Mr. Bauer will take a shower, and then retire to his bower....

So 24 ended last night. What did I think? Well....



(spoilers, by the way)



It was a better ending than last year's, although it was still a bit long on the stuff that didn't make a lot of sense:

:: Are they really trying to reattach Chase's hand? The one that was locked into a refrigerator when the virus-dispersal device went off? Wouldn't the tissues of his hand be infected? "Good news, bad news, Chase: Your hand should recover, but you'll die in three hours because it was infected. Sorry." (Speaking of which, how did they get him into surgery within ten minutes? That's some fast doctorin'!)

:: Still, that was an awfully good moment, when Chase glimpses back to see what it was that caught Jack's eye, sees that it was an axe, and says, "Do it," without hesitation. Pretty heroic, that.

:: No David Palmer next year, then? Well, OK. All he ever does is sit in that glass-walled office and stew over things, anyway. His storyline was really distracting this year.

:: Did no one go through Gael's belongings before giving them to his wife? "Here's his desk calendar, his picture of you, that little bouncing-marble desk toy, his fully loaded pistol, his coffee mug -- yeah, we washed it -- and oh hey, there's Saunders! Hi, Saunders!"

:: The guy who played Saunders sure had a bummer of a TV season. His evil plan on 24 is thwarted by Jack Bauer and he's shot dead by a distraught widow; and on ER, he tried dating Dr. Corday but discovers that she's been dating another guy at the same time. Ouch.

:: If I ever have to build a bomb with a timer attached, I'm using all the same color wiring. Just to piss off the secret agents who try to defuse it.

:: If Palmer doesn't pardon Tony before exiting office, then next year should be Jack hunting him down and beating the crap out of him. I'm surprised Jack didn't ask him to do so directly, especially when Palmer asked Jack's forgiveness for ordering him to kill Ryan Chapelle. Jack should have said, "Sir, that had to be done, but there's no need to lose another good man like Tony Almeida. You need to pardon him, and you need to do it now."

:: The more I think about Kim, the more I think that people are blaming the character for her lousy storylines. She's got this rep for doing dumb things all the time, and yet, I haven't seen her do anything really dumb. It wasn't like she went looking for mountain lions last year, and this year, I had no problem with her character. People should quit griping about Kim. Really.

:: I liked seeing Jack concede the emotional power of everything that had happened.

So, what could happen next year? Who knows? I'll be tuning in come January, though.