So many times in the past two nights, I have wanted to yell at my television, ordering everyone to just listen to Jack already. After all these years, they haven’t realized that Jack is ALWAYS – not sometimes, always – right?

President David Palmer knew it. And he got the 23rd amendment pulled on him for his belief in Jack. But Palmer’s the only one who ever believed Jack.

Agent Walker’s pretty damn close to becoming a Bauer-ciple, however. She believed him in the first two hours and now finds herself acting like him. C’mon, you know you cheered when she pressed her gun right into Tanner’s wound through the badge and then cut off his oxygen? Thatw as a classic Jack move if I ever saw one.

So after four hours, these are my basic thoughts about Day 7:

• Who knew Bill Buchanan was such a hardass? He’s ready to sacrifice anyone, Jack included, to achieve his objective. He’s kind of like Jack, but on an even bigger scale. What do you think happened to make him this way? Someone kill Karen? We have, however, only seen four hours, and if there’s anything we’ve learned after six years of this show, it’s that nothing and no one is ever what they seem to be, except Jack.

• Tony was actually physically dead for 10 minutes before being revived. Does that make him part zombie? And he did actually work for the bad guys for a while, until “innocent Americans” started being targeted. He’s such a Boy Scout, deep down.

• Chloe is all in, but if it came to protecting Jack, I think she’d personally jump in to save him. She’s mellowed a lot. I think having a baby must have done that.

• How did Bill and Tony and Chloe all hook up to be the Band of Brothers with no agency behind them? There’s something more to this that we don’t know. And who’s paying the rent for the abandoned embassy they’re hanging out in? (I don’t know that it actually is an abandoned embassy, I’d imagine that’s rather unlikely, but it sure seemed that way – the wide stairs, marble or granite walls/stairs, high ceilings. It is D.C., after all.)

• Emerson’s British accent keeps fading out. Also, he’s a bastard.

• Jack’s tried to puncture someone’s eardrum with a pen, taken a baseball bat to a bad guy and cut off an FBI agent’s air supply to knock her out. I love this man. He has not, however, directly killed anyone as yet.

• Yes, Jack DID hotwire a car after subduing it with the butt of a pistol, then drive it off the second or third story of a parking deck while laying on the floor and not watching where he was going. And he was only mildly injured.

• Don’t most folks who are going incognito but using a van use a white panel van instead of a rather bright blue one? I mean, how does that slip through a perimeter?

• Who else already is annoyed by Janis Gold and Queens Boulevard?

I’m kind of relieved that 24 moves into its normal time slot next week and we have only an hour to sit through. As fantastic as the past two nights have been, especially for a die-hard fan who’s been without her Jack Bauer for far too long, I don’t think I could keep up the pace.

I wondered, too, if this season could keep up the pace, considering the astounding four-hour opening from last year in which Jack bit off a terrorist’s ear, comandeered a helicopter, killed Curtis and saw Valencia nuked. I think we can all agree that Day 6 was pretty damn craptacular all in all…

There were plenty of classic “24″ conversations between characters tonight, though – Chloe being pissed off that the FBI has a geek almost as good as her, who could “ping” her off the network; Tony apologizing for invoking Teri; Jack apologizing to Tony for beating him up; the “Why did you come back to the U.S.” convo with Emerson. Even the boring exposition with the president (by the way, who else thinks Ethan is the bad guy in the administration?)…

The past two nights held a lot of promise. Let’s hope the producers can keep that promise to us.