Amy's Robot

24: best season ever

If you're not watching this season of 24 because you got bored during one of the previous seasons, I can understand your reasoning, but let me just tell you: you are missing out on the best season of the show yet. There has yet to be a boring or uneventful episode, and the typical family drama tedium has been reduced this season to a few short, unintentionally funny scenes of the loopy schizophrenic teenage daughter of the CTU Director. And that's it. Then it's just all action, all the time.

Let's look at last night's episode, which was an exercise in audience gratification. Ever since Mrs. Araz, the Dragon Lady of Persia, slithered her way through those first few episodes of the season, looking evil and gorgeous and endlessly cool, I've been waiting for her first encounter with Kiefer. Of course! The two most hardcore characters had to have a tense and tingling showdown. Last night's interrogation of the Dragon Lady was maybe the hottest scene of this year's television season so far. The elements of the scene were like this:

Kiefer: Empathic but insistent demands for information, delivered in a relentlessly suave and velvety bedroom whisper

Dragon Lady: Unbending and militant commitment to her cause to vaporize the infidels, lots of breathy and heaving huskiness, also looks ravishing despite getting shot a few hours earlier

Tony Almeida: Driven wild by the smoldering interrogation he is witnessing, he is powerless to resist the slow and deliberate removal of his pants.

OK, that last part didn't happen, but Fox producers--feel free to use my ideas. Speaking of Tony "Amy still loves you even if you're a drunk" Almeida, I'm guessing there will be some moment later in the season when he encounters Michelle, his ex-wife who dumped his drunken ex-con ass when he got out of prison, who has gone on to be some kind of CTU Deputy Division Chief. If he wins her back, maybe he can convince her to start wearing those trashy stretch-lace tops that his new hell-on-wheels bartender girlfriend likes so much.

I'm hopeful that this season might keep the momentum going and stay bloody and exciting in the coming weeks, instead of floundering into sloppy filler crap. One recent tactic that works very well is to introduce a seemingly important character, then kill them by the end of their first (and only) episode, such as poor old Uncle Naseem from last night. Keep it up!

categories: TV
posted by amy at 1:06 PM | #