24: Jack is Back

Is that your final answer, Bauer?

Start spreading the news: These days, Jay-Z isn't the only one in an "Empire State of Mind." Because Jack Bauer and 24 have hit the Big Apple. And hit it hard.

The show's eighth season, a.k.a. Day 8, opened on Sunday with the promising first half of a four-hour premiere that found Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) recovered from his bio-weapon contamination and happily immersed in the role of grandfather to his daughter Kim's little girl. But domestic bliss just ain't the man's destiny, at least not on this day. Trouble literally came knocking when a sweating, bleeding operative named Victor arrived at Jack's door. Looking to cut a deal with CTU, Victor revealed that an assassination attempt was imminent against President Omar Hassan of the Middle Eastern country Kamistan. Hassan was at the United Nations finalizing a peace agreement with U.S. president Allison Taylor.

"I'm out," Jack told Victor, who replied, "You're the guy who always does the right thing." True dat. Soon Jack was trying to bring Victor in from the cold through the mean streets of New York City, a little bit of reluctant freelance work before flying off to L.A. with Kim and her family. "Something came up. I'm going to be a little late," he told Kim as we had a sense that Jack will be pretty busy for the next 23.5 hours. And so the roller coaster ride that is 24 began anew.

After the debacle that was Season 6, I almost gave up on 24. But like great athletes, great shows sometimes have off-seasons. If not 24 at its best, Season 7 at least marked a return to form. And thanks to the return of favorites like Cherry Jones as President Allison Taylor, not to mention the the addition of all sorts of new characters, I'm pretty hopeful about Season 8. Mykelti Williamson as Brian Hastings, the new head of CTU looks especially promising. He and Jack have already squared off about the nature of the assassination conspiracy, and Hastings has a touch of mean about him. When he ordered the "full biometric package" on a female reporter who was having a relationship with Hassan and was implicated in the plot, it sounded far more sinister than just another polygraph.

I'm not sure if there's a velvet rope and doorman outside of CTU, but its updated steel-and-glass interior looked like a nightclub that the likes of you and me would never get into. Clad in a sleeveless black dress, new character Dana Walsh (played by Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff) resembled a hostess cruising through the place. A taste of tall, toned, tech-savvy perfection isn't the worst thing in the world, but let's give credit to 24 for quickly providing Dana with a surprising backstory: She's a trailer-trash refugee eager to keep her past a secret.

Welcome too is Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor as President Hassan. Kapoor admirably created the proper sense of historic destiny and vanity that this character demands. And speaking of vanity: Between Hassan and his elaborately-coiffed brother (the Middle Eastern sub-species of a small, dark North American hominid indigenous to Wes Anderson films, Homo sapiens jason schwartzmansis), Kamistan must possess a longstanding cultural tradition of male big hair. Perhaps Hassan's willingness to negotiate a deal with President Taylor is no surprise, because the nation's penchant for gravity-defying hairstyles suggests a common ancestral homeland with Zohan, the Israeli Jose Eber.

Just as moving to New York energized Zohan, so too has 24's arrival in the city. Back when the show was set in Southern California, it rarely employed notable locations in the region. Blow up the Hollywood Sign, for God's sake! And why wasn't there ever a threat against the Kardashians' house? Even for those of us who live in L.A., nuclear annihilation in the outer suburbs didn't seem to have sufficient urgency, at least as long as freeway traffic and real estate prices weren't adversely affected. Last year's move to Washington D.C. seemed borderline redundant because 24 already trafficked in plenty of White House scenes.

But the vision of New York that 24 created in the first episode is intriguing, a city of ongoing, low-intensity urban warfare with gun battles in the streets and spy drones cruising among the skyscrapers. The city looked closed in and claustrophobic, emphasizing how trapped Jack really was when Chloe and Kim pleaded with him to rejoin the battle. Looking around CTU, Jack offered the most poignant statement he has ever uttered about his frame of mind when he growled, "I hate this place."

As his granddaughter said to him, Jack doesn't look like a grandpa. And let's face it, we know that the destination Jack was bound for as he loaded up on weaponry in the CTU armory is truly no country for old men. It may look like New York's concrete jungle, but Jack will soon be in a place that, no matter what Jay-Z may think, is what nightmares, not dreams, are made of.

He's going to Jackistan.