(Note: This review covers both hours of the series premiere for 24: Live Another Day.  Reviews do not occur in real time.)

It’s no secret that I found Jack Bauer’s character turn at the end of 24 to be dissatisfying.  I believe it can be summed up as “character assassination”, which would be in keeping with the slipshod, last-minute plotting favored by Howard Gordon and his writing staffs.  Anyone familiar with Homeland knows exactly how quickly and dispassionately Gordon’s methods can lead to characters going way off the rails.

So when 24: Live Another Day was announced, I felt a lot of emotions: anticipation, fear, skepticism.  And I wasn’t sure if all those reasons why 24 had long since outlived its lifespan had really changed; was an audience jaded over justifications of questionable counter-intelligence going to embrace a character legendary for stepping over the edge?

Not surprisingly, Live Another Day manages to pick up the storytelling and overall style of the original series without missing much of a beat.  This is both good and bad.  It has that sense of the familiar and even comfortable, but it also has each and every trope that 24 ran into the ground for eight seasons.  It’s very clear, right from the get-go, that one’s investment in the nostalgia factor is going to play a huge role in one’s enjoyment of the new material.

Playing into the “been there, done that” impression is that time jumps between seasons was a regular thing for 24.  So coming back four years later, both in reality and in the story, doesn’t seem all that shocking.  As usual, the story centers on a contemporary set of issues: the use of drones, public outcry against such, and hacktivism.  Oddly enough, only one character really changes in the intervening time, and it’s a character decision that is about as wrong-minded as it gets.

Chloe was always a bit awkward, and one could see her going down some strange paths if life would go terribly wrong.  But one thing that she never really wavered on was her sense of morality.  Considering what she was willing to accept out of Jack in the later seasons of 24, all in the name of national security, I find it very hard to believe that Chloe would start railing against intelligence overreach.  She happily engaged in intelligence overreach more times than I can count!

But worse is the idea that she would adopt a WikiLeaks-esque stance, all based on the influence of someone like Adrain Cross.  While I might applaud that she went for the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fashion aesthetic, why in the world would Chloe ever come to think that exposing and endangering covert intelligence agencies, their families, their contact, and so forth would be a moral choice?  It literally takes Jack a single moment of reaction to cut right to the heart of why this character turn (and this sort of thing in general) is completely indefensible.

And as much as I like the idea of President James Heller, it comes with baggage.  In this case, the baggage that is Audrey, who is married to the President’s chief of staff.  Because that is likely to end well, especially with Heller having all kinds of issues that suggest Alzheimer’s.  Oh, and Audrey was basically a complete mess in her post-Jack years, so I’m sure the writers are going to mine the worst excesses of seasons four through six of 24 before the day is done.

I can’t say much about the CIA office in London (which seems unnecessary as a setting, but there we are), but it all seems very familiar, from the visuals to the design to the characters inhabiting the space.  It’s not at all surprising that there would be a hot female agent (Yvonne Strahovski) who is willing to think outside the box (and fall into Jack’s gravitational pull), since that’s practically a given and resonant with the final seasons of 24 as well.  But will Kate Morgan be the one to pull Jack out of the abyss, or will she just be a reminder of what triggered him to go psycho?

Meanwhile, we have a solid villain in Michelle Fairley, who has run a project to remote-control drones, which is a very bad thing.  And she apparently had designs against President Heller, and somehow Jack is going to be implicated.  His reasoning for liberating Chloe is a bit muddled, but considering some of the “logic” of recent seasons of Homeland, it could be a lot worse.

It’s worth noting that this season is only 12 episodes long, so a lot of the long stretches of filler subplots ought to be cut out of the story entirely.  It’s a tacit admission that only half of most seasons of 24 was worth the time, but it’s also going to be a test.  Can they prove that they can tell a solid story in that span of time?  Or did they just end up applying the same methods used for 24 episodes to 12 episodes, incorporating all the same mistakes?  Only time will tell.