I still haven’t completed the season, but after finishing episode 21 (12:00 noon to 1:00 pm, and yes, I’ve noticed that only in the first season did they tell time correctly…there is no such thing as 12:00 am or pm) I am even more disappointed. Ignoring the major continuity error (Meredith Reed didn’t take Jack’s call on her cell phone as Chloe and Arlo discuss, but on the office phone, line 3), check out the temporal distortion; at 12:00 noon, Jack is leaving the storefront immediately after killing Dana Walsh. At 12:00:01 pm, yes, one second after Jack walks away, Cole is being brought into the fully-developed crime scene.

This isn’t the first time they blatantly ignored their own clock, of course - I remember laughing about President Logan’s micro-second lovemaking back in Season 5. But still, everyone knew this was the last season…it would have killed them to stick to the clock and run that scene a few minutes into the 21st episode?

Depressing to know how right I was about how little Gordon et al really cared about the whole, “Events occur in real time” thing, or about 24 and its fans. If you need any more evidence that these clowns are responsible for a fantastic show’s downfall, here it is.

I have read your thoughts about “24″. Is it premium series on cable? I have never heard of it.

Nope, it is (or rather, was) a network show. It aired on the FOX network for the past eight years (ok, ok, eight out of the past nine seasons, since one year it got caught-up in the writer’s strike). The program was based on the idea that each hour is an hour in the lives of the characters; as Kiefer Sutherland intoned at the beginning of each season (with the time changing appropriately), “The following takes place between 6:00 am and 7:00 am. Events occur in real time.” Thoughout each episode, the clock would appear to let the viewer know what time it was…while in later years they were almost dismissive of anything approximating “real time,” the first year you could literally set your watch by the minutes (except for the very beginning of the episode and the very end of it, since they needed to “cheat” a few minutes at either end for opening/end credits, etc.). That first year they even had five-second split-screen interstitials showing you where all the main characters were during the commercial. It was one serious commitment to the real-time clock, and like I said had me at the end of the first episode quite literally on the edge of my living room chair, something no television program before or since has accomplished.

It was, before the writers completely lost whatever talent they had, one helluva television program.