What's With All The Moles?

Spoiler Alert! If you haven't watched this week's 24 and FlashForward, and care about what happens in those episodes, stop reading now!

Remember, don't go any further if you care about spoilers!

OK.

So, this seemed to be "Mole Week" for two of the shows Vicki and I watch. 24 featured a 2-hour episode (really, 2 1-hour episodes) on Monday, in which the CTU mole that was outed last week - Dana Walsh, played by Katee Sackhoff - finally gets discovered by her co-workers. As soon as that happens, she goes on a murder spree within the CTU office, killing several "red shirts" before finally, and violently, being apprehended just as she was about to make her getaway.

"Fast forward" (heh!) a few days to Thursday and it's FlashForward's turn to recycle the mole storyline. Once again, it's a woman who's found to have been working from the inside of a government group, in the guise of Marcy (who I guess we'd seen before but she hadn't really made any impression on me). As soon as she realizes the jig is up, she - you guessed it! - starts blowing away lots of federal agent co-workers in the form of expendable minor characters. She tries to make her escape but is roughed up and knocked out before she can quite pull it off. Who takes her down? Series regular Janis Hawk (played by Christine Woods), who we then discover is a second mole, cunningly tossing the first operative under the bus so ask to throw suspicion off herself!

At that point I said to Vicki, "So I guess the message here is: women are bad, they can't be trusted, and they need to have some sense knocked into them??" Gah! I'm sure it's just a coincidence that three different females on two different TV shows in the same week would be portrayed in this manner, but c'mon! Isn't this a little silly?