24 Legacy! No Jack but still feels the same….

24 has always been one of my favorite shows.  I loved Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer and I would go see anything with that character in it.  It’s just bad ass and fun.  When I heard they were rebooting it, I was skeptical.  When I heard that Kiefer was not returning, I was even more skeptical.  When I saw who they chose to replace him, I was concerned but open to it.  I had seen enough of him in Walking Dead that I could imagine him as a badass terrorist fighter.  Terrorist, Zombies… more or less the same, right?

Well, 5 episodes in, I am hooked.  34 is back.  There is a terrorist plot of cells that plan to do a ton of bad things.  There are crooked government officials, mistrust within CTU (which is surprisingly still around despite being unable to stop all that happened in the Bauer years, including nuking part of LA).  We also get a perspective from a terrorist cell as well as from street gangs of DC.  I actually like the street gang aspect of the story.

Thank goodness, it is somewhere else other than LA.  The world does not revolve around LA!  We are in Washington DC, which kind of makes sense because of all the places they have tried to hit, DC has been immune from attack, at least in real life.  Carter (Corey Hawkins) is a young ex-Ranger who lead a team to take out a Bin Laden type bad guy.  This is the aftermath of that attack.

Carter is hunting down activation codes for terrorist cells.  As much as I like 24, I do hate when they make complex things simple for the masses.  And this is one of those things.  I find it hard to believe that that a single set of codes are the key to terrorists’ plans.  I also find it hard to believe they would be THAT coordinated that they had a set of codes that just had to be texted and things happen.  What are they?  Robots?  But I accepted it for the sake of the story.

Carter is definitely different from Bauer and he has his cheesy moments, but overall it feels like 24 and most of the characters are great.  The story is nothing special, but I feel the tension and the intrigue.  It’s good.  It’s 24.  So well done, so far.  Let’s hope it keeps it up.