I love 24. From the pilot, I was hooked, and I've been a huge fan of the show ever since; even in seasons where other people said it wasn't up to par, I was enjoying myself. That's why it pains me to say this: the eighth season is without question the show's worst. By season's end, I'd lost my love for it and was simply watching it to say that I'd stayed with the show to the end - and all of my friends, likewise longtime fans, echoed those sentiments.
There's not enough space for me to detail everything that went wrong with season eight, and why; there are just too many missteps. There's the introduction of Dana Walsh (a badly written character poorly acted by Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff), whose subplot was the only time in 24 history where I found myself mentally tuning out. There's the destruction of once-interesting characters like President Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) and now-former FBI agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching), who went from people I liked in season seven to people I was happy to see go away in season eight. There's Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) becoming acting head of CTU. As for Jack (Kiefer Sutherland), he spends a large part of the season basically going off the deep end. The ending? Been there, done that before.
There's one thing I'm really upset about not having here, and that's commentaries. Every season set before has come with at least a handful of commentaries, and good ones that involve key cast and crew members from the episode in question. Half the fun of a 24 release was sitting around listening to Jeffrey Nordling jokeabout being killed off, or Carlos Bernard poking fun at stuff, or Jon Cassar teaching us things we didn't know about the show's production. Unfortunately, season eight doesn't have a single commentary track. Not even one on the series finale. I find it hard to believe they couldn't have found someone among the cast and crew to record tracks, so I wonder what happened.
