dammit!

Back to your regularly scheduled talkback.

Annoyed me a little, because I normally avoid spoilers and I already had BAG's death on Terminator spoiled for me so it's a shitty week, spoiler-wise.

Manny Coto is still a fucking great writer. Doesn't get anywhere near the respect he deserves.

i.e. He'll only show symptoms when the script calls for some dramatic tension.

Or was that T4?....

And was it just me, or BELTRAN == SAYID ALI's TWIN BROTHER and CHRISTIAN SHEPERD's SON! And his sister worked at the Looking Glass!!!

Scars and all.

That's right, I'm here all night folks.

R.I.P. Edgar.

Have Kim refuse, and reveal that the kid from last season was Jack's son and bring him in instead. But, please, for the love of nielsen®, do not bring Kim in.

Thank God she's not a TTSCC fan!

As others have noted, WHY would you call off the air strike? The incendiary bombs would've taken out the rockets TOO. WHY would you let Jon Voight get the upper hand? He has NOTHING. Go ahead...call his bluff. He fires a rocket, he kills hundreds of thousands of people, and now there's no reason NOT to hunt his ass down. At which point he goes down in American history as it's greatest traitor and he even gets the first public TV execution to appease the masses, who at that point would want anything and everything that is Starkwood related burned to a crisp.

For that matter, what the hell is Voight even trying to accomplish anymore? Given his comical villainous speech tonight, apparently he's interested in seeing Starkwood survive as a company -- but who the fuck would employ them after this? Certainly not the U.S. So, fine, move all the personnel and equipment to another country and THEN order a military hit on them. Duh! So what does Voight actually think he can say to the President next week? Some lame line like: "Starkwood did bad things for the government in the past and unless you shut down all Congressional investigations, I'm going to use my rockets"? What the fuck kind of threat is that? First of all, the President and Congress get elected and rotate in and out of office. So what is Voight's master plan -- to blamemail each new president over and over again? And how can Voight even blackmail THIS President? She can simply say "Fine, go ahead. Go public with all your dirt about past administrations, you nut job. In case you didn't notice, I'm the NEW President, so you won't be soiling my hands. Hell, if anything, I'll look even BETTER to the American people and practically be reassuring my reelection since (according to tonight's episode) I was the one who voted against you guys when I was in the Senate."

Seriously, this season went from the truly incredulous and lame plot of an African warlord (???) storming and capturing the White House because he was mad about losing a turf war back home (!!!) to morphing into a semi-interesting concept about Starkwood and paid mercenaries or paid militias, which quickly went into the crapper due to such fucking huge plot holes and such piss-poor internal story logic.

I swear, it's amazing to think how truly GREAT this show was back in Seasons 1-4 and what utter crap it's become. Worst of all, I can't believe this is the bullshit storyline they created WITH a writer's strike that ultimately bought them MORE time to try and fix the utter shitfest that had been last season. But now they're on a pace to match it!

As for just taking out Starkwood and ending the whole crisis, I think this goes back to the overall theme of this Season- that doing whatever it takes is not always the right way. Risking thousands of lives to catch the bad guys is not how the world works. They could have shut down Starkwood last episode and gotten into a shoot-out with the militia, but they didn't because 1) the rule of law applies and 2) mowing down people is not how this show works.

What Hodges is trying to accomplish is to discredit and destroy Allison Taylor and her supporters. He wants "sovereignty" to do as he pleases. Stay tuned to see his end game, it will be interesting. And if you know anything about politics, you'll understand that Presidents change, but bureaucrats linger for decades. They become institutions unto themselves. Look at Obama's cabinet- lots of people from the Clinton years there, right?

But I agree with you that the White House raid was fucking insane and silly.

So, when does the president's daughter sex-tape hit the redtubes!? I'll buy that for a dollar!