Blu Ray Screencaps of 24 Season 8.
This is the UK/European version of 24, the USA edition is by all accounts identical to this one.
Season 8 starts at 4pm in New York, this season seems to be set around seven years after the last series, i'm not sure how old Jack Bauer now is but the character has to be well into his forties which is appropriate since Kiefer Sutherland is now 44 years old, President Allison Taylor is still in power and negotiating a peace deal with Omar Hassan who is the leader of a fictional Islamic Republic, i think they have based this place on Iran, well anyways Jack is retired and he has been recovering from the chemical attack on him seen in last season's 24, he is a lot happier and now has a grandchild by his daughter Kim who has convinced him to move back to Los Angeles but as usual something comes up as an old contact of Jack's brings some information relating to a plot to disrupt the peace talks between President Taylor and Hassan, this is not as exciting as previous first episodes of 24 but it's okay and i enjoyed it, i also look forward to a future film version of the show.
Episode 2 and 3 feature more intrigue as an assassination plot unfolds and Meredith Reed, a newspaper reporter, seems a lot closer to President Hassan than just covering a story, perhaps she is part of the assassination plot but perhaps not, twists and turns keep us guessing, Jack meanwhile runs into a few problems of his own and gets a little tied up, the man in charge of CTU New York is Brian Hastings and recurring main characters include Dana Walsh, Cole Ortiz, Arlo Glass, Ethan Kanin, Rob Weiss and Chloe O'Brian, Chloe of course has been a regular for a number of seasons now and is always on hand to help Jack out.
I'm not going to give away any plot spoilers with my summary but you should be very careful when viewing each disc because some idiot has designed a menu system that gives away major spoilers for each episode, if your eyes view this information you will learn what happens in the episodes, this is a real problem if you choose to view episodes individually, i recommend selecting play all episodes to avoid this issue or you may view the spoilers which will ruin your enjoyment of the show.
In my opinion the image quality has been slightly compromised by the decision to put six episodes on each disc instead of the usual four, i am not sure if this show is shot using film or digital cameras but the film grain/digital grain looks to me as if it has been treated to a small dose of DNR in a number of scenes, not all scenes are affected and it's not major DNR but it's still there and it looks unnatural to me in the scenes that it does affect, the image during those moments takes on a rather artificial noisy look, to me the grain doesn't look well resolved during some parts of 24, i felt detail was affected by this, the look of 24 is deliberate, grain is a part of the image and intended to be seen and i think the decision to put six episodes on each disc has compromised some of the image quality which looks a little manipulated to me, it looks filtered, i'm not happy with Fox for doing this. I think image quality is still okay but it has been robbed of some of it's texture.
The sound quality of this show is very good, it's never going to compete with a well mixed feature film but it sounded fine, rear speakers occasionally carry discrete surround effects although they are mostly used for added ambience and for music reinforcement, dialogue is always easy to hear and i liked the meaty quality of the bass when the 24 logo counts down and the surround directionality during the opening moments of each episode, i also enjoyed the punchy main theme music.
View some blu ray screencaps of 24 below. Click twice for the full HD image.
Fell out of bed feeling down. This has brightened my day!