What I'm Watching: 24

24: Season 6, Episode 22 "3:00am-4:00am" (F)

When I sat down to watch this episode, I had forgotten where we left our hapless CTU workers last week. I was immediately reminded that, oh, of course they are being held prisoner by the mercenaries hired by the Chinese who got in to CTU way too easily. And of course Jack, with unexpected help from the clearly not strong and most importantly not field-trained Nadia and Morris, will easily overpower them, because while they have a good number of machine guns, he has his Jack Bauer Invulnerability and Super-Strength and thus can take them out without hardly trying. In other news, Philip Bauer, the obvious "sociopath," as diagnosed by learned psychologists Tom Lennox and Karen Hayes, is on the loose and seeking Josh and a passport to China. The chain of events leading up to Philip's call to Vice-President Daniels has become so convoluted and impossible to explain that there is essentially no chance to go back for the show and reserve this direction it has taken. On the heels of the news that "24" will be back for at least another two seasons (running again from January-May as a "non-stop season"), I would suggest, as others have, that the next season of "24" be set in the past, before Jack survived a thousand different people trying to kill him and every single cast member from the first season (except Jack and Kim) died. The new pilot "Winters" was not picked up by NBC for development this fall, so that means Xander Berkeley (George Mason) and Sarah Clarke (Nina Myers) should be free to reprise their roles on the new season. That would be great, but I highly doubt it would happen.