The Morning After: Airport '09

Pretty solid end to a season that brought back a lot of the good aspects of 24. Could have lived without the faux-cliffhanger of Jack laying there dying when we all know he'll be back. (Assuming Kiefer isn't in jail.)
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They put a lot of work into trying to redeem Cougar Bait by showing her as brave, smart and useful by helping to save Jack, but I'm still not buying it because she still looks silly while running, and she managed to get every cop at the airport shot.
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The most brutal part was Jack going all Freddy Kruger with the scapel on the guys who were going to harvest his organs to reconstitute the virus. That's what you get for giving JB a lumbar puncture....

It goes without saying, but SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen the finale yet:
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I gotta say, for the first time since they flipped Tony the third time (from good to bad, then bad to good, then good to bad), I actually bought his motivation -- a man so distraught at losing his wife and son to this shadowy cabal that he would put innocent lives at risk (or even kill them) in order to get to the mastermind. A pretty powerful scene with Tony and Will Patton, followed by another one where Jack had to shoot Tony....twice.
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For once, I'd like to see them not rely on action/violence to solve a dilemma, but rather smarts. I mean, Kim Bauer is not an action actress -- but while we might not buy her winning in a shootout/stabout with evil trained agents, I guess I could buy her figuring a smart way out of her predicament....like getting the bad dude to lend her his computer to check her email (and then secretly sending Chloe a link so Chloe could datamine the computer?) or something to foil the plan.
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Oh, and it goes without saying, but President Taylor is my favorite President since President David Palmer....I like her putting her duty in office above her family -- a very Jack Bauer thing to do.

Does 24 have any female writers or producers? The question came to mind when the First Gentleman told the President that her job had destroyed their family. I know the show likes to be provocatively un-PC with the racial profiling and the torture, but presenting a false choice for a woman between career and family, saying that one can not only take away but actively ruin--completely demolish loved ones-- the other was kind of startling. Yes, she did the right thing in the end, and Cherry Jones showed off her great acting abilities, but that whole plot should never have been conceived.

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Tony just didn't make any sense. He wants to exact revenge for the death of his wife and son but has no compunction in killing thousands of people to do it? He never saw the Death Wish movies? Charles Bronson lost his family too but he never killed innocents in his revenge quest. It felt like the producers were trying to have their twist but also retain Tony loyalists and they came up with something both sides disliked.

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I am guessing that Agent Walker remembered who she was and did not touch a hair on Will Patton. Though having a uber villain who was behind essentially everything in previous seasons (well, Season 5, but I was hoping for more) was a nice touch. If he is the main baddie in Day 8, as it looks like he will be, I hope Patton gets rid of the suit and has some long theatrically juicy monologues. I also hope against hope that in moving the action to NYC, the producers do not in any way reference 9/11 or show Ground Zero. Different universe, but they don't need to have a justification for Jack's interrogation methods. I wish they would get rid of the endless debate (since Season 1) over torture; it doesn't work. The Agent Walker character realizing this at the end is a good sign. But too much of Jack being the tragic hero.

@rosseau -- I guess I buy it as a multiple Tony motivation: he wants to kill the man that killed his wife and unborn son, and was willing to sacrifice innocents in that quest because the BIG BAD GUY would have killed MORE innocents (either short or long term) if Tony didn't eventually bring him to justice.
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Consider it a Jack-like motivation, only darker -- whereas Jack would only endanger bad guys after losing his wife, Tony was willing to go darker and kill innocents for both revenge and the end "greater good."

I'm with you rousseau. I was watching the president thinking how sexist it was. The whole season really, she's been crying about this or that, and the other characters think it's perfectly OK. "Don't worry about the crisis, ma'am, go hold your husband's hands."