iF Magazine.com: TV Review: 24 - Season 7 (4 am - 5 am) - 5/5/09

If you haven't seen episode 21 yet, this review contains spoilers so proceed with caution.

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Television:

TV Review: 24 - SEASON SEVEN - '4:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.'

A decent filler episode that sees the end of Jonas Hodges

Grade: B
Stars: Kiefer Sutherland, Carlos Bernard, Jon Voight, Cherry Jones
Release Date: May 4, 2009

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By EMERSON PARKER, Contributing Writer
Published 5/5/2009

This was just a fill-in episode of 24 building toward the final few hours of season seven.

In fact, it is pretty hard to write a review based on this hour because really nothing happened. Well, except for the assassination of Jonas Hodges (Jon Voight) that was the result of Olivia Taylor’s (Sprague Grayden) desire for revenge for Hodges orchestrating the killing her brother and nearly killing her parents in two separate incidents during this day.

Now, to me, that’s about the best excuse I’ve heard for having someone taken out in a while. I mean if my parents were nearly assassinated and my brother killed, I’d want that dude to die as well. Especially if he had just been giving immunity by the same woman he tried to kill in order to find the ongoing terrorist plot against the United States. I can’t really blame Olivia although she did chicken out on the payment for the assassination but it was apparently too late as the dudes still took him out.

Now that’s assuming they did it. My guess is that it was Secret Service Agent Aaron Pierce that did it. He’s too in Olivia’s business and after she told him the only he could do other than protecting her was to kill Jonas Hodges. It makes you think. And it is just the type of swerve we’d get from 24. And we know from past experiences that Pierce is still probably a bit bitter over the whole President Logan/Martha Logan thing that he got wrapped up in.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this unfold next hour.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hour was comprised of more Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) having issues with that whole dying thing and whether or not he can actually do his job despite having only a few more hours or days to live.

Now I’m not knocking Jack at this point, but I have to say this is getting a tad old. I understand that it builds tension and creates a truckload of drama but knowing that Sutherland has one more year of 24 in his contract, hard to take seriously that we are going to see his demise this season. I just wish they had maybe had the transfusion with Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) a few hours back that way he could still be suffering but maybe getting slowly better during the rest of the season. That may not be that believable or drama-filled but it would serve at least my growing boredom with seeing him keel over every other scene.

But at the end of this hour we have all the pieces in place. Jack and Agent Walker (Annie Wersching) are close to tracking down Tony (Carlos Bernard) and his cronies inside the syndicate of home-grown terrorists, Hodges is gone, the Muslim dude they kidnapped is set to take the fall and the container of biotoxin is getting ready to be used. Hopefully the filler episodes are over and we’ll get on with the crescendo to the season finale.