There's a rip in the fabric of "24" spacetime

I hadn't watched "24" for a few weeks. With no "Heroes" last night, my wife wanted to catch up, so we sat down and watched the last couple of episodes. I gotta say, even by "24's" extremely lax standards, this season is spinning out of control.

Sometimes in a good way: The sheer comedy of Logan going to his wife to call the wife of the Russian president to avert a crisis in the middle of a nuclear holocaust was pretty great.

What wasn't good, at least for me, was the way the show seems to have abandoned even the pretence of its ticking clock premise. I mean, sure it's ridiculous that Jack never hits traffic, or goes to the bathroom, or loses cell phone reception. But if you're willing to accept that, the show usually played more or less by the rules.

Last night, there were a couple of scenes where clearly 10 or 15 minutes had to have passed, but the show cut straight from one scene to the next. The ambulance arriving for Logan within 30 seconds comes to mind. Did the Enterprise beam it there? And the vice president seems to have landed Air Force One directly inside the Presidential bunker. That's a pretty good trick, too.

I know, I know, it's fantasy. But since the show got to set up its own rules in the first place, it seems to me it ought to be willing to play by them.