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I dunno, I guess it's because I just got here, but I don't mind discussing the torture thing...it's interesting to me in a twisted way.  It disturbs me about myself that when I watch Jack or the "good guys" do it and a) it gets results and b) saves some good guys, it kind of reinforces the presumptions that a portion of my countrymen have about torture and why it should perhaps be allowed. 

And the thing is, I totally don't agree with that!  But in a fictional universe, I let it slide.  (I've just started watching s. 4, and find it interesting that the first few episodes seem to present a more mixed picture, which is healthy, I think). 

I think fiction serves a really useful purpose in the world, where we can explore non-real situations and outcomes and (if we have the presence of mind to reflect on these things) assess our prejudices and reactions accordingly.  I find the torture aspects of 24 very provocative, because I consider myself pretty anti-torture (something along the lines of "Who would Jesus torture?"), and yet am, if not cheering Jack on, at least not leaping out of my chair to defend the baddies' human rights.  If you get what I mean.

Anyway, I do share smitten's curiosity re the choke hold, and also these injectable torture drugs (leave no mark...etc).  Are these in use?  I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but it certainly seems plausible given everything else they can do with drugs these days...

Well, I guess this is the part where I apologize for jumping to conclusions about the relative popularity of season III.  As  a person who just kinda surfed over here and was checking out the forum boards, there just didn't seem to be a lot of discussion of it compared to I & IV, so I guess I drew the wrong conclusion.  And I can understand where the Almeida fans among you might think III was pretty darn good!

I dunno...I can accept that it's more dramatic for Gael to die in a dark basement, isolated, than in some cushy bed (and then they save on the fake blood too). 

I can also accept that we often don't learn much about what makes villains bad, and that Saunders is, in that light, a pretty well-drawn character.  My objection is not to how much we know about Saunders, but that there are at least 3 set-up conversations à la "He was a patriot...he was a good man...something must have happened..." that really give the impression that there's some kind of whalloping gotcha coming about what actually happened to Saunders.  I guess the conversations end with ellipses instead of periods, setting up for a revelation (i.e. not: "Jack left Saunders behind in Bosnia and he was probably tortured within an inch of his sanity.  That's gotta be it.")

I guess this is a pretty trivial nit to pick.  But since I was fairly certain that Jack was gonna save the world , the big suspense bit for me in the last few episodes was getting to find out what turned Saunders bad.