24 - Series 6 - Complete (DVD)

Day six of 24 feels very much like a day too far for the series. It started well enough and the first few episodes zipped along, but this series was written "on the fly", rather than being tightly plotted and written in advance, like the earliest days were, and boy does it show!

Too much of this has been seen before and it all felt a bit stale to me. It's ok ripping off ideas from elsewhere if you can do it well, but to blatantly steal from your own past, then do it worse, is a mistake. Nuke attack on US soil? Done it. Political intrigue? Done it. A plot to remove the President? Done that too. Assassination? Yep, done that. Hang on... we still have a load of episodes to write. What can we do?

What they did was introduce Jack's extended family, a family we'd never even heard of before this season, and that was something else I didn't really appreciate. I could almost buy the head baddie from the last series being Jack's brother (almost) but the sub-plot with the boy and Jack's father was just too silly for words.

None of this series really sat right with me, from the decision to use Wayne Palmer as President and then virtually write him out of half the series, to the sudden reappearance of Milo from Day One. Add to this the way characters were seemingly thrown into this randomly and it feels like a series that wasn't really planned properly. Aaron and the former First Lady were treated purely as filler, as was Charles Logan in my view.

The good news is that the producers know they dropped the ball with this series and have admitted as much. I hope they do something radical for Day Seven, but the rumoured direction of the show (Google for it if you want to know) is not a route that sounds too promising to me.

Don't get me wrong, I still love 24 and will probably still buy this boxed set, not least because Sky and Virgin Media fell out and I had to rely on friends to see half of the series (I missed the last couple of episodes and wasn't at all bothered at the time, but it would be cool to see how it ended rather than read a synopsis online) but I'll be waiting for this one to hit the sale bins, or for a cheap set to appear on eBay, before buying it.

Disappointed in this one. Must do better next time.