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A little over one year has passed since the events of last season. Former Presidential candidate David Palmer has a new job; not to spoil things, let's just say it involves working in a funny-shaped office. This being a show about a Counter Terrorist Unit, it's safe to say that some terrorists may be afoot, and this time a single assassination won't be enough to satisfy them. They've smuggled a live nuclear weapon into the country and plan to detonate it right in the heart of Los Angeles. Wouldn't you know it, the only person who can save the day is our man Jack Bauer, and naturally he has very little time to do so. Meanwhile the President has to contend with a trigger-happy cabinet ready to throw the country into a Middle Eastern war whether the Commander-in-Chief goes along with their plans or not. Along the way both men will have to work with old friends, encounter new adversaries, and trace their way through a labyrinthine plot filled with plenty of back-stabbing and political manipulations.

The second season of 24 has all of the action, suspense, intrigue and twisty plotting that made the first season so enjoyable, but it can't be denied that some of the efforts to keep the plot moving are even more hit-or-miss than last year. The show has both higher highs and lower lows this time around. The best parts of the season, including the premiere episode that kicks things off with quite a nice jolt, top anything from the first year. But the worst parts are much worse. Jack's slutty and repeatedly-kidnapped daughter Kim is back and the writers' attempts to keep her involved in the story become painfully ridiculous. It seems like this girl is doomed to run into a new psycho each new hour for the rest of her life, continually at constant peril. At one point this storyline becomes so bad that we watch her get lost in the woods and almost eaten by a cougar! Luckily she is rescued at the last second by a man who, yes, turns out to be another psycho. Eventually she escapes and makes her way to a convenience store and winds up being held hostage by, you guessed it, another psycho. Hour after hour it's the same thing, and none of it has anything to do with the main storyline that we actually care about. It's all filler, an excuse to keep her character on the show so that we can watch Elisha Cuthbert strut around in a series of admittedly wonderful tight shirts.

Early parts of the season also have a problem with one major storyline that is too slowly developed and takes much too long to be integrated with the main plotline; fortunately its payoff turns out pretty well. Later on, Jack Bauer seems to transform from a fallible human being into an invincible and unkillable superhero, which strains the limits of credulity quite a bit, and there is a major deus-ex-machina plot twist in the middle of the season that is extremely frustrating. The nuclear bomb conspiracy raises the stakes considerably over last year but also deflates some of the suspense. When the threat involved the assassination of one man, a viewer may legitimately question whether our hero can prevent the disaster, but I doubt many viewers will really expect the show's producers to let the terrorists nuke Los Angeles. Then again, the series does have a go-for-broke reputation and at a certain point you just never know whether they'd go through with it or not.

Despite these flaws, 24 is still a terrifically entertaining television series and anyone who enjoyed the first season deserves to take a look at Season Two. Kiefer Sutherland makes a fine action hero and the rest of the cast is stellar. The show has a bit of a darker edge, with Jack seemingly left unhinged by the events of last season, and the political scheming in the President's storyline is compelling, not to mention the eerily similarities between this fictional story and real-world events that were unfolding as the series aired. Juicy characters Nina Myers and Sherry Palmer return to steal a number of episodes. Supporting player Tony Almeida grows into a stoic leading man and the morally ambiguous George Mason is developed into a fascinating, multi-dimensional character. I will suspend my disbelief through some of the weaker story elements when so many strong points remain. I can't wait to see where the show goes in Season Three, though I do hope that maybe next year will be someone else's bad day, perhaps Tony's. Let Jack have some rest for a while. The guy deserves it. He's been up for an awfully long time.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The second season of 24 is once again presented in the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio as the series airs on Fox's digital broadcast channel (the standard analog broadcast is cropped to 4:3), and once again the show is cinematically composed to take advantage of the wider framing. The anamorphically enhanced image on these DVDs is very sharp with exemplary fine object detail, yet almost no noticeable edge enhancement artifacts. The heightened detail may even have one drawback for the actors, in that we can now see every pockmark in Dennis Haysbert's complexion with vivid clarity. Colors are also strong and the contrast range has a rich black level which lends a nice sense of depth.

Where the picture quality falters is the appearance of grain. The show's photography has some grain endemic to its shooting style, which was also plainly visible in the first season, but it seems more exaggerated this time around. Now even bright daylight scenes are often grainy, and it usually looks less like film grain than like digital compression-induced video noise. This is disappointing, and watching on a large screen I found it distracting for a while, but to be honest after an episode or two the otherwise slick and glossy production values won over and I stopped being bothered by the grain.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Stepping up a notch from last season is the quality of the soundtrack, now available in a full-blown Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. Unlike some other television series DVDs, this show actually makes good use of the 5.1 encoding. The rear soundstage is very aggressive with many discrete surround effects such as helicopters circling from speaker to speaker. Although not officially an EX mix, the track will decode well if you activate a rear center channel. Dialogue is always perfectly clear, even when it shifts directionally across the front soundstage during the many split-screen scenes, and the music has a nice presence.

This is, however, still a television production and will have some expected limitations. Bass does not extend very deep beyond what is heard in the musical score, and gunshots and explosions rarely have the kind of satisfying thump you get from a feature film soundtrack. Still, for a TV show this sounds great.

A Spanish dub track is also available in Dolby 2.0 surround. The disc provides optional subtitles in either English for the Hearing Impaired or Spanish, as well as true English Closed Captioning.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Because last year's Season One box set was rather deficient in the bonus features department, the show's producers went out of their way to create a nice selection of DVD supplements for Season Two while it was still in production. To start, it should be noted that every episode (aside from the premiere) begins with its original broadcast "Previously on..." story recap. This is something usually missing from TV series box sets, even the first season of this show, and it's a nice inclusion here. Unfortunately, although the episodes do include chapter stops (another nice improvement over Season One), the chapters are not conveniently placed so that you can skip over the recap. That becomes slightly annoying during marathon viewings. Perhaps Fox can get it right in time for Season Three?

Of immediate interest are no less than six episode-specific audio commentaries, one per disc for the first six discs of the set. Participants include key members of the production crew such as creators Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, director Jon Cassar, and writer Howard Gordon, as well as a significant number of the primary cast members: Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer), Dennis Haysbert (David Palmer), Carlos Bernard (Tony Almeida), Sarah Wynter (Kate Warner), Michelle Forbes (Lynne Kresge), Sarah Clarke (Nina Myers), Penny Johnson Jerald (Sherry Palmer), and Xander Berkeley (George Mason). These are all pretty good, interesting commentaries, but the most entertaining is the first one, featuring Carlos Bernard, Michelle Forbes and Sarah Wynter (who has a surprising Australian accent). This is more of a party track than truly informational, but it's a lot of fun listening to the actors joke around about working on the show, especially since their three characters had very little interaction with one another in the series itself. Wynter starts a running joke where she comments on how "hot" all of the other actors in the show are, including those in the room with her.

After this we get a collection of not just one or two but 44 deleted scenes. The first 22 scenes have optional commentary by directors Jon Cassar and Rodney Charters, while for the next 22 scenes Charters is replaced by writer Howard Gordon. Most of the footage is very good and would have worked well in the show, but was cut for either pacing or time constraint issues. The scenes appear on the discs with the episodes they were deleted from, or again collected as a complete string of all 44 scenes on the final disc of the set (with a Play All option). The scenes are all presented in anamorphic widescreen and appear in presentable quality equal to the rest of the episodes. All told, the total footage runs about an hour.

All remaining supplements are found on Disc 7. Next is a 13-minute featurette that the included booklet calls On the Button, but the actual disc refers to with a different title that gives away a crucial plot spoiler. I will choose not to announce the spoiler, and will recommend that first-time viewers stay away from Disc 7 entirely until they've watched the full season. The featurette covers the filming of a major action set-piece and goes into a lot of interesting detail about how these things are staged so as to look very dangerous without killing all of the stunt people in the process.
Normally I expect these TV series box sets to be filled with a lot of Electronic Press Kit fluff, but that is not the case at all here.

One of the most impressive features is a 2-part documentary called 24 Exposed. The first half runs 45 minutes and the second half another 42 minutes. Part 1 begins with an amusing voice-over from Kiefer Sutherland announcing "The following documentary takes place between March 24 and April 30 during the final two episodes of the season" in his most serious Jack Bauer tone. Technically, Part 1 is supposed to cover production and Part 2 post-production, but really they both concentrate on the actual location filming. The logistics of shooting a complex show like this are often astounding, and this very thorough documentary covers all the important bases in an interesting, entertaining fashion.

Last, and sadly least, is a Multi-Angle Scene Study from episode 6, which allows the viewer to use the remote control to toggle between different camera angles during a specific scene. It's a good idea, but would have been better implemented if they had chosen a different scene, preferably one which didn't involve two cameras shooting from almost the same position as one another. As it is, the feature is not terribly interesting.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

No ROM extras have been included.

Parting Thoughts