24 Jumped the Shark

Aw, damn. 

I was all excited about the new season of 24, and now I've (provisionally) decided it jumped the shark. 

One of the things I'd genuinely liked about 24 in the past was that CTU was, by and large, good at its job.  It was sort of comforting, in the post-9/11 world, to envision a government agency dedicated to keeping us safe that was actually efficient.  It was populated by well-meaning smart people who did the impossible in an astonishingly quick amount of time.

According to the episode I just watched, CTU is now populated largely by bureaucratic pencil pushers who couldn't stop Wile E. Coyote.  In just two short hours, we've seen:  (1) Erin ignore a valid lead; (2) EVERYONE miss the fact that the terrorist attack did not match the language of the chatter; (3) an astonishinly incompetent interrogation; (4) field officers (& Erin) miss something that Jack spotted from a camera-phone relay; (5) all of CTU not know as much about a suspect that Jack did (can they not read a file?); and (6) the head of Field Ops get shot because he approached an armed suspect with no cover at all.  Hey, at least the writers let him beat the crap out of Jack first, so he could die with some measure of dignity.  But the writers of this show do seem to be setting us up for 22 more hours of Jack knowing what's right and being stymied at every turn by those bozos at CTU who don't seem capable of seeing the big picture.

Ugh.

Not to mention it appears that an unusual percentage of the players look to be under the age of 20.  Riiiight.  I thought I was watching 24, not "Wargames."  Come on, people, not everything has to counter-program "The O.C."