The TV Zone

You're maybe asking yourself at this point, "Jack's revenge?" Hasn't Jack had enough "revenge" - with too many bodies to count, a president toppled, and various countries on various continents raked over by his righteous anger over six seasons? What more revenge must Jack exact? Critics. That's who. The blogerati. Or Newspaper types who said the sixth season - the nuke one - wasn't very good. Left-wingers who insinuated that the many torture scenes were sort of an endorsement of the Bush anti-terror doctrine. All those nattering naybobbers. Jack hasn't taken care of THEM yet, has he?

Next season he will. In an interesting - if crowded, confused and completely disorganized session this afternoon at the BH - show-runner "24" top boss Howard Gordon said that next season, Jack will face a senate panel that'll be a proxy for all these dumbasses. Or as HoGo put it: these senators will be "a stand-in for the pundits who took shots at us."

Details - as they always are until the show blows us all away with its wonderfully outrageous over-the-top silliness (don't you just LOVE "24"?) - were kinda sparse yesterday, but (Roslyn native) Gordon laid out some basics. As you know...the Nov. 23 prequel will be a standalone that'll bridge last season, the wacky one, with the new one, a less wacky one (but maybe in some respects, even more wacky.) Jack parachutes into the midst of a political coup or civil war - the trailer reporters saw yesterday didn't exactly specify - in a fictional African country where some really terrible things are happening to good people, and Jack has to take care of the bad people who did this stuff. Meanwhile, stateside, a new president (Cherry Jones) is sworn in just as this is all happening (think Darfur, or Rwanda....)

Why is he here in the first place? Because - per HoGo - "he's avoiding a summons from a congressional committee" stateside. This committee wants to grill him about the stuff he did (or did not do) to that circuit board last season, not to mention the near-global-catastrophe that resulted, but "Jack is unrepentant, and he feels like the idea of trying to defend himself is a corrupt act," which is why he's fled. (Last scene last season? He's on that cliff, looking out to the great beyond, after his world has tumbled once again, and Audrey is gone for good, etc.)

Anyway, Jack will have to face these senators at the beginning of the new season and that is when he - and "24" - will get their revenge for all the terrible and unfair things said by all the nitwits last year.

Says HoGo: "[The show's] become a running joke on a number of fronts, because obviously we upped the ante a number of times. Yet we've found something new and improbably, I think it works." He adds, almost helpfully, "it's a smaller idea" that the nuke-crazed 6th.

Of course, this time Jack kills the critics. What could be smaller than that?