Kiefer Sutherland of '24'

Credit: FOX

It shouldn't have been surprising that Monday (Feb. 16) night's "24" spent only a little bit of time on suspense, a few satisfying moments bringing back long-absent favorite characters, a few minutes on red herrings, a few seconds on not-so-shocking revelations and a whole lot of time resetting the pieces on the chess board.

Last week's episode delivered the action and the badassery and, if the teaser for next week's episode is to be believed, there's a lot more to come, but Monday's episode was a little lax.

[More after the bump, complete with spoilers...]

It's time for "24" to reraise the stakes, but this wasn't the episode to do it. 

Everything has, at this moment in Day Seven, become personal, rather than global. Ike Dubaku is no longer a threat to the United States and the situation is Sangala is, unless I miss my guess, totally irrelevant now. American forces will do their thing and Sangala will be restored to Prime Minister Motobu's hands, with the awareness that US-approved semi-democratic African regimes have a tendency to go haywire every bit as frequently as military juntas.

The people at risk are sad and tangential characters. 

Two episodes ago, Dubaku's innocent girlfriend Martika was just hoping to have her friendly mate over for a lasagna dinner with her disapproving sister. I'm a bit disappointed we missed out on the lasagna scene, but instead we got to watch Jack Baur and Agent Walker give Martika a slideshow and Power Point presentation proving that the man she loved was really the Butcher of Sangala. It was like the most heart-breaking vacation slideshow ("Here's Dubaku at his camp surrounded by his child soldiers... And here's Dubaku making funny faces and desecrating a pile of corpses") ever. Thanks to the Mole (we'll get there in a moment), Martika is now in serious jeopardy, but who's really going to be sad if something happens to her? Agent Walker, that's who. 

Agent Walker is a volcano waiting to erupt in red-faced outrage. I would know that even if I hadn't seen scenes from next week's show. She's settled into her role: She knows everything Jack Bauer does is right, but she feels really bad about it and doesn't understand how Jack doesn't. Feeling bad is acceptable only if you accept Jack's always right. So far, Agent Moss has yet to be convinced. He'd better hurry and see the light, or he may need to die.

But back to the uninteresting jeopardy, not only will nobody care if First Gentleman Taylor dies, but they told us his surgery may take five hours, which means we don't need to worry about the character again for another five weeks.

You just can't get me to fidget in my seat over what's going to happen to The President's Husband or The Dictator's Girlfriend.

Instead of dramatic stakes, at least we revealed our various moles during Monday's episode. This is generally the point in the season when we learn that the minorities -- Chinese, Middle Easterners, Latinos -- we thought were behind the season's plots were really just stooges for The Vast White Male Conspiracy and, indeed, that's the path we're going down. We already know that Jo n Voight will eventually be the Big Bad, whenever he's able to return, but tonight we met the preppy white guy liaising between Jon Voight and Dubaku and we learned that the mole in the FBI is...

Billy Walsh!

Darn you, Walsh! First you ruin Vincent Chase's career with "Medellin" and then this?

So yes, Rhys Coiro's Sean Hillinger turned out to be the Mole, to the surprise of absolutely nobody. Granted that a third of the audience, the third that doesn't understand diversionary tactics, announced loudly that Janis was the Mole just minutes earlier, but everybody was just behaving according to character. So far this season, just about all we've learned about Sean is that he's willing to violate FBI and FAA protocol to get his wife's plane down safely and that as much as he seems to love said wife, he's also sleeping around. Nothing else. He's a bit icky and sleazy, so the knowledge that he's also committing treason probably isn't going to change anybody's perception of him. His episode-closing treachery calling in an FBI arrest warrant on Jack and Agent Walker and then helping tip Dubaku off that Martika was in cahoots with the FBI is bad, but it could probably be worse.

As for Janis? She's socially awkward and insecure and we haven't learned much else about her. So when Chloe arrived in the FBI offices, her suspicion was completely within character. Thus far we've only seen Chloe and Janis exchange furrowed brows, but I look forward to a snark-off at some point in the episodes to come. In any case, I never thought Janis was doing anything other than what she said she was doing when she hacked into Chloe's system. Social discomfort is relatable and it's part of why viewers have always liked Chloe and it's part of why Janis could be fun if they give her anything to do.

Speaking of Chloe, who drove her to the FBI offices, but Morris, looking mighty displeased to be playing Mr. Mom. Then again, just about everything displeased Morris, so that isn't surprising. It was a good scene and I hope that's not the last we see of him. 

But Morris' appearance was FAR from the least exciting unannounced cameo in the hour. President Palmer's worried about her husband and asks Bill to find somebody to pick up her estranged daughter and Bill says he has somebody he trusts. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't able to guess that just minutes after we met Olive Taylor, the man who came to pick her up was...

Agent Pierce!

Simply put, if you didn't cheer when Glenn Morshower walked on the screen, you are not a "24" fan. OK, fine. Maybe you are. "24" fans come in all flavors. But you aren't my kind of "24" fan. I cheered. Since I can't imagine First Daughter Olive has any purpose, I hope this is just a ruse to get Pierce back involved with the action.

Other thoughts on the episode:

***Morris and Agent Piece got on-camera appearances, but we also heard name-checks for several long-deceased "24" characters. When was the last time anybody referenced Paul Schultze's Ryan Chappelle or Roger Cross' Curtis Manning? Agent Moss may be a tool, but at least he has respect for the dead.

***You know who I like? Bob Gunton's Ethan Kanin. Nobody's really listening to him, but he's kind of a voice of reason. I really hope he isn't evil.

***You know who I don't like? Martika's sister Rosa. Can we never see her again, please?

***This was the first episode shot post-writers strike and so it also would have been the first episode shot after the writers had a clue what happened with Jack in Africa before he was called before the Senate, so it was good to have Jack tell Dubaku's girlfriend, "I was in Africa a few months ago. He was responsible for murdering a friend of mine."

***The product plug for the Hyundai Genesis in the scene between Chloe and Morris -- first with the dashboard navigation and then with the camera showcasing the car's front and rear -- was as inept as any piece of product integration I've ever seen.

What'd you think of the episode?

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Phil Keoghan of 'The Amazing Race'

Credit: CBS

The fall's 13th installment of CBS' "The Amazing Race" wasn't so much of a race at all.

Siblings Nick and Starr finished in first a whopping seven legs of The Race, including the finale for the million dollar prize. They were athletic, reasonably intelligent and except for one meltdown from Starr, they kept their wits about them at all times. Only two other teams won legs the entire race. It was probably the most dominant piece of racing in the show's history.

I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that the show's 14th season, which premiered on Sunday (Feb. 15) night, will be more competitive. In fact, I'm feeling pretty good about this "Amazing Race" season so far.

As I've written before elsewhere, "The Amazing Race" probably should always have two-hour premieres, because otherwise there's just too much happening to keep track of all of the newly introduced teams, much less get to really like or hate any of them. But Sunday's "Amazing Race" premiere had several of the things I like most about the show, some of which were sorely lacking last season.

[Full recap, complete with spoilers, after the bump...]

1) Everybody actually read the clues - I know, it doesn't sound like so much to ask, right? But how many legs last season were lost by teams that misinterpreted clues, failed to fully read clues or just ignored pieces of key information contained in the clues? There were penalties and restarts galore last season. I think Nick and Starr probably would have won anyway based on their strengths, but their margin of victory was only increased by  never crucially botching a clue. Then again, Dan and Andrew made it to the final leg despite seemingly screwing up every clue they got. But on Sunday's "Amazing Race" premiere, everybody did the little things right. Either Bertram van Munster and company made the clues easier, or they selected a less careless cast. Either way, I was relieved not to have to yell at the screen.

2) Great locations - I had no troubles with the locations last season, so no criticism intended. I'm just very partial to Switzerland and between Lucerne and Interlaken, "The Amazing Race" delivered great photography of the country and also made very good region-specific choices of tasks. That leads me to...

3) Superior challenges - The Roadblock was just bungee jumping, so it wasn't hard and it didn't reward any skills or courage. Nobody really hesitated, so the Roadblock didn't change the overall order of things. Usually that irks me, but the Verzasca Dam and the ridiculous height of the jump helped me overcome any reservations. I mean, this is where James Bond jumped in "GoldenEye." The bungee challenge is always a cop-out, since you can bungee anywhere, but this was bungee-done-right.

The episode's second challenge was even better, forcing the teams to ascend a precariously steep and muddy hill and then descent with 200 pounds of cheese. Now the clue asked the contestants to do the task using some rickety antique cheese racks, but that didn't end up being essential, since the racks were almost guaranteed to break. The thing I enjoyed about the task -- other than the hilarious image of 50 pound wheels of cheese rolling untethered down the hill and off into the wilderness -- was that it really could be accomplished multiple ways and that none of those ways were actually easy, but it could still accommodate different levels of prowess. Yes, the stronger teams were able to carry 100 pounds at a time and make the task about brute force. But aging pop Mel of Mel & Mike accepted his limitations immediately and basically bumped down the hill on his rump. It didn't look comfortable or appealing, but at least Mel found a way to help his team. Best of all, the team that applied the most brainpower to the task was self-described Country Bumpkins Linda and Steve, who transformed their racks into sleds and made up a huge amount of time in the process. 

Perhaps next year a task can involve cheese rolling on Cooper's Hill near Cheltenham. But that might be too dangerous.

4) Hubris - Man, I love hubris like a 10th grade English teacher. So when an episode begins with flight attendants Christie and Jodi boasting about all of their insider knowledge when it comes to travel and then ends with Christie and Jodie nearly being eliminated because they were the only team that stupidly took an earlier train when the later train got in first, that just makes me laugh maliciously. That leads me to...

5) A genuine footrace race to the Phil with elimination at stake - Nine out of 10 "Amazing Race" episodes really aren't close at all. The editors have to do intercutting at the end to create the illusion that there was barely any difference between last and next-to-last. On Sunday night's episode, Jodi and Christie arrived at the Pit Stop parking lot after Jennifer and Preston, spotted the other team and then out-sprinted them to the mat. There wasn't any editing trickery, because the two teams were in the same shot most of the time. Because of my love for hubris (See #4), I was rooting for Jodi and Christie to stick around to brag another day. Jennifer didn't look physically slight, so she was oddly useless throughout the episode and Preston was literally carrying her at the end. 

Those five most excellent elements helped me ignore that it's too early for me to feel like I'm rooting for or against any of the teams.

The only team I'm comfortable getting behind for now is Mel and Mike White.  I mean, it's Ned Schneebly and his dad. It's Buck and his dad, of whom he says, "I think the other teams might think my dad is Cloris Leachman, but he's really MacGyver." We got to watch Mike White bungee jump tonight and that's just good TV. I found it interesting that, at least in the first episode, none of the other teams expressed any awareness of who Mike White is. I get that they weren't going to know him as the creator of "Pasadena" and the writer-director of "Year of the Dog," but he's done enough character acting that somebody could have recognized him. 

So I'll cheer for the Whites. I like the dynamic between athletic sisters Lakisha & Jennifer and between lawyer-siblings Tammy & Victor. I'd have liked the frankness of Hillbillies Linda & Steve, but he pushes her too hard and I don't want to watch her crying.

I have no reason to dislike Margie & deaf-son Luke, but I wish he'd stop making everything about his deafness and the point he's trying to prove. Cumulatively, his adventures on "The Amazing Race" will make him a worthy champion for deaf advocacy and I salute him. He and his mother won the stage, so they're worthy competitors. But he kept talking about how nobody would expect a deaf person to be able to do the things he did, but there was absolutely nothing required of the teams on this leg that I would have considered him at all handicapped in. "The Amazing Race" is a game of two-person teams. If you can communicate with your teammate, that's all you need and Margie and Luke can communicate perfectly. I guess there will be tasks down the road that might be struggles, but the show's producers aren't stupid. They will have made sure that none of the challenges explicitly rules out Luke.

[Best moment of the episode, by far, was Phil Keoghan signing "You're Team #1" for Margie & Luke. If that doesn't win him the Emmy for reality show host next season, it's a crime.]

So who to dislike? 

Well, Brad & Victoria left Jodie & Christie high and dry with the train confusion, but it's sortta a game. I don't begrudge them. 

Amanda & Kris are too pretty and happy to be trustworthy, but they don't yell each each other or call each other "Baby" or "Honey," at least not that we've seen.

And Cara & Jaime implied they were ready to be thought of as bitches, but in the episode they didn't do anything memorably good or evil.

How about y'all? What'd you think of the premiere? And who are you rooting for or against?

Eliza Dushku of 'Dollhouse'

Credit: Adam Taylor/FOX

OK, side note here, before we even get into "Dollhouse", but I wouldn’t blame Joss Whedon for being pissed. I mean, the guy basically reinvents genre TV with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The blonde kick-ass girl character has become a cliché on every TV show now, leading millions of young women to believe they can roundhouse their way to empowerment. You could argue there would be no "Lost," no "Fringe," and especially no "Twilight" without the steps Whedon took to bring geek into the mainstream. And his new series is stuck on a Friday night... on Fox, the same network that tanked his brilliant series "Firefly".. in the time slot where "COPS" usually runs an endless parade of shirtless losers.

Yeah, not exactly how you welcome the return of the conquering hero.

But screw that, we’ve got two hot chicks talking to us, the at-home viewers now. Summer Glau, from the "Terminator" lead-in, and a Whedon alum, and Eliza Dushku, both in tight clothes and spouting double entendres about making this a "date night" with their shows. (Sadly, there are guys who will take this quite seriously.)

[After the bump, on to "Dollhouse"... with spoilers.]

Ellen Tigh, before her husband Saul Tigh "kills" her on New Caprica. Of course, neither he nor she remembered that they were two of the original five cylons and could resurrect themselves.

Credit: SciFi

After the dramatic end of "Blood on the Scales," could "Battlestar" really top itself with even more stunning revelations?  Frakin' yeah, J.J. Abrams has got nothing on Moore and Eick!  This episode had more backstory than any previous ones in the series (at least according to Eck on the SciFi rewind commentary).

[Important point for all you overly myopic fans out there.  Yes, this was a fun and dramatic episode, but it was also exposition central.  Even Eick admits it!  And, in all honesty, that doesn't hold up as good TV, cinema or theater in the long run.  So, if you show your buddy this episode and he or she rolls their eyes, well, now you know.]

Now, onto the twists and turns of "As the Battlestar Turns" which was a lot to take in this week...

[Spoilers after the jump.]

Jeff Probst of 'Survivor: Tocantins'

Credit: CBS

Welcome to "Survivor: Appletinis"? Jeff Probst welcomes us to Brazil, home jiggling rumps on the beach, "the world's best soccer" (forget about that World Cup, Italy) and, if "The Simpsons" has taught us anything, lots and lots of monkeys. It's also the starting point on a race around the world. Wait. Wrong CBS reality show premiering this week. Come back on Sunday for a recap of the new season of "Amazing Race." This does, indeed, look to be the most isolated and distinctive "Survivor" landscape since China, if not longer.

[Recap of Thursday (Feb. 12) night's premiere of "Survivor: Tocantins" -- with spoilers, of course -- after the bump.]

Melissa Farman may be French, but is she crazy?  And if not, what will make her that way on 'Lost'?

Credit: Mario Perez/ABC

Great title.

And a great episode.

Is it just me, or has "Lost" really set a whole new pace for itself this year?  The information we got out of this one episode tonight would have been five episodes back in season three.  And the show's better for it, too.  We're five episodes into the season, and next week looks like the moment where everything's going to come together and we're going to get the Oceanic Six back to the island.  That means we'll still have another... what?  Eighteen episodes for the season?  That's a hell of a lot more material we'll have time for, and I'm guessing that if they continue moving at the same clip they have so far this year, we're going to learn most of the big answers about how things work and why this year, so that next year can be all about the emotional payoff.  How great would that be, and what a slap in the face to everyone who loves to claim that this show is all tease and no follow-through.

The time-skipping continued tonight, and it started to get more chaotic, quicker, more violent.  The effects on Sawyer, Juliet, Locke, Miles, Charlotte, Jin, and Daniel were fairly intense from the start, building to the evening's big moment, the end of Charlotte.  "I'm not allowed to have chocolate for dinner."  Her reveals to Faraday during her final moments were not surprising, but they were fairly powerful.  Now we know what one of the connections between them is, and since time on "Lost" works in a circular pattern, where you can't change anything because whatever happens has always happened, the love that Daniel expressed for Charlotte a few episodes ago... well, it sounds like it started a long time ago, when Charlotte was very young.  Could that be the same period of time where we saw Faraday in the first episode of this season?  I'd be willing to bet on it.  And that means that's going to be the time where the Skippers end up landing now that things have stopped skipping.

[more after the break]

Kara Dioguardi of 'American Idol'

Credit: Jack Guy/FOX

It's Chair Night, kids. And even if "American Idol" claims to be adding something called a Judge's Mansion and even if the chairs look more comfortable this year -- all plush and red and luxurious, rather than just rickety bridge chairs -- the game is still the same: Over two hours, "American Idol" will introduce this season's Top 36 and this recapper will try to stay awake by blogging every awesome second of it.

This is bound to get long, but let me assure you, it's nothing compared to the act of endurance required to watch the episode.

[Click through to follow the fun and, bit by bit, learn the identities of the "American Idol" Top 36.]

Kara DioGuardi and Randy Jackson of 'American Idol'

Credit: Michael Becker/FOX

Tuesday (Feb. 10) night's episode of "American Idol" is the hour I like to call The Dance of the Four Rooms or the "Alias" episode.

The first nickname is self-explanatory. It's the episode where the remaining Hollywood contestants are divided into several rooms and everybody in the rooms looks around and freaks out because they're grouped with that girl who forgot the lyrics or that guy who swore at Simon, or they get cocky because they're in the same room as the 16-year-old homeless girl with the golden pipes or the that pretty boy who keeps making Paula giggle like an imbecile. Then the judges shock one room that you were sure was heading home by keeping them around and they shock another room by sending home a former favorite for no good reason. 

I prefer, though, to call it the "Alias" episode, because it's the hour that begins at the end, just like so many episodes of "Alias" began doing once the writing staff got lazy. We'd see Sydney in a weird costume, in a weird country about to get shot by somebody we'd never seen before. And then we'd get the card reading "36 hours earlier..." And yes, I know that many shows have used this trick, but for some reason I associate it with "Alias" and with this episode of "Idol," where we start at the end and thanks to Ryan Seacrest's voiceover, we get caught up to the present.

[More after the bump...]

Zachary Quinto of 'Heroes'

Credit: Mitchell Haaseth/NBC

The second episode of the "Fugitives" arc was entitled "Trust and Blood." And, well, the episode featured very little of the former and buckets of the latter. Nathan's ultimate plan of containment seems futile at this point, with the less-than-spectacular plane crash (apparently too spectacular to, you know, actually show) leading to a series of events that has both sides well beyond the point of negotiation.

[More, including spoilers, after the bump...]

Annie Wersching of '24'

Credit: Joseph Viles/FOX

As I often say, my relationship with "24" waxes and wanes and when the show is dull or repetitive -- as it has been much of this season -- I like having the ability to call it on its failings. But when "24" is at its most provocative -- and it was on Monday (Feb. 9) night -- no show is better at making me yell at my TV.

I mentioned last week that, as die-hard "24" fans already know, tonight's episode was a key episode, the final hour completed before the writers strike halted production last year. That means when next week's show begins, we can look to see if Kiefer Sutherland is 15 pounds lighter, if Carlos Bernard's scruff has vanished and if Janeanne Garofalo has suddenly gotten frosted tips.

So maybe next Monday's hour will feel creatively rejuvenated, but this Monday was so packed with badassery that I just hope the writers were able to continue to momentum.

[More, including spoilers, after the bump...]