Previously on 24

Okay, after 24 had seemed to be springing back to approximate some of the TV goodness we saw in late lamented seasons....sob....last week saw Jack, Chloe, Madame President and the ex-Evil Veep/Discredited Former President Logan riding the shark.

Where to start? Having discovered a mere 10 or 11 hours before that he was madly in love with a woman who would choose to remove a pair of handcuffs from a bad guy by grabbing a bone saw and severing the miscreant's thumb...followed by various law enforcement hi-jinks and a brief (extremely) roll in the hay, Jack has lost his beloved.

He also realizes that Madame President deserves to be the next Discredited President, for withholding the truth about the death of the hair-gel abusing President of the Islamic Republic. It was the Russians who did it.

We don't think that Jack knows this, but Evil Ex-President Logan has assumed the role of all-knowing statesman and advisor/confidante to Madame President. He's able to blackmail the Russians into signing a now-spurious peace agreement, and thus, what, temporarily saving face before the world?

Hmmm.

Jack does know that Madame President isn't living American values. He steals a helicopter, lands it on the roof of a Manhattan building, and disappears into the crowd en route to CTU to get information on Russian culpability from Bridezilla.

Once they find out that Jack's after Bridezilla, Logan and Madame President have her taken off to a dungeon to be waterboarded by bizarrely mustaschio'd members of a "private security firm." (Uh, this guy was obviously drummed out of active duty service based on his bad deployment of facial hair.)

Chloe is still in charge of CTU. (WTH???) She displays her ability to mobilize every sort of tactical operation.

Though to our knowledge, she hasn't called for a perimeter.

And she fails to give Jack credit for being able to call her next move. He calls and asks for her help finding Nina, I mean Bridezilla. She sets him up to head out to an industrial laundry in Queens, where the intrepid CTU team will scoop him up in a sting operation.

Instead, he disables everyone on the team (and whoa, there was an extremely GQ handsome Black man we were very concerned about) and snags Bridezilla's ex-Intended, Cole for his team.

The two of them are going to go rogue to rescue Bridezilla, discredit the President, somehow mend fences with Chloe, and find the Canisters.

Oops, that last one was a typo. Just ruminating on what was a different, and much better season.

RIP: A host of handsome black guys (Curtis, sob), Nina, Teri, Milo, Eggar, that former CTU head who kamikaze'd nucular warheads (or was that what happened to the canisters?) into the desert, Renee...and wait, what did happen to Jack's other main Squeeze, Awwwwdrey?

Unknown: Chloe's family (Morris and Prescott), Tony, David Palmer's 28 year old brother and also ex-President Wayne (last seen, comatose).

Sigh, RIP, 24.

(cool photo by Flickr's Richard Ling, used under Creative Commons License.)