So now we have the uncomfortable years. Days 7 and 8 just never felt right; I would assume it is because my mind had already realized that the show had gone past its prime. 24 didn’t have the common decency to either go away or become hilariously awful. Instead it just went along with business as usual except they had done everything already and were just repeating themselves. Their big hooks for the 7th season were Jack being on trial and the ongoing story with Tony. One of them was brain splitting annoying and the other took one of the remaining great characters and turned him evil for shock value. Damn you 24!
Like I said, the main selling point for this season was Jack Bauer being under investigation for his tactics. This meant the extremes of Jack’s actions were talked about over and over and over and over again. And since this is 24, everyone that is anti-Jack comes of like a douche bag. It didn’t matter if it was Mayer, Larry, Renee, Janis, Taylor, or anyone else who opened their mouth, I wanted them all to go away before a word left their lips. You can’t spend 6 years of Jack saving the world with his bare hands and then expect me to question how he did it! This is not the real world in any fashion. In the 24 universe there are constant attacks on American soil with every single President’s life constantly in danger, Jack Bauer was practically a superhero. I don’t want to think about this anymore. Now did Jack do anything cool this season? Well he rocked a trench coat for the first few hours, so there is that. The classic scenes were Jack interrogating Tony, Jack faux-executing Renee, Jack’s disgust when Taylor questions his loyalty, Jack crying next to Bill’s dead body, and Kiefer’s acting when Jack was falling to pieces. I have to make an important distinction on the last one, because Kiefer was awesome but I had no interest in the plot itself. I never believed this was how Jack would die so the tension never worked for me. Plus it took Jack Bauer out of play for too many hours at the end of the season. This is the Jack Bauer show and need Jack Bauer to be doing stuff for my entertainment.
The return of Tony Almeida was the other highlight for Day 7. There is so much I can complain about here but in the end I was still happy to see Tony running around again. 24 may have been a hyper-violent reality with borderline future tech but it was still the real world. They had never done something like bringing a dead character back to life. Yes Jack had flat lined before but he was revived on camera immediately. Tony was killed in a government building in the middle of the day but somehow they lost track of his body and didn’t realize he was actually alive. Fuck that shit. But fine Tony is back and we are going to get to see him play Jack’s wingman once again … nope we get dark Tony. He may have worked with Jack throughout the day, but they never let go of the idea that Tony was hiding ulterior motives. And in the end, Tony was drunk with dead baby rage and was willing to burn the world down in order to get vengeance. What a wasteful end to one of the remaining original characters.
Skipping Redemption there were only a few returning characters in Day 7. The most important one was Bill Buchanan. I have not made it a secret that Bill is the goddamned man so I should be angry at his death. But I’m really not; it was a solid ending to his storyline. He was stupidly fired at the end of Day 6 so in his spare time he grew out his hair and created a clandestine CTU. Sure I’ll buy it. And we got to see him in the field for the first time so that rocked. And his death was both very noble and a phenomenal moment for Jack. You’ll be missed Bill! After a season where she was used poorly, Day 7 follows up the misuse of Chloe by barely using her. I know Mary Lynn Rajskub gave birth during the filming of this season but I don’t care about real life! I need Chloe on 24 or it just doesn’t feel right. At least we got her scene where Chloe tries to talk to Jack after finding out he is going to die. Aaron Pierce pops up as usual but he got saddled with Olivia Taylor so the less said the better. Man he can’t catch a break, first Martha Logan now Olive Taylor … no wonder he doesn’t come back in season 8. After those 3, all that is left is Kim Bauer. I’m sorry ... these few hours do not make up for everything that happened previously. But at least she didn’t dig any deeper. Sometimes that is all you can ask for.
Although many of them first appeared in Redemption, there were a tremendous amount of new characters introduced in the 7th season. The most important were Renee Walker, Allison Taylor, and the Ethan Kanin. Renee is one of those times were 24 just tried way too hard. People had a problem with Chase in season 3 because he felt like a future Jack replacement, well if that is the case Renee was that squared. The entire day was the corruption of Renee Walker. She starts as someone disgusted with Jack’s tactics but ends the day throwing away her career because torture was the only way. She never worked for me and Day 8 will not improve matters. Allison Taylor is the new President and completely fine. I never really had an opinion one way or another with Taylor. Until her asinine actions at the end of the last season, she was just a solid President on 24. Somewhere in between David Palmer and Charles Logan. Ethan is a bit of a cheat because he was in the Cabinet during Day 6 but he moved up to Chief of Staff for this season and that is always an important role. In the end, some of the best work on the political side always comes from the Chief of Staff position. Ethan belongs in the same class as your Mike Novicks and Tom Lennoxs; even when he was saddled with the Olivia plot line, Bob Gunton got the job done. There were many others that should be mentioned. Larry Moss was given the CTU director role but now at the FBI. It was odd because I kept feeling like I should dislike him more than I did. But removing the stick up his ass for Jack, Larry was quite serviceable in the management position. Janis Gold was the usual new tech that usually gets to interact with Chloe but until the end of the day there was very little of that. She had the usual quirks that the techs are always given except this time she was Janeane Garofalo. Besides Taylor and Ethan, I really liked Karen Hayes’ replacement, Tim Woods. This was mainly because I hated Karen Hayes so much. On the other hand, I despise Olivia Taylor. She was an awful character that constantly did awful things and acted smugly about it. I was counting the seconds until her comeuppance.
There was the usual assortment of villains during Day 7. You had the Sangalans, Dubaku and Juma, during the first half of the day. Then it was handed over to clichéd shady white men doing shady things behind the scenes. The difference this time was that they casted Jon Voight and Will Patton. Voight was brought in to be Jon Voight and he gave us all the Jon Voight we could handle. It was a solid season for villains on 24 and I still think killing off Emerson so quickly was a waste. He had potential as someone in between and Jack and Tony but they killed him off then sidelined Tony for a quarter of the season. An odd choice.
The seventh day of 24 ultimately falls in the body half of the rankings but felt like a ray of sunshine after Day 6. It was a too little too late for some of the changes, moving out of LA, removing CTU, etc., that would have been welcomed earlier in the series. But in the end it was still Jack Bauer running around and shooting bad guys so I was satisfied.
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