Near miss on 24

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS OF LAST NIGHT'S EPISODE OF 24.

Is it my imagination or is 24 getting a bit predictable? As I was watching last night’s episode and saw Agent Doyle and his team getting ready to raid the warehouse, I couldn’t help thinking that Chang was really somewhere else and his mercenaries were preparing to hit CTU. The only part that I was wrong about was I thought the goal was to kidnap Morris and use him to repair the chip. Instead they were going after that Bauer kid and using him to as payment to Phil Bauer for getting the chip working.

Either I am getting better at predicting plot twists or the writers are getting worse at coming up with new stuff. I am guessing it’s more the latter. Since CTU has already been attacked twice in the series and most recently it happened in the last season, most veteran 24 watchers probably predicted the same thing as well. My prediction is that Agent Doyle realizes from the phone call that something was going on at CTU and returns to engage the mercenaries.

But the more I think about what I saw, the more I realize that television is an extremely dicey business and last night’s episode could have been a major disaster for the broadcast network. Let’s say hypothetically speaking that Fox decided to start the new season three weeks earlier than it actually did. In that scenario, last night’s episode would have aired on April 16. So less than 12 hours after the Virginia Tech shooting, Fox would have aired an episode showing a group of Chinese guys running into a building, locking all the exits, and started shooting while everyone else dived underneath their desks. What a dilemma that would have been? What would Fox have done in such a situation – air the episode as scheduled, air a clip show and delay its schedule by one more week, or air a disclaimer giving away the plot twists and telling viewers to not watch if they were sensitized to the events of that morning?

I wonder if even Joe Surnow and the people who work for him realize how they really dodged the bullet with last night’s episode, no pun intended.