What did you think of 24: Legacy Episode 9?

I thought the writing was really sloppy in this episode to the point where nothing felt believable. And that’s pretty much my number one complaint with every episode this season. (That and the characters being weak, but the two kind of go hand in hand.)

– First off, how does all this crap happen within literally the first five minutes? Locke and Andy (who is barely even limping despite an enormous knife having been shoved into his thigh) are back at CTU already. Jadalla was transported back to CTU, booked into a holding room, and hooked up to all their monitoring crap. And Naseri somehow found out exactly which random CTU security guard to target, sent someone to capture the guards mistress, rigged her with explosives, set up a webcam all in five minutes. They’re not even trying to pretend this takes place in real time anymore.

– Speaking of Naseri, I’m disappointed that he’s just a bodyguard for Jadalla and not the actual big bad. Oded Fehr is an amazing actor and the Naseri character seems much cooler than Jadalla, dunno why they’re making him play second fiddle to that twerp.

– Basically this whole attack happened because some CTU security guard didn’t want his wife to find out he had a side chick? That’s some pretty crappy leverage. He could’ve just let his mistress explode and his wife would’ve never found out about his adultery. Instead he commits treason (life sentence) and assists in freeing a terrorist. At least if it was his wife and kids being held hostage it’d be more believable.

– The entire bomb defusal plot was weak. Eric says 20 minutes is too long for the bomb techs to arrive, but then it takes like at least 20+ minutes for Mariana just to hack the webcam feed and loop it. Eric immediately asks the girl who’s threatening/leveraging her (a smart thing) but never follows up when she doesn’t answer (a dumb thing). This entire thing could’ve been avoided if Eric actually got an answer from her.

– Tony had just barely over one minute of screen time, what a waste so far :(

– I liked the scene where Nicole found the letter Rebecca wrote to Eric, some nice acting by Anna Diop there. I’m coming around on Isaac too. I disliked the character initially but he’s become quite interesting these last three or so episodes.

Overall kind of the same problems as the other episodes, it was a retread of a previous 24 storyline only not done as effectively as in the past. CTU being attacked has been done several times before and this was probably the worst of all – there was barely any tension, nobody important died, the only characters that were really even put in danger were Rebecca and John (for two seconds), and it seems like this attack will have no lasting effects (the bomb in S2, nerve gas in S5, EMP in S8 all crippled CTU for at least a short time which was an interesting storyline angle).

Glad others enjoyed the episode at least. I’m hoping the final three episodes grab me more.