Firstly, the fifth season of Kiefer Sutherland's show 24 started with a bang last night. And I have to admit to being just a mite underwhelmed. With each successive season the writers are relying on larger and more spectacular hooks to bring us into the show, stretching the "real time" structure of the show to its limits. Unfortunately, this time they've stretched that limit a little too far. It's going to be a couple of months beforeanyone over here gets to seethe series over here, so I won't go into specifics, but it's almost impossible to imagine that the events so far fit comfortably into the timeframe available. It shouldn't be a shock toanyone that watched season 4's final episode that this season appears to be focussing on yet another bad guy pulling out all the stops to get to Sutherland's character, Jack Bauer. But I fail to see why this invariably has to include trying to bring down the government. Once, I could accept - in season 3 a former colleague of Bauer's is recruited by an anti-american terror cell and he uses their influence to track down Bauer, via his friend, the President - but now someone else is seeming to do the same thing. Too much. I'm going to keepon watching, but it'd betterget a little more on track and back to the well plotted sequences we saw upto season 3. As an aside, Manny Coto, the man who nearly saved Startrek Enterprise is now an executive producer, so we'll see how things pan out with some pedigree new blood onboard.
Second, time for a bit of nostalgia. Eagle eyed bloggers and newshounds may recall some discussion last month about how America defines the word "torture" - now when the stories broke about how prisoners were being shipped to other countries, for whatever reason, the newswires went a bit mad...
But to this old hippie there was no sense of surprise. Instead, a sense of deja vu. Look at this article from New Years' Eve '04 that I linked to in this post just two days later. Told you it'd be worth keeping an eye on, didn't I?
And finally - I've been reloading my MP3 player after getting bored of having Sgt Pepper, Rubber Soul, Revolver and the White Album on there. I've gone for a completely different soundtrack. Now I have half of the first phase of the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy radio series, a select few episodes of the Goon Show, including one whose title may spark a little bit of interest in a couple of my readers - an episode entitled "Ned's Atomic Dustbin" - and an episode of "The Navy Lark" which featured some grand old names such as Jon Pertwee, Leslie Philips and a very young but utterly unmistakable Ronnie Barker. A bit of class for my bus hopping adventures.
That's all for now. Fuck me it's late.
