24 - Season five wishes

Having rewatched a great many of the episodes on the A&E marathon, I got to speculating on what may be happening next season. I know some things from spoilers, but that's most casting choices. I got to thinking about what I'd like to see -- plot-wise -- and am wondering what everyone here is hoping will happen this January.

My two wishes: A smaller, more personal threat and Jack having to work completely outside CTU.

As much as I liked this last season (and I did), I would like to see the threat be more like the first season... a personal threat to Jack and the ones he loves. Not because I don't think the "world in peril" scenarios don't work, but simply because it's time for a change. Each season had a "bigger" threat than the last and, as a result, Jack has become less "human" and more "superhuman". I'd like to see Jack have to deal with something very personal -- even if it doesn't deal with a national crisis. It will give the writers and actors a chance to make Jack less of a caricature and more of a character.

As for the second part (having Jack work completely outside the CTU), that should be easy. With Jack having to be 'dead', his resources are going to be very limited as will be his responses. The past three seasons, he'd been 007, licensed to kill. For that matter, he's been handed situations so dire and the consequences of non-action so severe that his choice of actions could be justified (even if they were morally questionable/wrong). I'd like to see him up against people who are just doing their job, say police or government agents. These people could just be working on false information (say, Jack's a bad guy) and harming them would be over the line. They had this in the last season even. In Jack's hostage situation he was unable to hurt any of the people. He didn't fight the cops when they cornered him -- even if he did think about it. In the first season they did this a lot, where Jack was at odds with the Secret Service.

Not sure if any of this will happen. I get the feeling the writers tend to get caught up in the excitement and bigger and badder is better seems to be the battle cry. A girl can dream, though.

(Crossposted: 24addicts)

Makes perfect sense...

I've been spending a lot of time watching and thinking about everything that's happened in New Orleans. I haven't gotten around to posting until now, but I spent a lot of time talking to family and friends about it. Not only governmental responses, but also individual responses.

I mean, what was the difference that made, say, the NY police and fire personnel run into the Twin Towers (where they knew in all likelihood they would die) but had the New Orleans police walk off the job and tell people "It's every man for himself"? How can the Mayor of New Orleans complain that the Federal Government failed, when he left hundreds of busses sitting, unused, when in the emergency plans they had been marked for use in the evacuations? The poverty rate in New Orleans was 28%, in a city of 484,674 that is 135,709 people without the means to leave the city by themselves -- even if they would trust the government or the weather reports enough to want leave.

In a city that had one of the highest crime rates (the homicide rate was 10 times the national average), one of the lowest cop to resident ratios (3.14 to every 1,000) and a history of police and civil servant graft and corruption, was the break down of civility really that unexpected? Those who could evacuate, did. That left a city of marginalized, oft-ignored and disaffected people at the mercy of the aforementioned criminals, abandoned by 60 percent of the what little police force there was.

It's got to be FEMA's fault that things went badly down there, right?

Philosophizing from Katrina...

In my surfing around looking for different thoughts on the whole Katrina distaster, I ran across this great blog entry. I totally love it. More that that, I agree with the main points of it. Read at your own risk, however. Although there is some offensive language, I'm sure it's the ideas that are in it that some will find the most offensive.

Quotes from it:

Who can not see the way the country has changed, not since 9/11, but before that – since the 2000 election? Who cannot feel the split, the division, that rips like a shredding sail on a broken mast, canvas tearing like the sound of musketry, as the rigging falls to the deck?

Race has nothing to do with this – precisely nothing. The mobs of murdering Hutus and swarms of slaughtering Serbs are as different racially as it is possible to be, and they are cut from precisely the same cloth.

That’s because the people I associate with – my Tribe – consists not of blacks and whites and gays and Hispanics and Asians, but of individuals who do not rape, murder, or steal

In New Orleans we have a mayor who left some 400-500 buses sitting fueled and underwater in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool saying that evil white conservative America was selling out his people within 24 hours of the catastrophe, from a safe and dry and adequately toileted location, while four years ago we had a Mayor who ran to the site of the disaster so quickly it is a full-blown miracle he was not killed when a building collapsed literally on top of his magnificent, combed-over head.

Sometimes, Bad Things Happen. Some things are beyond my control, beyond the control of the smartest and best people we have, even beyond the awesome, subtle and unlimited control of the simpering, sub-human village idiot from Texas.

Hurricanes come. They have come for all of human history, and more are coming. Barbarians also come to steal or destroy what they cannot make themselves, and they, like human tempests, have swept a path of destruction through civilization since before history was written on clay tablets on the banks of the Euphrates.

My favorite, because I often think it:

George Bush did not take over the White House with a six-shooter; people voted him into office with the biggest number of votes in American history. I’m one of those people, and [...] I demand my equal time.