24, Monday 9pm, Sky1

Posted by Will Parkhouse

If there’s one thing 24’s good at, apart from tension and torture, it’s acronyms. Last night’s double bill season opener saw former CTU man Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) hauled away from his Senate trial to work for the FBI, after terrorists managed to break into the CIP firewall. It’s enough to give you a VBH (very big headache).

Anyway, the CIP firewall, we discovered, is Day 7’s gadget du jour, being the thing that stops The Bad People Who Hate America from hacking into air traffic control and telling pilots to do lots of loop the loops or crash into buildings. Or not, in this case.

The big shock, unless you’d seen the trailer or seen the name of actor Carlos Bernard in the opening credits (which you probably had), was that this season’s bunch of terrorists were led by none other than… Tony Almeida! Yep, now you know why the “death” of Jack’s best pal back in season 5 was so rushed and unsatisfactory. We didn’t actually see his actual moment of expiration, foxy new character FBI agent Renee Walker explained, because “he was rushed away by the EMTs a minute later”. Yeah, EMTs.

So not only was 24’s second biggest legend alive, but after seeing his wife Michelle Dessler killed and losing his job, he’d decided he now hated America – and not just in a "grumbling about George Bush and MacDonald's" sort of way. In a “let’s kidnap a computer geek and get him to build us a complicated gadget to hack into the CIP firewall” sort of way.

Of course, there was only one man who knew Tony well enough to know how to stop him, which provided Jack Bauer with a convenient respite from his trial. And off he went. It was a promising start, if not an electrifying one – new characters, a new office setting and two old colossuses reconvening on VDTs (very different terms).

SEE ALSO
24: Redemption >>
An A to Z of 24 >>

Comments

[RadioFreePenge]

SJ - if you hated all the previous series, why did you watch this one (and bother to come on a blog to comment about it)?

[M. Roberts]

I love the new 24 series as will all the rest! It may seem slightly unrealistic for all this to happen in one day but it certainly keeps me gripped to my seat! Great TV

[Penfold]

Great to see a "reboot" as such to refresh the characters and somewhat stale plot.
I'm hopeful for the rest of the series and Renee could turn into a female Jack Bauer (if she survives the first few hours).

[SJ]

utter rubbish - as all others in series