they are really going to come down to the wire. Miami - Chicago is going to be a war, old-school Eastern conference style. Toronto and New Jersey is a tough-to-call matchup, though the experience of NJ can't be underestimated. It's the playoffs, baby. And kudos to the always-great coverage on TNT, which blows away that of ABC / ESPN.
24!24! 24!
- Yeah yeah, there's a lot of hype about some show called "Heroes." But I'm going to have to put that one on hold, otherwise, Jack Bauer may come to my house and pop a cap in my ass. Jack has one superpower only, and it's called GRAVITAS, baby!
Last night's 24 was a big improvement over last week's ep. The focus was again on Jack, along with another key character in Bill Buchanan. This ep was pretty effective in doing the whole "Jack against the world" angle, building up the showdown between Jack and Audrey's captors very well, to the point where I was on the edge of my seat for the final 10 minutes or so. However, in retrospect, wasn't Jack a little too desperate to save Audrey, acting without even thinking of a real way to hav his cake and eat it too? I mean, upon giving the Chinese guy the component, the Chinese guy didn't even take a minute to verify it was the real deal! Jack could have easily, as it turns out, have given them a fake and they'd be none the wiser ...
Still, that was a pretty gripping showdown, and the revelation that Audrey has gone all crazy-like is kinda cool in an eerie sort of way. I mean, it drove the ever-stoic Jack Bauer to utter "My god, what have they done to you?" ... so, if even Jack is shaken by this turn of events, then we as viewers pretty much have to be as well.
I'm hoping though that things now line up in the following way - as I see it, the only fully-satisfying conclusion to the season will be that soon, maybe as soon as next episode, we find that Jack's father has been the mastermind behind all this China stuff, and the full extent of his involvement in all the conspiracy / bluetooth group stuff is revealed. This leaves Jack as the only man left capable of preventing his dad's masterstroke from coming to fruition (something big, say, nuking DC to pave the way for a new world order ...?). And of course that means Jack needs to be exonerated and restored to full-on CTU status ASAP. Who better to do that than new Director of CTU Heller. Shocked at his daughter's state and out for revenge, Heller sends his buddy Jack on a one-man mission that only a Bauer can see to completion, because who better to take down a Bauer ... than Jack f'n Baur?!?!
Now THAT's how they need to end the season!
(By the way, for a season-ending cliffhanger - what if Papa Bauer goes all Darth Vader, messes with Jack's mind to convince him to turn against the US government, and makes him an offer he can't refuse, to join him in the Bluetooth Mafia! Jack accepts, turns to the darkside -- America is now most likely $#&#'d -- BOOM - end of season ...!)
Anyways ... (whew!) ... the rest of the ep was slightly bogged down with ever more heaping helpings of CTU and White House melodrama. Okay, yes, I got a kick out of Powers Boothe as the badass VP who is also a "dirty old man." Who wants to bet that that blonde woman he's bonking is one or two episodes away from turning on poor ol' Powers like a bottle of expired Viagra? But, on the other hand, Karen Hayes is SOOOOOOOOOO annoying. Holy crap, Bill Buchanan needs to dump her ASAP. All she does is whine and threaten to resign. Thousands of people died, and she's surprised someone is going to take a fall? Meanwhile, why is the once-awesome character of Chloe being so wasted on stupid back and forth bickering with Morris? Everyone at CTU is either an inherently lame character (Nadia, Milo, Doyle) or a potentially cool character being wasted on crappy soap opera-y subplots (Chloe, Morris). And why is it that whenever an elder-statesman Director of CTU is forced to resign (or is killed, fired, whatever), the next in line is inevitably thirty years younger, with little to no experience, and someone who only hours earlier had been tortured, maimed, or otherwise accused of being a mole?!?! Heller or whoever can't get to CTU fast enough ... At least, now, in present state as fall-guy to Uncle Sam, Buchanan is actually getting a bit interesting ...
Okay, that's enough of my bitchin'. Overall this was a good episode that reinvested me in Jack Bauer's story and got me excited for the places that the plot can now go.
My Grade: A -
- I hate to do this but I need to - this Sunday, as I mentioned, I was a sick man. I was collapsed on my bed, barely eating, and had but one thing to look forward to to bring a smile to my face - that being the promise of an all-new episode of THE SIMPSONS. Sadly, Sunday's ep was not just mediocre, but just plain bad. It lacked humor, lacked zip, lacked wit. Ugh, just sad. Let's see - Marge becomes addicted to an online computer game? Wasn't funny, didn't even make sense, and had no real insightful humor or commentary to go with it. Lame, lame, lame. An out-of-nowhere B plot about Lisa's newfound passion for soccer? Terrible, half-assed, good for maybe one decent gag at the expense of so-three-years-ago Bend It Like Beckham. The attempt to tie both subplots together into an overarching theme of parent and child bonding? Stop, just make it stop. I could have just watched the episode where Bart really wants that videogame BoneStorm instead. This was really poor.
My Grade: D
- Alright, I'm going to bare down and sneeze and sniff my way through the rest of the day. And I'm outta here ...
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3 comments:
Hey man,
I'm gonna have to disagree with you big time on that A- for last night's 24. I posted my LJ review here for you to see (it's behind a friends-only cut due to being accompanied by chit-chat about workin' at the school), primarily because I borrowed one of your favorite words. Enjoy!
~J
24 S6 Ep 19 Review
In countless books, comics, TV shows, movies, and even video games involving the good ole struggle between good and evil, there may be some characters involved that you end up loving to hate. After having just polished off Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii (full review of that one coming up soon), King Koopa, now dubbed Bowser in all of the latest Mario games, is a villain who has that sort of amusing love-to-hate quality. Shredder of the classic TMNT series is another fine example of a villain who fits the bill for this sort of character, as do the Daleks of Doctor Who and possibly even Voldemort from the Harry Potter series. All in all, they all make up that antagonist figure whose evil plans you want to see foiled time and time again by whatever hero is involved, but at the same time, you don't want them to be killed off or herded away behind the bars of justice for too long because their evil plans are so entertaining and no other baddie can live up o their mettle in any way.
Well, that's just not the case here in S6 of 24. Unlike any previous season of the show, at this point, there are no more of these love-to-hate characters that close in on the coveted label of being a classic villian. Fayed was perhaps in closest range of reaching that kind of quality, especially when torturing Morris many moons ago. but he got knocked off by Jack awfully quickly in the season, all things considered. Although Jack is left to contend with Chang and the Chinese, it's disgustingly blatant that the writers -- for whatever idiotic reason -- are doing their worst to shift the focus so that VP Daniels serves as that main, nefarious, all-ruling badass, and you know what? It's just not working. Daniels' role in all of the Jack Bauer Power Hour's mayhem when he first came into play was somewhat intriguing, but now that he's back in charge of the Oval Office...again...and that he's essentially kissed and made up with Tom as well as his uninteresting secretary lover-cover girl, the overall tone of the season has once again taken a nosedive for the bland, predictable, and just plain boring. D.B. Woodside's Palmer the Younger may not have the same -- to steal Baram's favorite term, GRAVITAS -- as his older brother, but at least when he's involved in the storyline (and never mind how ridiculous the chain of events were that were responsible for allowing him to even be part of the storyline by this point), some presidential shakedown really happens, and it's fast and furious (all things considered, again, given this season's overall pace of a tortoise trapped on a highway struggling to make it out alive). Seeing Daniels essentially mack it with his lover-cover girl and ordering her to do him that night in the Whtie House (everyone asks if you did it in the Lincoln bedroom, just like Dana Carvey says, right?) was clearly an attempt to make his character more slimy and despicable, but all I could think of is how badly I just wanted the freakin' camera to get off this trite personality and get back to Jack and the Chinese.
And then of course there's Doyle, who really should've been shot by the Chinese by now. It's really a pity Jack had to kill off Curtis earlier this season, because although he'd probably be in the same shoes as Doyle right now, thinking it best to interfere with Jack's attempt to screw the Chinese in exchange for Audrey's safety, at least Curtis had some kind of personality of his own that made you pay attention to him a bit. Doyle just consistently acts like a Jack wanna-be, and his constant meddling screw-ups make him feel like a nasty third wheel that grinds the main plot with Jack and that grinds any kind of character chemistry down to a halt. Now thanks to him, Jack will probably have to chase Chang down in the woods while Chang runs away, much like how Kim ran away from that stupid cougar in S2.
Ironically, the winner of tonight's ep had to have been Buchanan's character. Even though he lost the battle by having to surrender his post at CTU thanks to some new-but-old political strife, he had a few moments of polished dignity here and there, and hey, he just might be the first CTU director who makes it out of that place alive (save for Jack, though he only had the floor temporarily). Hopefully Buchanan won't disappear for the remainder of the season, though, considering how he was the only one left in CTU worth caring about, considering how Chloe's been regulated back to the position of bitter ex-wife.
Unfortunately, the moment when Buchanan made his graceful exit, Nadia was empowered to give her rough-edgd entrance as the new acting director of CTU. This was simply too random and forced and ultimately did not make much sense. Why not Chloe, Bill? Or, better yet, why not Milo, the guy from S1 who supposedly worked "middle management" between the multiple seasons? Nah -- let's just tap the girl was was recently roughed up in interrogation right around the corner just because she's a Musilm. That way, everyone can get predictably agitated that a Muslim is now calling the shots, some fool like that random guy that Doyle spat that empty "you've messed with the wrong guy this time" threat (who, incidentally, never appeared again -- I really don't think Doyle's that intimidating to the point where someone essentially leaves the cast) can try to launch some stupid hate crime against her, and Sister Palmer will rush in out of nowhere to brush up her legal defense. Lovely. At least Nadia's hair still looks perfect despite her brief tussle with Doyle earlier, and oh yeah, for having been up well past her bedtime by now.
On nights like this where the ep is so disappointing, I break the tradition of shutting off the boob tube as soon as the ep's over to avoid even the slightest spoiler like seeing the preview for the next ep (sometimes even those little itty bitty previews can ruin a LOT, such as the arrival of Papa Bauer this season). I won't ruin anything for anyone who didn't break that tradition last night with specifics, but I will say at least next time looks to be a little more interesting. We may still never find out if Logan's officially dead or not, nor may we ever find out exactly what did Palmer the Younger hand over to the Chinese to get Jack back (other fans have let this one go, but not me -- bringing Jack back right away in the first ep of this season is still inexcusable for me until they come up with a damn good reason why that exchange was able to go so smoothly), and we may not even see Papa Bauer again for at least another hour (he must be stuck in that transparent LA traffic, right?), but there are others entering the scene that pack the potential to steer the main plot in a much better direction.
Yo J-dog,
I actually agree with many of your points, and looking at the bigger picture - I agree that this season is really lacking a good villainous presence esp. after last season where we had both Logan AND Henderson - two of the best ever 24 bad guys. I still don't get why Graem Bauer was killed off so fast, as he was built up for a long while (much of LAST season)and had potential to be a great foil. His passive/aggrssive personality was also pretty entertaining. I guess overall though, I just enjoyed this particular episode, even if the bigger picture of this season of 24 is still very much up for grabs. I saw some subtle signs in this ep that things are headed in a good direction, so much of my enthusiasm is with good faith that we are headed for one slobberknocker of a final arc. If I'm wrong, then yeah, this ep is nothing special. But it got me excited about where things might be going, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Hey man,
Well put. I do hope there's a huge major arc coming up at the last minute here...but to twist Jack's words a little, IS there enough time???
By the way, I have been pondering several ideas for writing projects and came up with a real dazzler last night, but I want to collaborate with someone on it. You interested?
~J
PS: Smashing use of the word "slobberknocker."
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