WhoAmIWorkingFor

Yes, the Crime Story version was a new recording with different lyrics.

Looking at it another way, this still the early part of the season, which in previous years would be coming up on the tail end of the reasonably-coherent plot that the writers were able to come up with in advance before filming began. The twisty, complicated, and pulled-out-of-ass part is what happens after this. Which is why I am hoping very much that this shortened season means that for once everything will have been laid out in advance and the plots will all fit together logically, unlike Season 4's epic plot Wheel of Fortune, which fit together like a Rube Goldberg machine that was on fire. I can smash together more metaphors but I should stop now...

A quick side thought: As is often the case, Chloe gave Jack a fake IP address to upload the data to. It would amuse me if they'd actually given a real one for once, even if it just led back to the official 24 website or similar, in the same way that they used to give out real phone numbers that someone on the crew would pick up. The completely-faked IPs somehow manage to sound stranger to my ear than hearing phone numbers that start with "555."

Crime Story, featuring Del Shannon's "Runaway." It fits the shinier Vegas opening a little better than the Chicago one, though it's still period-appropriate.

The really nifty touch about the BTAS opening is that aside from the lightning crash, all of the event sound effects are via musical instruments. (Or that you'd expect to hear a sound effect, but it's all integrated into the music.)

Jordan Reed is the CIA mid-level guy on the phone call. The part that makes me chuckle is that he basically is in the revolving-door position of (goateed) dark-haired mid-level nerdish guys that includes Adam, Milo, very early Tony, Gael, Arlo, and on the bulkier side, Edgar and Morris.

Considering how things were going badly for President Heller when his speech started, I wonder how he calmed down the audience during the twenty minutes of it that we didn't see—old behind-the-scenes stories of Knots Landing? Naveed: Now you just went and jumped straight into the Death Pool. But the real magic trick will be managing to climb back out. (I can also think of similarities to the Araz family situation in Season 4, except that Naveed is rather more critical to Margot's purposes than Behrooz was to Navi (speaking of which, it seemed a little odd to name him similarly to Nestor Serrano's character from S4, unless they just plain forgot)). I can see him trying to scuttle the plot by having one of the drones blow up the house that he's in... though that doesn't immediately help his chances of outswimming the Death Pool, since his job description has You Have Outlived Your Usefulness written all over it. Colin Salmon's American accent still has some rough edges; John Boyega was pretty consistent this time around. Having Kate Morgan be just like Jack is going faster than I expected, which makes me wonder about the point at which her rivalry with Erik will inevitably resurface. Later seasons Jack typically only has Chloe and one or two other people as sidekicks for the entire season, Kate fills one of those slots, and I don't figure that Mysterious Serbian Guy will be a huge factor (though at least he got in a line of dialogue this ep). So Erik is probably expendable, and he would fit the role of (Doomed) Handsome Black Agent, Rival Who Can't Overcome Jealousy, Rival Who Ends Up Listening To The Bad Guy Because Of Jealousy, etc. Audrey: Aw, you still seem to care. (Edited for junior-high English and a train of thought that was delayed at the station.)

The quibble I've read concerning the idea that our TV broadcasts are announcing our presence to the galaxy is that the signal strength will have decreased to essentially nothing at interstellar distances, so they won't really alert other civilizations to us unless they're already in the system.

Chloe has argued, or at least disagreed, with Jack on a few occasions in the past. But it would definitely help her become more of a full sidekick instead of just an assistant if she was allowed to have a bit more conflict with him. The amount of time that has passed should have created more of an opportunity for this. I'm curious to see how that plays out, since the guy's now fallen into the tricky middle ground of characters that may end up helping out in the end despite their obvious personal conflicts; some of those transitions have worked out better than others. (For example, Jack and Paul Raines ended up being pretty good together even though it made no sense at all.) Can happen if you've been there for a while, though. I'm rating the probability of his being the Big Bad as about the same as gravity reversing itself in the morning so that I roll out of bed onto the ceiling, but it seemed worth mentioning as a long-odds twist. :)

Including another animated opening, there's Cowboy Bebop's: (Ah, the old Adult Swim days.) If there's an impression from this of '60s noir-styled sci-fi, that's exactly what the show is.

It occurred to me today while I was having a routine ID check that Jack's face should be all over the place for computerized facial recognition to pick up (considering that everyone else's face on this show is in a facial recognition database), so just wandering up to the gate with a fake ID shouldn't have worked. So it goes. Perhaps I was hoping for the guard to see Jack, say "You're Jack Bauer!", have Jack reply with "I am not the Jack Bauer you are looking for," and get waved through because he's now really a Jedi. On the "not really feeling this season" thing, I feel a bit of that myself. Heller might be a generally stand-up guy, but I still miss the David Palmer days, goof-ups and all. It might just be that I associate William Devane with too many other roles. And rooting for "America, warts and all" on this show is a mess of gray moralities. The last couple of seasons has pretty much been just hoping that Jack and Chloe can have a half-decent relaxed off-screen retirement at the end of a season, but that just keeps on not happening. I agree that several of the premises underpinning the main plot require a great deal of suspension of disbelief to work, but when they start using real countries for the plot... ...speaking of which, I was slightly surprised to hear that The Family was specifically named as once working with Al-Qaeda, when in past seasons there would just be generically-described terrorist groups. A writing decision based on the real AQ not being as specific a single target as it was in the last decade?

Chloe's choices make a bit more sense in light of what is now confirmed to have happened with Morris and Prescott, but... ouch. She did get a hug from Jack, which I think might have happened... one other time, ever? Simone's husband is a giant, neon-glowing candidate for the usual list of (1) Getting killed for cracking under the pressure/flipping on The Family (2) Getting killed for becoming annoying (3) Getting killed after being set up as a martyr in some part of the scheme (4) Getting killed for otherwise outliving his usefulness (5) Killing everyone else because he's actually the Big Bad in disguise. I'd rate the odds of the first four as much higher than for the fifth, but there's always an outside chance on this show. Speaking of early assholes, with the show's track record, Mark seems way too simple-minded for much else than an early nemesis. I mean, perhaps the big plot really depends on him, but so far he hasn't been very subtle and most of the people on the show that are wearing such a huge Please Punch Me In The Face sign haven't turned out to be that clever in the end. He's also risking considerable wrath from Audrey by poking at her father. I had to run out for a bit, so I missed what happened to Basher after they ran him past the other gang and he spilled the beans, if it was shown at all. Did they let him go, "Let Him Go," or is he in Behrooz territory now? Erik apologizing to Kate: Only a minor death flag in the grand scheme of things. They are doing a neat job of showing Kate as Jacqueline Bauer, in that typical rogue-agent kind of way (though she still loses points for resorting to old-fashioned-CTU-style blackmail on Navarro). Jack starting a riot to get into the Embassy: Speaking of rogue-agent kind of things that one, y'know, does (on the bright side, it might be slightly less fatality-inducing than S3's prison riot). I'm actually more curious to see how the fallout from the ID doublecross works out on Chloe's end of things, and she's also got the Serbian hitman on her end.

It may be that the population in the 24-verse has grown somewhat accustomed to high levels of chaos breaking out every so often. I was going to suggest that perhaps some of the smaller incidents might not even be known about, which is possible—then I started thinking about just how obvious the large, obvious incidents were (mostly involving Presidents, the White House, airplanes, and artificial sunrises), and it seemed that there was plenty enough to worry about without knowing about the little things like viruses wiping out everyone. The demonstration: To me, it seemed silly, in the atmosphere of craziness that should exist in the 24-verse, that they'd allow even a small crowd that close to where the President was, unless the British were sending a message to President Heller in the "we cannot guarantee your safety if you visit" kind of way.

"It's not the years, hon, it's the mileage." Though all the wear and tear just makes Jack more and more into Solid Snake. ;) Chloe did get to run CTU for that short and weird back half of Season 8. Though it's usually best not to be in that job for any length of time anyway. I'm still pondering London CIA's basement headquarters with the presumably-nonfunctional-but-decorative boiler-room control boards and giant decorative gears. And the pleasantly-squalid brickwork.

Jack and Curtis: During the start of season 6, (Avert your eyes if you haven't gotten to this part yet!) Jack has to shoot Curtis when Curtis goes a little nuts on seeing Dr. Bashir, er, the character played by Alexander Siddig whose name I don't recall.

I remember that seasonal transition similarly. Come to think of it, though, that's probably the biggest interseason jolt; the later ones (except maybe from S7 to S8), to my recollection, have a smoother flow even with cast changes.

I watched the last 10 minutes just to see the preview for next week, and it didn't take more than about a minute to reacquaint myself with the original craziness of the place. I've watched a number of episodes of the original UK Kitchen Nightmares in the last few months, and the hard-case owners from that series look like saints by comparison. I'm keeping in mind the "FOX previews always lie" factor, but when the preview seems to be promising us unaired footage from the first visit along with recaps of the Internet/local news sh*tstorm that followed the airing of the first episode, that definitely suggests that Gordon himself did not return to Amy and Samy's strange little world. Even a couple of seconds of reaction shots from that would be priceless in the preview. So casual viewers should be able to get all caught up by watching whatever appears next week (considering how padded out the show can get and how much things spiralled after the initial airing, it easily could just be recaps of what we already know), but I do wonder what juicy bones, if any, could be tossed out for the Internet pitchfork brigade that, well, helped get them all this notoriety in the first place.

We're going to end up nicknaming this... 12? I don't mind the relative shortness; in the (later) seasons, the series did get a little messy as they tried to figure out what the last eight hours would be like while they were doing the middle eight. Hopefully fewer episodes will help focus things.