yellowstone's Journal: 24 Season 1: hours 21-24

Suppose you've got some high-value prisoner. Does moving him around to different facilities every few weeks make sense to anybody? And speaking of (allegedly) highly secure facilities, does it make sense to have it staffed with 5 guys and a couple janitors? Does it make sense for it not to have it's own back-up generators?

OK, Mrs. Senator Allstate is now working on being a full-on psychopath. And Senator Allstate is... oh, wait! Senator Allstate susses out the adultery-for-blackmail trap his wife set. Hurray for at least one character that's not a dope! (On the bad side, how does Little Miss Hottsie Tottsie not realize any way forward from her situation results in her getting fired in very short order?)

Man, the Bad Guys really suck at tying up their hostages. That's 0-for-2 on Bauers getting the drop on them because they can't secure their prisoners.

And the Über mole is revealed. As I mentioned earlier, there are a limited number of choices for suspects, and once we know there are two moles, Nina's alibi has to be called into question. It was actually a good ploy to suggest George Mason (aka the Management Weasel Jack tranq'ed in hour 1) as the best alternate suspect.

And Teri Bauer gets killed because she thinks she and Nina are BFF :-p And BTW, if you're a mole, at risk of detection at a moments notice, don't you have some kind of one-button kill-switch to wipe any incriminating data? You can add the fact that Nina didn't have a way to 1) push a button and 2) beat feet for the horizon as soon as she was found out as another preposterous element of the plot.

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Other final thoughts:

• A lot of the stuff that I commented on is really just nit-picking and having fun. But one thing that really does bug me is when characters do something really stupid. That's why I was so glad Senator Allstate didn't fall into his wife's adultery/blackmail scheme; it would have required him to be stupid on at least a couple of levels.

• The whole Drazen family seemed to have this weird watered down, vaguely Eastern European accent. Was that on purpose, or were these guys just bad at doing accents?

• Dennis Hopper's part was disappointing... it really doesn't compare well to his similar small-but-pivotal role in the first "Speed" movie.

• One of the problems with the whole "this all happens in 24 hours" premise is that for at least some of the characters (like Teri and Kim Bauer in season 1), they really should be emotional basket cases well before the end of the 24th hour. I get that dramatically, they can't let major characters spend 6 hours curled up in a corner, but the result is that they seem to become emotional zombies.

• Watching the series on DVD loses some of the immediacy of the "happens in real time" premise too. When it's being broadcast, the plot clock follows along with the wall clock. On the DVD... not so much. Even if you wait to start watching at the top of the hour, if you take out the commercials, previews and coming attractions, you're left with about 42 minutes of actual show. I suppose you could pause the DVD at each commercial break, but... well, yeah, right.

• On the other hand, watching the series on DVD gave the plot a little more immediacy, since I watched it over the course of a few days, rather than the 5 months the broadcast version took.