24 (2001) - 143 mistakes in entire show

Continuity: Day 7, 11pm-12am: When president Taylor asks Olivia to be her acting Chief of Staff, Allison rests her head on her hand, with only her elbow on the couch. In the next shot, her arm is suddenly resting on the couch instead. There's a straight cut between the two shots, so she didn't have time to move.

Revealing: Day 7: 4:00 pm-5:00 pm. When Renee says she couldn't get the laptop to boot up due to a fried hard drive, the Windows desktop is visible on it, which meant that the laptop did boot up.

Factual error: Day 7, 6:00am-7:00am: The head scientist tells Tony that the pathogen can survive 2 hours and longer after to host's death. Assuming it is either virus or prion (a protein), it wouldn't be alive to begin with and could effectively remain in Jack's body indefinitely.

Plot hole: Day 7: 11:00 pm-12:00 am. The director of CDC informs the cabinet that the biological weapon at hand is a "prion variant indigenous to the East Congo" and refers to it as a "strain". A prion is a protein, not a bacterium, so it cannot be indigenous to a certain place and cannot belong to any strain. More importantly, prion diseases are not known to be transmissible in an airborne fashion (Mad Cow and Kuru, also prion diseases, are transmitted by ingestion), which kinda takes the air out of the threat. However, the description of prion disease symptoms and the example of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease as being caused by prions are accurate.

Continuity: Day 7, 8-9 am: When Alan Tanner shoots Gabriel Schector, three shots are fired, but four bullet holes are visible in the window.

Factual error: Day 7, 6:00am-7:00am: The head scientist tells Tony that they need Jack's organs to reconstitute that pathogen since there is not enough of it in the sample. Assuming it's a virus, even a small sample could easily be grown in the lab to yield large amounts of the virus. Assuming it's a prion, they don't even need a sample since the could simply build it again from scratch so long as they knew the protein sequence (which is a likely assumption). In either case, Jack is unnecessary.

Factual error: Day 7, 6:00am-7:00am: The head scientist tells Tony that the only sure way to destroy the pathogen is to expose it to temperatures around 500 degrees celsius. Surgical and lab equipment are sterilized at 120 degrees celsius under the (legitimate) assumption that nothing survives this temperature. Prions and viruses, both mostly protein, would have fallen apart by this temperature.

Continuity: Day 7, 6:00am-7:00am: When Tony's henchmen isolate the pathogen from Jack's spinal fluid, the head scientist says the viral load is higher than hoped for, explicitly stating for the first time that the pathogen is a virus. This is in contrast to everyone else referring to it as a prion up till this point.

Other: Day 7, 4:00pm-5:00pm: When Morris drops Chloe off at the FBI, he asks if she's sure she doesn't need his help. In the subtitles, Morris' name is incorrectly shown as "Miles".

Continuity: Day 7, 9:00am-10:00am: in the "previously on 24" recap, Jack tells Renee Walker "the Department of Justice is about to file criminal charges against me." But in that scene in the previous episode, he used the departmental abbreviation "DOJ".

Plot hole: Day 7: 12:00 am-1:00 am. Jack is informed that experimental treatment using stem cells from a genetically compatible donor is being developed that might be able to cure his condition. Stem cells are used to treat diseases where a cell type in the patient's body malfunctions, such as insulin-producing beta cells in diabetes, or where injury has killed cells that do not regenerate, such as in spinal cord injury. In these cases stem cells can replace the damaged cells and make sense as therapy (bone marrow transplant as leukemia treatment is one real such treatment). Prions (which is what the show calls the bioagent) and bacteria (which is how the show describes the bioagent) cannot be cured by stem cells, since the cause of the disease is not damaged or defective cells. Even if the disease damaged brain cells and stem cells cured that, it would resume later since the causative agent is still there.

Factual error: While Drazen is a very common Serbian given name, it is not found as a surname in that form. The surname "Drazenovic" would be fairly common, but not simply "Drazen". Even then, it would be pronounced "Drah-zhen" and not "Dray-zen" as everybody in the show does.

Factual error: At some point Jack tries to get a message to CTU about the fact that he is being held hostage. The enemy sees Jack writing and tells Jack to shred the message. I work in government security. Believe me, no government agency would have a simple shredder that just cuts the paper into strips. Required is a cross cut shredder that breaks the paper into almost a pulverized state.

Continuity: When Jack is on the phone with his wife as he is entering the CTU building, when you can see him in two different shots, he is holding the phone differently in each shot.

Visible crew/equipment: When Kate is going into the furniture store, whilst the door is closing you can see the lighting equipment reflected off the door.

Visible crew/equipment: Jack Bauer and his boss are in a building at night with a shooter hidden somewhere. They open a door and look very carefully to the right and then to the left before going through the door. On the right side you can briefly see two crew members and as the camera pulls forward they back up some so they won't be seen.

Continuity: When Jack is outside Dunlop Plaza, talking to Nina on the phone, he says, "Nina, it's Jack." But the transcript Tony looks at a few seconds later reads, "Nina, it's me, Jack."

Continuity: Shortly after the clock display reads 01:44, the time is shown again... and it's 01:42.

Visible crew/equipment: When Teri Bauer and Alan York are cleaning up the mess in the furniture store, you can see a mic moving on the left side behind a plant (while the camera is near the floor).

Continuity: At about 2:15am, when Jack's talking to Nina about the passenger list on the plane, we see a shot of Jack in the top left, and Nina in the top right. Because it's real time they're both meant to match up - we're watching them both at the same time. In each shot we can see the back of the other's head, but while Jack is looking down and around in the left-hand shot, in the right-hand shot his head is staying perfectly still.