TV is the New Reading

“24” is back as strong as ever

With a SMASH! to the side of an SUV from the camera perspective of a little girl -- a car crash engineered by domestic terrorists bent on destabilizing air traffic and other critical systems -- the sun rose on a seventh season of “24.”

It was worth the wait.

Whatever they did in the additional time they took to improve the writing, the effects, the casting, whatever rewrites and re-engineering they did, the effect was nothing short of awesome.

It’s the seventh season -- or “Day Seven” -- of the real-time epic “24,” which traces the evolution of a national disaster through a 24-hour time period from the perspective of counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland.

Day 7 finds Jack facing down a Senate hearing led by Kurtwood Smith, retracing his career and the ne’er-do-wells he’s interrogated a little more intensely than the Geneva Convention would prefer. Faithful viewers have long been aware of his less scrupulous excesses, which Jack has always justified through a rationale that the prevention of violence against the many outweighs violence against one. It’s unattractive, beyond the fact that in the world of this show, it has always proved effective, and just in the nick of time. We’ve seen Jack employ such tactics ranging from threatening to stab people in the eye to manipulating video to trick people into thinking they’ve witnessed the assassination of their family to zapping people with a frayed lamp cord to actually shooting people through the leg.

So there’s certainly a public hearing to be held. As Jack himself rationalizes, however, these were the actions he took to keep people safe, so the public can decide whether they’re OK with that.

But just as his testimony is just getting under way, Jack is whisked from the Senate hearing and deputized by the FBI to help stop former counter-terrorist colleague Tony Almeida, who appears not only to have survived and recovered from his apparent fatality on Day 5, but now also to have joined a terrorist cell.

That car crash at the beginning of the show allowed Tony’s new friends to abduct John Billingsley, a computer geek responsible for the security systems shielding air traffic controls. He’s forced to build a module that allows the terrorists to mainpulate air traffic and smash planes into each other. And by the end of the two-hour opener, it’s clear that the domestic terrorists are acting at the behest of insurgent leadership within the fictional African nation of Sangala -- a group introduced in November’s Day 7 preview called “24: Redemption.”

The Sangalese ambassador is in talks with U.S. president Allison Taylor, who has plenty on her plate without planes crashing into each other. And by the end of the two-hour opener, the ambassador is darkly outlining his revenge strategy.

Most long-time viewers know that in true “24” fashion, nothing is as it appears at the beginning. Jack will dialogue with Tony and the backdoor hack of national security will only be a front for something even more sinister.

But as a writer who’s been critical of this show in the past, I wanted to go on record saying that it seems to be off to an excellent start. The pacing is perfect, Jack’s new colleagues at the FBI are displaying the right mix of trust and skepticism, and the short-range objectives seem to fit more neatly into the long-range objectives than they have in the past.

What I’m saying is ... keep up the good work.

FOX’s “24” earns a TV-14 rating for graphic violence, destruction and gunplay. It airs Mondays at 8 p.m.

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