The Official 24 Season 8 Thread

Last night's episode was AWESOME. After these last few episodes, I'm kinda sad that the show is ending

Yeah, this is shaping up to be one of the finer seasons of the show, certainly since season 5.

Holy shit!! The last 10 minutes of last night was fucking brutal. Pliers? Check. Knife? Check. Jack being a fucking badass, turkey carving, motherfucker? Check. Wow. Where the hell was all this the last few seasons? I knew when FOX showed that Viewer Discretion warning right before the rejoin that we were in for a wild ride.

Yeah, that was fucking awesome.

If only they'd made every season/episode as awesome as these have been... We might not have gotten tired of the show, and we might still have it for another season or few.

jack bauer IS Sam Fisher.

I'm liking these last few eps, especially when he did that thing with Starbuck(dana)

No, because they keep talking about making a movie.

But fuck, the show has been consistently awesome for several weeks now. I really can't recall the last time that the show has had so many great, interesting, intense episodes in a row.

Yeah, I think it's safe to say this is easily the best season since 5. It's been on a roll, and I don't see it disappointing for these last few eps.

If the entire 8th season had been like this, I'd definitely agree. But the first half (after the first assassination attempt) was so bad that it knocks it a bit below 7 (which doesn't touch the best moments of 8, but was at least decent most of the time). If the last three episodes are also amazing, I will reevaluate.

Nonsense, the last half of 7 was usually as stupid and/or lackluster as the first half of 8.

Disagree. 24 hit a new low with the Dana subplot, and when it turned out she was a mole, I almost stopped watching the show. It didn't help that nothing else was going on when that plot was expanding. Jack didn't really do anything memorable at all in the first half of this season, and all the other characters I cared about were gone.

There were boring parts of 7, but nothing that made me think, "That's it, I have better things to do".

I just retook this last season and I can't stop thinking of Marcos as SNAFU from The Pacific series

It's been easy to forget the boring episodes earlier in the season when the last four or five have been amazing.

Bingo!

The shitheads at FOX should re-evaluate their decision to end this series. People stopped watching because it became very formulaic and boring. They always try to cram a major event into each hour rather than letting things simmer over the course of a few weeks. This season, at least the last few weeks, have been incredible.

I hate that President Taylor is a spineless cunt and can't make her own decisions. David Palmer was the shit, and since then we've had a criminal and a pussy in the WH. By now, you'd think that Jack would have his own designated phone number right to the pres.

I honestly don't know how I want this to end...

I'm sure that around season 4 or 5 (around the time 24 got renewed for three more years and Sutherland got his own production company), he said that the 24 writers would eventually kill him off in the most shocking and unexpected, yet fitting way for Jack Bauer. Now I know they've been talking about the movie for the last 2-3 years so it seems extremely unlikely that they'd kill him off in season 8, but in terms of the character and story, I think it would be better if they did it. It would be a sad sad day, but if done well, would totally lend so much more weight to this season.

Unfortunately, if done, it would be one of those things that becomes so well known in the coming months/years that anyone starting out with 24 after this year would most probably already know that Bauer dies in season 8 and it would completely spoil it for them a la anyone watching Sixth Sense now.

I'm not sure if I want him to die at the end or not. In a way it makes sense and would be a good ending, but...I have to say that I really want Jack to finally have something good happen to him. But maybe he's so far in now that redemption and salvation is just not possible.

Sure, it's easier to like David Palmer because he and Jack got along great after the first few episodes of Season 1; but in Season 3, he was just as cowardly and devious as the presidents after him. The only difference, really, is that he looked pissed about giving in to terrorists, instead of crying about it.

...

Well, shit. That was awesome.

Jack is going to fucking kill EVERYONE.

That scene where he kidnaps Logan from the car was one of the most intense scenes of the series.

24 has been amazing these last few episodes. Fuck those lazy ass writers who ruined this show. If they had done this all along, they wouldn't continuously lose viewers, and the show wouldn't be ending. Jack Bauer is a bad man....in a good way.

I hate how she suddenly became that way once Logan entered the picture. I mean, she didn't even want to let him help when his name was first mentioned, and then all the sudden she just decided to bend over backwards to follow his advice. It's basically character assassination from a writing perspective. Still, the last three episodes have been badass enough that I can almost overlook what the writers have done to her.

so this season was better than the previous 6 combined. i loved the symbolism of JB dressing up as darth vader and becoming death, destroyer of worlds. the ultimate proof that he has gone to the dark side. i'm totally in the tank with him and his clearly unethical and illegal behavior, for the first time since the end of season 1 actually.

he's always found himself on the wrong side of the law and my personal values (til this magnificent season i've referred to the show as "Jack Bauer Torture Hour"), and the show has always lost me for that reason, in seasons 2 thru 7. not so this time, i guess since it's personal for once. i'm not even a fan of renee walker and i still feel for the guy (or whatever soulless, tortured shell actually still remains of him). call it empathy.

president and nadia hassan and taylor's characters were richly written and performed; taylor's shift to the dark side was not so much an abrupt sideways hop as it was a murky half-step over an almost invisible, vaguely-drawn line. so goes the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." or the one about ambition making you look pretty ugly. the peace deal is to taylor what renee walker is to jack bauer; their descent to the dark side hinged on something very personal to each of them.

obviously she is, in layman's terms, an evil cunt, but as with all ideologues suffering from cognitive dissonance, she doesn't see herself that way. the writers specifically addressed many characters' shared character flaw (uncompromising ideologues) in direct, complex and tangential ways without insulting the audience's intelligence, as it has been known to do in the prior 6 seasons.

but the hands-down best turn in the history of this show goes to gregory itzin's reincarnation of charles logan. this man was born to act.

How anyone can describe Taylor as an "evil cunt" is beyond me. She has done nothing evil and has no evil intentions. She is clearly doing what is best for the countries involved, even if it means covering up some lies. She's acting for the greater good - nothing evil about it. She's not even a villain.

What Jack is doing is wrong, it's not for the greater good, it's selfish for the most part as it will result in no benefit for any of the countries/people involved except himself. However, I completely understand the reasons and fully support it because I just want him to continue to be a badass.

it's not the greater good because the "peace agreement" will be superficial and false, and nothing will change aside from some worthless on-the-surface bullshit in the very short term

It's great to see such nuanced and sophisticated viewpoints on Taylor's and Bauer's actions. This season has really made its viewers think, instead of just resorting to derka derp good and evil rah rah rah. That said, Taylor has turned into such a venomous, disgusting villain, since her "it's all morally relative" justifications of torture and usurping the Constitution have compromised her own personal value system. The biggest villains on this show for me are always the scummy, dirty-dealing politicians who delegate the dirty work in pursuit of some bigger picture. If you didn't realize Taylor is an evil cunt the moment she authorized the disappearance of Walsh, for example, then you're not seeing the bigger picture. Or you're seeing the picture bigger than the one I am willing to look at.

For the conclusion, I dunno, I want JB to eviscerate Taylor, if not with a knife a la the Russian hitman, then at least verbally.

Yeah, this season (the last half anyway) has done a great job of really putting most of the characters in moral gray areas. It's not so easy to condemn or condone either Jack or President Taylor right now, even though I'm sure most viewers are rooting for Jack anyway.

Goddamn, Taylor turned into a real bitch.

I couldn't get on here last night to post this, but I enjoyed the final 2 hrs quite a bit. There was no way that this would end well for Jack, and I'm just glad he actually got to walk away. The scenes with Chloe at CTU were very touching, and I seriously hope that they do a movie.

BTW, great "Oh shit" moment when I realized that the sniper rifle was pointed at Logan and not the Russian President. Jack is always 2 steps ahead of everyone. I half expected the guys in the masks were gonna be Michael Madsen and some of his buddies staging Jack's death. Oh well, it still sets up a movie down the road...

That was the best series finale for any show ever. Goddamn watching that was tense as fuck.

I cried like a bitch at the end since I was so emotionally wracked from the Lost finale the night before. Can't wait for the movie!

Yep. At the end of the first episode, when he called Logan, I thought, "Jack has turned into Hannibal Lecter". And biting off that guy's ear sealed the deal. He had never been quite so vicious as he was during the last few episodes of this season, and it really helped to make the final hours some of the best episodes of the series.

I'm also glad they didn't do the "Jack and Chloe manage to outsmart the President and co." plot again, and instead brought Taylor back to some form of reality. The only time I rolled my eyes at the finale was when Logan murdered what's-his-name. It didn't fit in with his character at all. The last conversation with Chloe and the backwards countdown were perfect though.

I actually thought the whole thing was rocking and rolling until the last hour. The only reason the signing was prevented was because of the conscience of the President? Fuck that. What a shitty fucking way for it to end. I liked the scene with Chloe but otherwise that was a shitty finale, IMO.

Logan lived. Suvarov lived, and who knows if he'll be implicated. They didnt do a very good job of explaining that the recording of Logan was on the same card that Jack recorded his message on. Maybe I should have caught that but I didnt until after I finished and thought about it for a while.

I dunno. There was bloodshed all the way up until the finale and then nothing. Its not that I wanted Jack to go out in a blaze of glory (although that would have been awesome), but I wanted at least SOME carnage. Logan killing his assistant barely counts. The writers pussied out with the ending, IMO. Oh well.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Bit of an anti climax I guess.

I agree. From the time Jack decided NOT to kill Suvarov through the office window it was all downhill. He went all that way and all of a sudden had a change of heart?

THEN, the president threatens Hassan with nuclear war straight to her face...which was awesome! For her to not sign the treaty and stop Jack's assassination was totally off character for this season.

It's like the last hour EVERYONE pussied out.

Jack should have assassinated Suvarov and Logan through the window. Then the last hour should have been a build up for how Jack kickstarted a war between the US and Russia. There's your script for a movie. Jack stopping WW3.

So he starts the war, then stops it? That makes even less sense than his sudden change of heart, which was entirely in character for him. He lost his mind a bit, but he had only killed minor players up to that point.

And the threat of nuclear war from the president was the out of character part. For the majority of the season, she was rational, if a bit overly dramatic. Then she suddenly turns into a lunatic, which was pretty awesome, but the finale brought her back to what she was before.

If there had been no plans for a movie, I would have agreed with you guys...Jack should have just killed everyone, and then gone out in a blaze of "glory". But they needed to maintain some of the rational elements of the character, and they couldn't leave the whole world hanging on the edge of apocalypse.

In that light, knowing it's the end of the TV series, but not the end of the storyline, I think it worked well. Anti-climatic? Of course, but most of the season finales have been. Nina Myers lives, the war with the Middle East is avoided at the last second, Charles Logan lives, etc., etc.

But this wasnt a season finale, it was a series finale. They essentially pussied out so they could cash in on a movie. Pretty lame, and this is coming from a huge 24 fan.