Last July I started on the first season of 24, and have watched seasons in alternating months since (wasn't the plan, just how it worked out). In the last week I watched most of season 4 (all but the last disc which should arrive late this week), and Sunday night was the premier episodes of season 5.
I definitely have mixed thoughts on the show. On the one hand, it's sorta cool with lots of shooting and things blowing up and stuff. Basically the same attraction the action movies with no plot have. It also has a "high tech" piece which could be interesting. As for plot it moves in some points, but is horrible in others. The real-time aspect could be interesting, but they seem to break it whenever convenient so it doesn't hold much value.
It's an interesting show if you're willing and able to continue suspending disbelief. This has gotten harder to the point of being nearly impossible with the latest stuff. If you don't want spoilers, you probably should stop reading now.
As far as tech stuff goes, the first season was pretty much as expected for TV/movies. Everyone who knows how stuff works has pretty much needed to learn to live with this by now. Shows like 24 and Alias have somewhat prided themselves in being at least half rooted in truth, which makes it a bit easier to play along. What I mean by that is they get general ideas close, and tend to use real terms when it exists rather than making up stuff. Of course it's not always true, and I'm definitely not saying they're completely accurate. In this regard the first season was actually pretty decent. A few locations, spent the season tracking down locations. Waiting for info, etc. Since then it's definitely suffered the "throw more tech at it" trend which is way too popular. Season 2 started throwing more locations, and more JIT tracking stuff. Still couldn't always find people though. Season 3 there was heavy use of cell phone and other tracking, satellite data is almost always instantly available, and CTU has instant complete control over seemingly every system in the area. Find a phone, track numbers called, track them, pull up real-time satellite, catch bad guys. Season 4 they seem to have so much they can't keep track of it. It's a big deal they find a guy's cell phone and track activity to some other remote player. Then they find the phone of the guy who was just talking to the primary guy and they mention the phone, but apparently don't bother to check activity. Then they have a hard time getting satellite time for major investigations, but it's no problem for someone else to grab and hold onto it for long times for some secret task they're not supposed to be doing anyways. Season 5 is barely started, but so far we have can't get some info unless they go to a lab, but can pull up the entire agent deployment real-time from the laptop over Wifi.
Another major thing is the plot. You gotta wonder how many times people can get themselves on multi-year personal leaves, fired for insubordination, convicted of treason, officially dead, etc. and still come back in to work for the government in a core position. The issue of not being able to work with the same people has come up, but then of course the next season most of the rest of the staff has turned over so it's not an issue for them to come back. Also the amount of control CTU LA has over the entire country is sorta funny at times too. Travel times have also become skewed to enhance suspense or allow more things to be added.
It seems the show has fallen into the trap of trying to jam more excitement into a given time to keep the interest of more people. Unfortunately it seems to have gotten to the point of having issues telling the story. I think they either need to let up less-essential details and drop a lot of subplots, tell less complex stories, or drop the real-time thing. At this point I'll probably keep watching as it's still somewhat interesting. Unfortunately it's not only rather hard to suspend disbelief, but there doesn't seem to be any real building suspense anymore. Hopefully season 5 will improve things.
As a somewhat side note, but advertised locally during the thing, Fox 9's investigative reporters are hyped up about something that cops get away with all over the metro area but the average person would be ticketed. There's comments about "do as I say, not as I do", and my favorite "is there a double standard?" It's on Monday night after 24. I have a feeling this one will be as good as when they uncovered that underage hockey players drink. When will they learn?
Tuesday was Sesame Beef day, and we even got it for free. Hard to beat that. As for work, Tuesday morning the web server crashed. We got that up. Then later one of the alarm systems had a bad battery and started beeping in classrooms, which the faculty didn't like too much. So that was disconnected. The generator was also fixed but they didn't want to test it in the middle of the day for some reason. Wednesday morning that was tested, and apparently all went well. Wednesday afternoon the root partition on one of our database servers filled up. The lack of usable /tmp created problems using the system. So we cleaned up a bit, moved that elsewhere, and attempted to scan the partition to figure out why it seemed there were unlisted open inodes or a miscalculation in free space. Turns out the partition was bad and the system promptly crashed. Rebooted off a restore and rebuilt with a combination of backups and copies from other servers, and brought it up. All seemed well.
Turns out something was missed. The sync scripts to the ERP and LDAP didn't handle it well, and the next morning the database listed nobody as having accounts. The scripts that reference that to keep Active Directory up to date started checking group memberships, found the accounts in the groups were unknown and took action to remove them. Luckily I had stuff that had synced earlier which had the data and imported it all again while schdav figured out the script syncing issue. Of course the AD scripts are designed to handle normal changes, not a complete initial load. As such they take some actions to ensure consistency which don't normally around each account, except when trying to do many thousands of them. So it took a couple hours for it to get everything updated again. Then people had to log out and back in to get access to things other than their home directories. That was a fun morning. There was also a switch interface issue taking out 2 buildings at the sem, but I didn't have to fix that one.
Friday the power cable fell out of our Internet connection provider's switch, taking out our connections to both Internet and Internet2. After not finding network services available to fix it, eventually went down, saw the lack of lights, and pushed the cable back in.
That's just the stuff that broke, lots of other planning and trying stuff in there too. At least it happened now and not in the next two weeks or so. The weekend has been going better. Yesterday was sitting around doing not much. I did have to fill out way too much stuff and get way too many envelopes ready to mail though. Why can't all companies/government entities accept electronic stuff? At least the county appears to be decent about email (better be after their phone queue hangs up on people), even if everything is still paper. Watched another disc of 24. Still not sure what I think of it. Not the best ever, but enough to keep me watching it at a somewhat decent pace (although it's slowing down my Netflix queue rate a bit). Today was restocking the dew in the office, grocery shopping, and probably more 24 in a bit. Tomorrow I'm taking a personal day, so may result in even more of that. Maybe I'll see about getting new tires on my car. It'd be nice to be able to accelerate like normal without spinning them.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
