What I’m Watching: 24

24: Season 8, Episode 6 “9:00PM-10:00PM” (C-)

We’ve officially fallen off the deep end, and we’re now plummeting towards the same kind of irrecoverable state this show was in for the past few years. Everyone has suddenly decided that it’s smart to do things out in the open, that illegal transactions should occur only feet outside of a counterterrorism agency and that persons should be seized for detainment and interrogation in the middle of a clearly populated room. Anything and everything involving Dana’s attempt to help her bad apple ex-boyfriend pull off a major heist in the midst of this whole crisis is truly dumb. There’s no reason that she needs to get it started right away, and there’s certainly other ground that this show could cover for the next few hours. Even the criminal entrepreneur himself is surprised by how quickly she figured out a way to pull it all off without getting caught (or so she thinks). The worst part of this is that we have to endure the presence of Arlo Glass, who has to be the most obnoxious CTU employee in “24” history, and that’s saying a lot. Shouldn’t someone be concentrating on the matter at hand? Instead, a Russian terrorist executes one of his sons in front of the other. That shouldn’t be nearly as surprising as the show is trying to make it seem; we’ve seen that already on this show many times. It’s quite strange to see Jack posing as someone other than an only slightly tweaked version of himself, his previous cover, putting on glasses, spewing German, and chewing on a cigarette. It doesn’t suit him, and it certainly doesn’t suit the tone of the show.