Wow. After a more than 2 year wait for the cliffhanger to be resolved
from "Need to Know" for season 5 to return to broadcast television, the
fucking cliffhanger was NOT resolved. More teasing that Mandy (Jessica
Pare) is alive and in need of rescue but nothing is done with it yet.

May I fucking ask, were fucking swear words added to the first four
episodes of fucking season 5 for the streaming version, or were they
added just for episodes 5 to 14 that were originated on streaming? How
about Jill Wagner nudity in the edit for European television?

Everything about the commuter train was so dumb. Gah, I remember that we
had discussed this with "Need to Know" more than two years ago. The US
embassy (they kept calling it a consulate) was built over an active
railroad which has commuter train service, so in a complete unrelated
but simultaneous action, the evil terrorists had boarded the train
hoping to set off bombs as the train passed under the embassy. This
would have destroyed an entire neighborhood in the capital.

We finally got to see the action. The other SEAL Team (Were they even a
military special forces team, or a CIA special team, or something else?)
hasn't moved off base in two years, so it's up to Jason's team to
prevent the incident. Once again, they kept talking about taking out the
terrorists long before the train reaches city center, but for totally
specious reasons they decide not to.

It's not stated in dialogue, but there is a strong implication that
neither the embassy nor the surrounding neighborhood has been evacuated,
making this whole thing an unnecessary crisis. Again, it's been two
years.

Strangest commuter train I ever saw. Supposedly there are hundreds of
passengers, but we see just two coaches and no conductor, maybe a dozen to
20 extras. One of the extras had dreadlocks or very long hair extensions,
making him look Jamaican and definitely not African. The consist has
a baggage car, a tank car, and exactly what you'd expect to see on a
commuter train, a container on flat car.

Note: Containers cannot just be off loaded. It requires an overhead
crane found only in railyards set up to receive them. Can't just put
these things off on an industrial siding. Also it was obviously a
container meant to be trucked on an American interstate highway. Ocean-
going containers are half the length. But it makes a nice platform for a
stunt man to leap from a helicopter.

Sonny's long crawl across the top of the cars took forever, then he
wouldn't have had the room to swing off the roof along the side of the
train to fire through the window. Somehow Sonny, with no communication,
ended up outside the correct window. But we knew this would happen.

Jason's orders were so dumb. Everybody change into civies! Watching with
my mother, she pointed out that their shoulders are bulked up and
clearly they had something (automatic weapons?) under their jackets that
they had trouble moving through the passenger coach. Also, the
terrorists never would have noticed Americans suddenly in the passenger
coach who weren't there before. Even Ray (Neil Brown) at best could pass
for Arab if you don't look too hard but not sub-Saharan African.

Basically their mere presence should have immediately alerted the
terrorists but they just sat there.

So Jason has everybody leave the passenger coach, then return with
bandanas over their faces before they start shooting. Why?

Lisa (Toni Trucks) discovers one of the terrorists is live streaming but
at HQ they have dialogue "They don't know we've intercepted the feed!"
Uh, if you're live streaming, you WANT your audience to watch live. We
never did see the terrorist holding the camera. But through the dialogue
and live feed which we never see, Lisa figures out that ADDITIONAL bombs
were loaded on board, not just the guy in the suicide vest, so Jason has
to make sure he takes out the trigger man. Jason has no idea who it is
but figures he's close to the bombs.

A great deal of this is ripped off from the action scenes in Executive
Decision (1996) without Kurl Russell having to land the plane and
without John Leguizamo making mean jokes about Russell.

Jason sent Clay (Max Thieriot) after the chief terrorist, who got off
the train one stop early, so Jason really does not close to enough men
on board to pull off the absurd mission, relying entirely on the
coincidence of Sonny's miraculous shooting.

Blackburn is gone again, leaving Jason confronting the evil CIA dude
who, thanks to Jason's idiocy (against Ray's advice), orders Jason's
team to stand down. But Jason talks his way into going after the
terrorist chief in a later scene. Still more cliffhanger for episode 6.

Nothing about Jason's short-term memory problems are dealt with despite
a reminder about them from scenes from previous episodes. And Ray's PTS
is 100% cured, I guess.

On 12/7/23 7:36 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

> Wow. After a more than 2 year wait for the cliffhanger to be resolved
> from "Need to Know" for season 5 to return to broadcast television...

I never did get to SEAL Team (season 5). Maybe if I can still pull all
the episodes (so far) off OnDemand, I can get to it next week.

Ian J. Ball <ijball@mac.invalid> wrote:
>On 12/7/23 7:36 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

>>Wow. After a more than 2 year wait for the cliffhanger to be resolved
>>from "Need to Know" for season 5 to return to broadcast television...

>I never did get to SEAL Team (season 5). Maybe if I can still pull all
>the episodes (so far) off OnDemand, I can get to it next week.

Comcast offers season 5 episodes 1-5, the ones broadcast or rebroadcast
thus far, On Demand from CBS. The rest are available streaming from P+,
although it offers season 2 streaming from Pluto TV as well.

> Adam H. Kerman
>
> Wow. After a more than 2 year wait for the cliffhanger to be resolved
> from "Need to Know" for season 5 to return to broadcast television,
> the fucking cliffhanger was NOT resolved.

lol

> Note: Containers cannot just be off loaded. It requires an overhead
> crane found only in railyards set up to receive them. Can't just put
> these things off on an industrial siding. Also it was obviously a
> container meant to be trucked on an American interstate highway.
> Ocean-going containers are half the length. But it makes a nice
> platform for a stunt man to leap from a helicopter.

Shipping containers can be had from 8' to 40' in length.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container

I keep trying to convince my hotrodder (and thus a packrat)
buddy to get one for all the car stuff he's collected over the
years and has stuffed in his garage.