What I’m Watching: 24

24: Season 8, Episode 10 “1:00AM-2:00AM” (D)

Things are really heating up now in typical fashion for this show, where one crisis quickly spirals into another and the villains have morphed completely by the end of the season. It’s a shame that CTU is still so woefully unprepared for each successive challenge that they face. Though this reformed CTU is still in its early stages, there’s no way that it would have been approved and opened without a single senior agent in house. Putting aside the fact that this whole Dana detour has resulted in the top two CTU agents being nowhere to be found during the most important moments of the crisis dealing with dead bodies and no one seemingly caring or checking up on them, it’s actually stated that these rookie agents have never come up against anything like this before. It’s as if they haven’t even been trained to prepare for it. Why do all these people have on experience, and more crucially, why is Jack so fully aware of their incompetency? He assures the nervous young agent that they’ll have everything covered but somehow they still manage to fail and leave him alone, vulnerable to the whim of the terrorist. The terrorist has an American mother, by the way, which means no one will suspect him, even though that very mention is followed up by a quick cut to him calling his mother and telling her to go to her sister’s house. He’s only sentimental for a second though, because he changes right back to Emotionless Terrorist to scare the hell out of the young agent once he arrives at the hospital. The immediate airing of Farhad’s location on Fox News had me shaking my head, but CTU managed to pull one over on the terrorists and me. I’d suspect, however, that a Fox News reporter might be the teensiest bit suspicious if CTU abruptly called and decided to be nice for some reason without having ever shared information before.