24: 1:00pm - 2:00pm/2:00pm - 3:00pm

(SO6E08/S06E09) *Warning, spoilers follow*

Unfounded familial guilt.

Musings about a potential coup.

Mystery men in blue suits.

And a guy who says things like, "Not bloody likely mate," gets drilled.

Maybe I've just been terribly spoiled by the first, super-charged four hours of 24, but this hyped, two-hour installment felt flat-footed to me. I even longed to have the Bluetooth guy back.

So over the latest two hours of 24, viewers saw just how evil Jack Bauer's dad Phillip is. He's not just your garden variety evil, he's the kind of evil that not only kills his own son Graem and frames Jack for the murder (nicely guilting the living son for the death), but threatens his grandson's life as well. Oh, and we can't forget how Phillip also left a tidy little blinking package for his Jack in an abandoned house at the end of the episode. (That would be a bomb, though not of the nuclear variety like the nice one Abu Fayed left for Jack earlier in the episode. For those of you counting at home, Jack faced two bombs in these episodes and only one detonated. Even with that, the two-hour installment still seemed slow to me.)

Aside from discovering the depths of Phillip's evil, viewers also learned that Jack's flirtatious sister-in-law Marilyn Bauer hated the barely room-temperature Graem and had been trying to leave him for years, only the creep vowed to take her son Josh away from her if she left. During a car ride where Marilyn was trying to direct Jack to the location where she once spied Graem talking with some Russian dudes (the Russian had connections to Fayed and the nukes), Marilyn asked Jack if she was one of the reasons why he ran away and joined the military 20 years ago. (Was that eyelash batting that I saw?)

We also learned that Morris O'Brian, who was kidnapped by henchmen working for the "bad" terrorist, will cave to terrorist demands when the henchmen utilize torture tactics against him, like beating him, dunking him in a bathtub and having a drill literally burrow into his flesh. The drill bit business convinced Morris to create a mechanism to arm the remaining suitcase nukes for Fayed, the nukes that could kill tens of thousands. Why did Morris cave? Didn't he, a trained CTU employee, know that Fayed was just going to kill him after he reconfigured the triggering mechanism? Fayed was, in fact, on his way out and had just ordered Morris killed when Jack and his band of CTUers found them. Fayed escaped (again!), but not without leaving Jack with a live nuke, which Jack deftly disarmed via directions from a scowling Chloe. Morris survived the torture, but had to withstand Jack's disgust when Jack learned that Morris gave Fayed a working device. (I wonder what the human rights folks thought about these scenes and how torturing Morris worked.)

Fayed was hurriedly running around LA with three suitcase nukes. Morris shamefully returned to CTU and called himself a coward. Phillip Bauer was busy blackmailing Marilyn into sending Jack to the wrong location so Jack could be ambushed with another bomb. While all of that was on-going, there was some deadly serious political wrangling going on in Washington. However the story line with chief of staff, Tom "The Biscuit" Lennox, plotting in a shadowy boiler room with a slimy White House aide who is in contact with "others" who seem to either want President Palmer II assassinated or overthrown, was too season two-ish for me. The subplot seems to similar. Lennox is becoming Mike Novick.

In season two, President Palmer I wanted to hold off on immediate, retaliatory air strikes after a nuclear bomb detonation on American soil, while his cabinet and his VP pressed him to act. When Palmer I wouldn't do so right away, his chief of staff Novick and the VP had the president ruled incompetent and thrown out of his post.

Thus far this season, two nuclear weapons have been detonated. President Palmer II says he won't enact severe policies to essentially lock up every Muslim in America and suspend civil liberties. Palmer II wants to act with deliberate speed even while nukes are loose.This position is yielding him threatening telephone calls from the VP while his chief of staff Lennox and other mysterious people plot against him. By comparison, last season's weenie President Logan was an entertainment bonanza.

Meanwhile, I did not buy the scene where "good" terrorist Assad was walked into the presidential bunker to have a private chat with President Palmer II. Would a president really have a terrorist just meet with him like that? As Palmer asked Assad to deliver a televised speech to try to persuade Muslims to turn against the terrorists, the two got into a strange discussion about whether this arrangement made Assad a puppet or a U.S. partner. What I didn't understand was how having Assad give a press conference was going to do anything about Fayed's nukes or stop the other assorted terrorist attacks. Does Palmer think that Fayed and his men will have a crisis of conscience and stop this madness?

Yes, these episodes had explosions, ticking bombs, torture and family melodrama. But something still felt a bit off.