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| - Aborted Arc info moved from main article.
* (Some fans are still hoping Max and/or Trepkos from Day 2 shows up again.)
* An more egregious example shows up if you think about it; the past 7 seasons (some more subtly than others) have been slowly building towards an inevitable confrontation between the good guys and a shadowy organization pulling the strings behind most of the evil plots in the series. Fast forward to production of the last 6 episodes or so, and writers suddenly learn there isn't going to be a season 9. This forced massive storyline changes, and most likely we will never see a resolution in canon.
* They haven't actually been building up to anything like that Max was killed in the Game while the rest of his group were said to have been captured prior to Day 3. The second group was a company ran by Jack's father and brother that was resolved in Day 6 with their deaths, with it being completely separate from the previous group. The third group in Day 7 ATTEMPTED to be this, but it was so thrown together at the last minute that no one bought it and it just lead to people mocking the David Palmer assassination conspiracy, so it was dropped. This "ultimate showdown with a bland cabal of vagueness behind everything" was mainly the viewpoint of some fans who wanted to have a link between all the seasons even though none really existed. Basically all of them are aborted arcs that some fans tried to link together but in the show nothing actually came of them
* Nina Myers had a client in Day 3 who remains unidentified, and in Day 1 she said she was working for an unknown third party too. Graem and Philip Bauer were members of Day 7's Omniscient Council of Vagueness because Graem admitted to ordering the hit on David Palmer, something Tony said they were ultimately responsible for. Graeme also claimed to have been behind previous attempts on Jack's life in events prior to Day 5, suggesting a link to previous days. Logan only attained power because he was a Vice-President whose boss was nearly killed in Day 4, which might also have been these machinations. Day 6 also has the group who tried to kill Wayne Palmer who remain unidentified, but bare a lot of the hallmarks of Day 7's group. Yeah, they are linked. Not necessarily a case of Aborted Arc though since the head man was caught in Day 7, making it more like a case of Anticlimax.
* You left out the fact that none of them were officially confirmed to be linked. It's still Fanon since the fans made up the connections. Nina was working for a German individual in Day 1, and it just so happens that the person behind Day 2 was a German businessman named Max, who was killed in the Game and the rest of his group was captured before Day 3. Nina was working for an unknown employer, but it was barely mentioned and I don't think most fans, or even the writers, remember or even focused on that, and it was just used as a device to bring Nina back so Jack can kill her and resolve her storyline for good (to add, it was probably supposed to be Max, but of course they chose to kill him off in the game instead, which took place before Day 3) and then they just moved on to Stephen Saunders. While Logan did rise to the presidency as a result of Air Force One, it was a result of just one of Habib Marwan's plans that season, with no mention of an Omniscient Council of Vagueness at all. The infamous "never-ending" conspiracy was originally masterminded by President Charles Logan and the Bauer family, with the latter ordering Palmer's assassination from behind Logan's back (making it ironic that Logan, Day 5's Big Bad, was the one person who wasn't involved in Palmer's death), however after the poorly received Day 6, Logan was solely blamed as the mastermind behind Palmer's assassination (until the end of Day 7) while Jack's long lost father and brother were never mentioned again. They finally attempted to do something like this with Wilson's group (which was the first and only attempt at using an Omniscient Council of Vagueness to be behind much of the series), however, it flopped instantly since Wilson's plan (to cause a terrorist attack on the US) was completely different from Logan's, as Logan nor anyone in that conspiracy wanted the US to be attacked, and sometimes helped Jack thwart the terrorists, so there's a plothole, which isn't even including the fact that Wilson allowed Tony into his organization, despite the fact Tony was once a target for assassination by Wilson, and Wilson supposedly had Tony's wife Michelle killed in the same attempt, and yet he just takes his Dragon's word that Tony can be trusted and even agrees to meet with him with predictable results. And how did Tony find out anyway when even high-ranking people in his conspiracies didn't even know of his existence? In the end, it was a poorly written storyline despised by the majority of the fanbase. So they just didn't touch it again in a mixture of Aborted Arc, Discontinuity and in some cases Canon Dis Continuity and instead brought back Charles Logan for Day 8's final arc.
* The above information neglects to mention that, in season two's deleted scenes for the finale, Nina is revealed to be with Max on his boat, and it is mentioned that the German contact she was in touch with in the first season was a direct associate of Max. What "Plan B" Max and Trepkos were building towards was never explained, so it is a classic example of Aborted Arc.
* The "never ending conspiracy" isn't just various terrorist attacks thwarted by Jack; it's also the stuff happening within the United States government, the big one being whoever was behind the attempt on the life of Wayne Palmer. Presumably whats meant to have happened is the Wilson group included Philip and Graem Bauer, and they were involved stuff before Day 5 (given Graem's confession that he had tried to kill Jack before that day, implied to be several times and in previous seasons). It's possible they were at least involved with Marwan enough to help him get Air Force One shot down, thus maneouvering their mole Charles Logan into power, though this is speculative. The group's objective seems to be setting up a hardline far-right government favoring tough action against America's enemies and policies favoring the big business interest conspirators (who mostly seem to be arms manufacturers and the like, so the goals coincide), and setting up foreign strong men like Juma (Drazen?) whose policies they like. They were only directly behind the attacks in Day 7 (Hodge's seem to hijack only the chemical weapons part), but such attacks served to drum up support for their ruthless policies, such as Logan's original plot to kill a bunch of terrorists with nerve gas, and the policies Hodges was trying to terrorise Taylor into implementing.
* Regardless of whether these various conspiracies were intertwined or not, the real Aborted Arc was that so few of them were followed up on by the government. Powers Boothe, for instance, seems content on pinning the blame for Wayne Palmer's attack on an innocent man, which seems a temporary measure, but there is no mention of any sort of investigation into who was really behind it, which means he's not too bothered about the rampant infiltration of the White House by assassins and traitors. Graem's co-conspirators at the end of Day 5 are not mentioned again; neither are the other members of Wilson's group. Alexander Trepkos dropped off the face of the Earth Jack never looked into which evil bastard kept on hiring Nina, or who in the government leaked info about Drazen and his whereabouts (Nina doesn't seem likely to have had that clearance). The amount of karma houdini's in this show is quite staggering, and its seemingly because nobody in this world seems to be terribly interested in tracking these scumbags down.
* In the final season of the show, Katee Sackhoff has a personal visitor come to CTU to talk with her. 1) How the hell did he get the address? 2) Would a counter-terrorism unit ALLOW personal on-site visits? 3)Wouldn't somebody in charge have questioned what appeared to be out of character actions by her and a the potential security threat of having someone come to a supposedly secure site?
* Since "24" as an increment of time could have covered everything from 24 seconds to 24 centuries,why was it "necessary" to have every single season cover the span of 24 hours? Wouldn't have been easier to have one day seasons AND one month or less seasons? Solving a problem in day that would take days,weeks,months or years in "real life" made the show grow old for me fast.
* Word of God is that season 2 was originally planned as a season of 24 standalone episodes in which each episode (no longer in real time) would cover an entire day, meaning each season would span almost a month. They decided against this move because it seemed like too much of a departure from the format that made the series what it was in season 1.
* Does anyone remember how well-done the gunfights used to be between Jack Bauer and a room full of mooks? Back in Seasons 1 and 2, when Jack was clearly outnumbered, he was forced to use defensive tactics and trickery/guile to get the upper hand against Gaines' men and the Coral Snake unit, and the implication was always that Jack was at the disadvantage by being just 1 man and barely making it by the skin of his teeth. From Season 4 on, the gunfights became like a first-person-shooter: Jack just points and shoots and doesn't have to worry about being hit, or running out of ammo and the Conservation of Ninjitsu was in full effect to ensure the mooks were literally aiming for empty air when they try to shoot Jack. It took away from any sense of urgency or danger in the fights that Jack didn't even have to duck or retreat from an onslaught of gunfire when his trusty handgun could ensure complete and 100% accuracy from any distance.
* One could argue that from Season 4 on, Jack never really felt that there was much to live for, and thus went all out and dared people to put bullets in him, because he wanted to die, but if he didn't, he'll take them all out.
* You probably didn't watch the early seasons well enough if you thought Jack only used defensive tactics. Midway through season one, there's an entire episode where Jack stalks through the Gaines compound, killing several men before he finds his family, then he starts a massive distraction and gunfight to allow Kim and Teri to get away safely. Hell, Jack's infiltration of Marwan's compound in episode 4.06 was sneaky as well...until he had to go loud and kill everyone in the vicinity.
* When Jack was outnumbered--I never said he only relied on defensive maneuvers. When the entire compound of the Nebulous Evil Organization bec in Season 1, it took two full hours/episodes to take them down.
* President Taylor again; in Season 7, she persists to help a foreign nation, knowing that Col. Dubaku will use the MacGuffin to cause catastrophic damage to America's infrastructure. Then in Season 8, she refuses to hand over President Hassan knowing that terrorists from the IRK will kill thousands of Americans in a dirty bomb. Does anyone else think she's too in love with her own foreign policy initiatives that she disregards the lives of innocent Americans? In the Season 8 case, she could have at least tried to Take a Third Option and pretend to hand Hassan over while outfitting him with a tracker but she chose to just flat out refuse their demands with no other options.
* Well, despite the United States' considerable political influence, the President does not have the authority to hand over the leader of a foreign country. When Hassan finds out what is at stake, he accepts that his life isn't worth hundreds of thousands of lives.
* You may have a point but since when has real-world law ever mattered in the 24-verse (if it did, Taylor would likely have brought it up when debating whether or not to hand over Hassan)?
* I just find it head bangingly stupid that Jack didn't think to tell anyone that Audrey was alive in Season 6. Wouldn't the news that the daughter of the former secretary of defense was being held hostage by the Chinese cause an uproar in the United States? I can't think of any situation in which the American government would just take that sort of thing lying down.
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