Would you agree that this was the best hour of Day 8 so far? By now, it’s no longer just about the action; the level of emotional intensity has jumped to eleven. I think any type of abusive situation — whether between a man and woman or between a parent and child — stirs our inner sense of justice. For that reason, I was completely drawn into Renee’s creepy relationship with Vladimir as well as Josef’s attempt to save his brother in defiance of his father’s orders.
Despite Jack’s misgivings, Renee hasn’t ruined the mission yet, but on the rare occasions that Vladimir leaves her alone, you can see the darkness bottled up behind her eyes, and you just know that she’s going to try to kill him at some point. Last week, Kevin grabbed Dana by the throat and pinned her to the wall; this week, Vladimir grabbed Renee by the throat – I’m seeing a pattern here. I give credit to Annie Wersching and Callum Keith Rennie for bringing incredible tension to their roles; really, every scene between Renee and Vladimir is so taut because there’s this constant danger that one of them is going to snap. (That’s the time bomb that Jack is so worried about.) I’m looking forward to the meeting between Jack and Vladimir next week. I wonder how much longer Vlad has to live … 24 moves through the small-time bad guys pretty quickly.
Speaking of bad guys, what do you guys think of Sergei Bazhaev so far? His number one rule is “Don’t endanger the family.” Right. Exposing your son to weapons-grade uranium doesn’t count as “endangering,” nor does shooting the aforementioned son or kicking Josef around for trying to save him. Someone get Bazhaev a Russian-English dictionary so he can look up the definitions of “endanger” and “family.”
The abusive situation between Sergei and his sons has succeeded in making me very interested in the character of Josef. How will he respond to losing his brother and getting beat down by his dad? Will it make him more obedient or more rebellious? I was losing sympathy for Josef during the clinic scenes, but Sergei’s nastiness has restored the sympathy. And that’s great – having mixed feelings about a villain makes everything more interesting.
A few other stray thoughts:
What did you think of the episode? Leave a comment, and share your thoughts.
Clacked by Ruby T.
on Feb 02, 2010 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
I just saw the latest episode and i agree this was the best episode of the season so far. I was apprehensive at the start of the season but “Renee Walker” is absolutely awesome. You see a little bit of Jack Bauer in her. And what about the last scene, i thought Jack would have whipped up the gun and shot everybody instead of a sniper shooting people off.
The german was really horrible, but at least it was german. The only word that was wrong was Kiefer’s “scumbags” or whatever it was. He forgot the last part of the word.
Anyway, I can’t see Katee act like this anymore. It makes me want to punch things. Starbuck doesn’t behave like this. It’s annoying.
Yeah, he didn’t even try to sound German – I was kind of hoping to hear Kiefer do a German accent. But then I might laugh, and NO ONE laughs at Jack Bauer!
I know what you mean about Katee, but she can’t be Starbuck all the time. You may have to join a support group for people suffering from Starbuck withdrawal. ;-D
Hehe it didn’t sound german… this is generating enormous flashbacks to oh so many US actors speaking english adding a ton of Zs ;-)
What makes you sound german is when you mispronounce “th” (a lot of germans can’t manage to get their tongues to their upper teeth which is necessary for a correct “th” – the sound doesn’t exist in german) and of course the swap of “i” and “e”. We pronounce “e” like you do “i” and vice versa. It’s really not that hard. Oh and the guy pretending to be russion was just as “good” as Kiefer. I guess they were basically given phonetic cuecards and that was it.
Funny enough though we have Jürgen Prochnov acting as the head russian mobster, doing a russian accent. We now need somebody from russia telling us if the german actor’s english has a correct russian accent ;-)
Oh and I guess bsgfan2003 and I can form that group you talked about ;-) You know the underlying problem is something else – I don’t think this storyline is just filler and won’t serve any purpose at all. I mean I hope it will serve some purpose – it would be really neat if the ex-con (I mean the ex-boyfriend who’s also a convict ;-) ) would have a run-in with Jack later on, screwing something up. But how high is that chance? I lost so much confidence in the writing staff on season 6 I don’t have much faith this will work out in a satisfying way. But I still hope. I mean it’s Starbuck for cripes sake :-)
Sergei is only interested in protecting the family unit, which means profiting enormously from this weapons trafficking, and limiting exposure to the authorities. Any family member that endangers the latter goal is obviously expendable.
I was actually sympathizing with Josef the entire time. He seems to be a bad guy who doesn’t kill unnecessarily. He did his best not to shoot everyone in the clinic if he could hide from them, and would have had no reason to murder the doctor’s family if the doctor cooperated fully. I wasn’t even sure if he was going to eliminate the doctor afterward, even though it would have been the smart thing to do.
Renee went dark to stop Jack from talking her down. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have washed the earpiece down the drain, but recovered it after sex.