I went through and rented season five of 24. I mentioned a few of the problems I have with the show a while back and my dad has comically commented on the show as well.

But watching season five, a couple of new things struck me.

• Jack Bauer has now been accused of trying to assassinate David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) something like twenty times. Wouldn’t someone, somewhere down the line go, “You know, we figured out that he didn’t do it the first nineteen times, maybe—just maybe—he didn’t do it again?”
• Likewise, Jack is perpetually accused of something nefarious and sinister and conspiratorial. Yet, the only things that ever stick are when Jack does something that he tells everyone he’s going to do, appended by the phrase, “We don’t have any other choice.” The Chinese embassy thing from season four, for example. I think it should be amended into the CTU charter that Jack is innocent of everything he’s accused of doing in secret but guilty of doing everything he tells everyone he’s going to do.
• And the final thought along those lines, why hasn’t anyone ever said, “Hey, I got an idea: Let’s trust Jack. This is what he does, and it always works out eventually“? Chloe did have a fairly amusing line near the beginning of season five where she reassured someone “He’s really good at this,” but then even she spent the rest of the season asking Jack why he wanted what he was asking for and why she should be the one to do it. He’s got to be the most second-guessed person in history. Well, other than GWB maybe. But, you know, at least history is not on Bush’s side.
• Speaking of Chloe, I’m not quite clear on why it is that she always says something will take way too long to decrypt and Jack says, “Just do it,” and three minutes later she has it decrypted. What exactly is her metric for “impossible” decryptions?
• Also on the Chloe topic, I am aware that the actress (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is something of a geek sex symbol, I guess because she plays a super nerd on TV and she’s female. I actually have a hard time seeing the attraction because she’s always struck me as a little tough to look at, but it turns out she’s about 200x better looking when she actually smiles. And in all fairness, she’s never really called on to do that in the show.
• One sequence that didn’t particularly make sense to me during season five was when the “first layer” conspiracy was being unveiled and presidential advisor Walt Cummings revealed to President Logan that he was involved in the terrorist activity to secure oil interests in central Asia, etc, etc. Later in the season (spoiler alert) we find that President Logan was also involved in the conspiracy at an even higher level. So why, during that first private meeting with Cummings, didn’t Logan just say, “Oh, sweet! We’re both doing this together! Awesome, that will make this a lot easier”? Instead he puts on this big show of being repulsed and then “slyly” concedes to Cummings wishes to maintain his cover.
• Then again, I finally figured out after five seasons that the show is really enjoyable just so long as you don’t think too hard about it. Once you start trying to make actual sense out of what’s going on, it becomes obvious that the whole thing is preposterous.
• Is it just me, or did they sort of forget to deal with the question that was pretty central to the set up for the whole of season five: Who else knew Jack was still alive?
• One thing I did appreciate about the fifth “day” was that they seemed to tone down the gnarly torture scenes. It’s not so much that I’m squeamish about it; I just felt like earlier seasons had too much of Jack—our supposed protagonist—casually inflicting massive pain on people like it was some heroic deed. It made him seem almost reprehensible and difficult to root for. This time around I felt like he was actually a hero for the most part. Even when he shot Peter Weller’s wife in the leg, at least I understood what his motivation was and it wasn’t some prolonged sequence. Sure, they used the magical pain injection a few times at CTU, but for some reason that seems better than watching some guy get a drill bit ground into his shoulder or whatever.