A Family Affair (24 spoilers)

So we're six hours into the fourth season of 24, so I figure it's about time to weigh in.

Right now, I'm hard pressed to say which villain, over the show's run so far, has had the absolute worst accent. Dennis Hopper's Victor Drazen set the bar pretty high, but then that was damn near obliterated by Ramon Salazar last season. Omar was in the running, but he didn't last long enough to really have a shot.

The real story here is hopefully going to be the parallels between the two central families to the plot, the Araz family and the Hellers. There's a real potential for a rich storyline that has them both behaving similarly for their respective beliefs, and I think we got a big hint of that with the Secretary of Defense siding with CTU on the interrogation of his son.

Maybe not as extreme as having your son executed, but in the same direction. So far the whole Araz story has been marked by well-executed predictability. You knew the girlfriend would follow Behrooz, and that he would try to save her. And you knew he would escape his would-be killer. But all of those still worked.

If they could find a literary precedent for the struggle between and within those two families, and steal mercilessly from it -- excuse me, make some homage to it -- I'd be mighty happy. Except that I can't think of anything off the top of my head, so any allusion would likely sail right over it.

Back at CTU, I'm a little disappointed that they went with Marianne as the obligatory mole. Who's in charge of background checks over there, anyway, Bernie Kerik? My gut tells me Marianne is a red herring, and Audrey is going to be the lynchpin of infiltrating the good guys. Only I don't think she'll know it. Her husband is bad. Count on it.