Just two days ago the online trailer for the sixth sea­son of 24 went live at the 24 site. On Jan­u­ary 14 Jack Bauer returns with a four-hour sea­son pre­miere on two nights. In the trailer a wave of ter­ror attacks sends the US into a state of emer­gency and CTU gets Bauer back from the Chi­nese. Accord­ing to his looks he didn’t quite enjoy his time over­seas but that was to be expected, wasn’t it? He seems pretty weak and beaten down. Well, check it out for your­self. By the way, Sea­son 5 is expected to be released on DVD on Decem­ber 5. Be sure you’re not gonna miss it. You’ll find a short pre­quel to Sea­son 6 there.

Now, what’s going on with Jack? Will we see another sea­son? Based on the trailer, Jack Bauer will be asked to sac­ri­fice him­self for the US to sur­vive. This time is all about Bauer sav­ing his own ass, or so it seems. There’s quite a chance he’s gonna die in the end, sav­ing the day a last time. I really hope that won’t hap­pen. I’d like to see a sev­enth sea­son but in the end there are only two fac­tors affect­ing this choice: rat­ings and bud­get. Hope­fully, it’s not over yet. On the other hand, Fox has already ordered a new show which is to be done by the 24 people …

That’s all there is to it. Well, not quite. There’s a 24 fea­ture film sched­uled for 2008. Frankly, I can’t see how they’re gonna make a film with this real-time con­cept. We sim­ply have to wait and see for our­selves, I guess.

Well, friends of Dou­glas Adams’ work may know what I’m talk­ing about. There’s a hint for all the rest of you: Answer to life, the uni­verse and every­thing. I’ve recently seen sea­son 5 of 24 and I couldn’t help think­ing of Dou­glas Adams. Jack Bauer seems to have an answer to every­thing, seems to know a solu­tion no mat­ter how bad the sit­u­a­tion he’s in – he always seems to be more than just the aver­age sol­dier with Spe­cial Forces train­ing. Yeah, of course, Jack Bauer isn’t anybody.

24 has a very inter­est­ing and intrigu­ing con­cept. I clearly have to admit that. Fur­ther­more, I like peo­ple com­ing straight to the point. I like intrigues and how sin­gle peo­ple fol­low their own agen­das, no mat­ter what it costs them. I like the idea that every­thing hap­pens in real time and that peo­ple are forced to make deci­sions in a mat­ter of sec­onds. That said, I’ve to admit that I didn’t watch 24 from the beginning.

On the con­trary, I thought of it as the usual bull­shit air­ing on tele­vi­sion today and I only changed my mind when I saw most of fourth season’s episodes. Sud­denly, I des­per­ately wanted to watch this series because it seemed inter­est­ing. I bor­rowed sea­son one from a friend of mine and I just fin­ished watch­ing it. I nearly freaked out when he couldn’t bor­row me sea­son two at once but he’s kinda busy and I’ve got to be patient. For now, that is.

For a long time now, I liked Kiefer Suther­land. He’s a won­der­ful actor and he’s not try­ing to cover up his screw-ups – as evi­denced here – like so many other actors try to do. Well, he paid for it, so what? I’ve done worse …

OK, remem­ber: Newton’s Third Law states that “For every action, there is an equal and oppo­site reac­tion.”. And that’s exactly what 24 feels like. Moves and counter-moves. Peo­ple try to achieve their goals while other peo­ple try to pre­vent them from ever reach­ing what­ever they set their minds onto. In the end, it’s quite sim­ple, ain’t it? Think binary. That’s what decision-making ulti­mately boils down to. Yes or no. Do or don’t. True or false. Really basic stuff but it works. Why? Because of the thou­sands of sub­plots. Every­body is fol­low­ing his own agenda – and we’re gonna see every minute of it. Even though Bauer seems to have an answer to every­thing – despite him say­ing “I don’t know (yet)” – the series seems to have a firm grasp on me.

Just con­tinue that way. I really appre­ci­ate series like this one. It’s good to see it work­ing because most of the other series out there seem to be crap right out of the box …

It’s been a long time again. Well, I don’t care any­more. Cur­rently, there are two to three peo­ple read­ing this blog. Even­tu­ally, I’ll get it right and visit more often but at the moment things are com­pli­cated enough. How­ever, what was I try­ing to write? Ah, I remem­ber. I wanted to write some­thing about Smal­l­ville. Fair warn­ing, isn’t it? If you’re not inter­ested in my ram­blings you can still drop outta here. Wow, I can’t remem­ber being that nice.

Now, where should I begin? Let’s try it this way: I started with Sea­son 1 and I thought it’s nice but def­i­nitely not mine. Sea­son 1 to 2 mostly have been the same. Vir­tu­ally no infor­ma­tion on Clark but lots of meteor freaks turn­ing up. Sea­son 3 was kinda dif­fer­ent but not that much. I wasn’t inter­ested in those, really. Thus, my rela­tion­ship with this series really started with sea­son 4. For the first time, I’ve seen every sin­gle episode and I had to reeval­u­ate my atti­tude towards this ‘new’ Super­man fran­chise. Frankly writ­ten, it wasn’t that good either but it’s been way bet­ter than the first seasons.

And then – with sea­son 5 – things started to get very inter­est­ing indeed. More action, more emo­tion, more thrill, more dra­matic, more time pres­sure – quite intim­i­dat­ing way to make it bet­ter. I’d like to say that Smal­l­ville finally has devel­oped and poses as a really enter­tain­ing series. Yeah, grow­ing up comes at a cost, all good things in life do. Choices have to be made … actu­ally, it’s a lot about mak­ing choices. I can’t await this season’s finale episodes and the offi­cial deci­sion to pro­duce another one.

I under­stand that all good things must come to an end. Peo­ple like to move on and try other things. Then there’s the bud­get. We all know what hap­pens to a really suc­cess­ful fran­chise, don’t we? Actor deals are usu­ally made for five years while seven years gen­er­ally is the max­i­mum. Let’s face it: peo­ple are becom­ing big stars and that’s mak­ing them ever more expen­sive until you reach a point where to much money is spent that stops going on screen. There­fore, it’s surely not wrong to assume that there’ll be at least another sea­son rush­ing in – there’s enough unused poten­tial left, enough sto­ries to explore. Think about it. Clark hasn’t fig­ured out how to fly yet. He doesn’t even know that there are some pow­ers cur­rently unknown to him; tele­scopic and micro­scopic vision or Super-Breath, for instance.