Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours ago
So here I am, enjoying my first days as a free man by...staying sick at home, watching season five of *24* on DVD, eating a lot of microwave popcorn and drinking a lot of orange juice.
How about that Jack Bauer, huh? Let's talk about *24*. I realize that I've given over a hundred hours of my life to this series. It warrants some analysis.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Okay. I remember watching the first season, and its subplots hinging on an errant teenage behaviour, amnesia, and terrorists kidnapping the hero's wife and child. I remember thinking "Oh man, this is friggin' cheesy." It wasn't until Jack Bauer got into that hugely impressive gunfight while exfiltrating his family from the terrorist compound that I thought "Hey, I've never seen this on a television show before."
Let's face it, *24* is really nothing more and nothing less than a soap opera. A soap opera with shootouts and torture, but a soap opera nonetheless. The plotlines that get introduced are excessively melodramatic and emotional. The writing in the series, really, is hackneyed poop. It gets to the point where you can know exactly what's going to happen because you can expect that it *won't* happen. Oh, there's no way the terrorists would *ever* do that...which means, of course, that's exactly what the terrorists will do. And if the series casts a person in a good light, like giving him empathetic moments with the principals, you can trust that he's going to turn out to be a mole. And if the series casts a person in a negative light, like having stand around a lot with his arms folded across his chest in disapproval of Jack Bauer, or introducing him as seemingly working at cross-purposes to Jack Bauer, then you can trust that that person is a red herring to the real threat. In being utterly unpredictable, the show becomes entirely predictable.
Besides which, you *know* the terrorists will never pull anything off that'll actually kill a significant number of people. The terrorists are never given a chance to explain themselves in a meaningful way. Especially in the season I'm watching now, where the terrorists are Chechen rebels in all but name, and I find it very hard to not be empathetic to the cause of a people who are fighting for independence from another larger and militarily superior country. As the gentle reader will recall, our own country had its origins in groups of such rebels. But *24* has little time to debate the moral validity of asymmetrical warfare techniques--it just needs to show the terrorists as bad guys whom Jack Bauer needs to kill. The terrorists are smart and tough and savvy, yes, but still absolutely evil from an American point of view. Essentially, if Jack Bauer had been born in any country other than the United States, he would be one of these terrorists. Ah...but opening up that can of morally ambiguous worms would cripple the show's capacity to find violent solutions to its problems.
And you *know*, no matter what, no matter how bleak the situation seems, that Jack Bauer isn't gonna die.
Which is not to say that I don't like it. I respect the writing of the show. Not because I think it's terribly smart--it's mostly technobabble mixed in with furious commands and dispassionate threats. A lot of the political dialogue that occurs between power-players in the office and the White House is particularly vapid; the political dialogue tends to be a lot of blather about protocol and one person asking another to "Keep me in the loop." Just the same, I have to give the writers and the editors credit for keeping so many balls in the air all at once, and for delivering what is usually an exciting and interesting show, in spite of its being spread out over four or five plotlines and four or five groups of characters in any given episode. That's not easy to do--making each of those situations tense, and also keeping all of them interrelated so that they feed off of each other, and contribute tension to each other.
The acting in the show...well, I don't think any of the characters are terribly morally complex. The CTU agents just have to act ulta-competent or flustered, which they do well. Jack Bauer is either fiercely confident or awkwardly sensitive, depending on the situation, and while there's not a lot of range there, I do think Keifer Sutherland sells it exceptionally well. He branched out a bit in Season 3, when he we got to see him in an undercover identity and also struggling with a heroin addiction, and I liked that season the best largely for those reasons. Jack was a real character in that season; he wasn't just on or off. And having to negotiate with Nina, knowing that Nina had killed his wife? Wheeeeee. That was tight. I've yet to see the series approach that emotional highpoint in the subsequent two seasons. The Presidential plotline in that season was also particularly poignant--Dennis Haysbert was superlative as a president whose own cabinet was threatening to remove him.
Most often, the Presidential layer of the show just feels tacked on, like an unnceccesary and less-than-exciting layer of people who are removed from the action getting stressed out about things, but I liked that episode. Seasons 4 and 5 have done a better job of making the President central to the action, but I still would rather watch Jack do his thing than watch the President dither over diplomacy.
What ultimately make this show more than anything else, I think, are the cinematic action sequences. The gunfights and explosions and car chases are as good as or better than anything you'll ever see in a movie. There's nothing too smart about this, nothing too morally complex, but it is laudable, nevertheless, in that the show does its stunts and set pieces so well. So, really, that's why we watch *24*, isn't it? For the explosions and the gunfire? We shouldn't be ashamed of that, but we shouldn't take it for more than it is, either.
And one last thing...they shouldn't have killed Edgar Stiles. He was one of my favorite characters. He was my "in" to the show. He, along with Chloe who proved to be an absolutely necessary addition to the mix, provided a humanizing element to the otherwise stiff and over-tense environment at CTU. He made mistakes. He wasn't aggressive or ultra-cool; he was like the rest of us. And now he's dead. Boooooo. I'm really hurt by that. It's almost as bad as watching Wash get it in the *Serenity* movie. Why do they have to kill my favorite characters?
How about that Jack Bauer, huh? Let's talk about *24*. I realize that I've given over a hundred hours of my life to this series. It warrants some analysis.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Okay. I remember watching the first season, and its subplots hinging on an errant teenage behaviour, amnesia, and terrorists kidnapping the hero's wife and child. I remember thinking "Oh man, this is friggin' cheesy." It wasn't until Jack Bauer got into that hugely impressive gunfight while exfiltrating his family from the terrorist compound that I thought "Hey, I've never seen this on a television show before."
Let's face it, *24* is really nothing more and nothing less than a soap opera. A soap opera with shootouts and torture, but a soap opera nonetheless. The plotlines that get introduced are excessively melodramatic and emotional. The writing in the series, really, is hackneyed poop. It gets to the point where you can know exactly what's going to happen because you can expect that it *won't* happen. Oh, there's no way the terrorists would *ever* do that...which means, of course, that's exactly what the terrorists will do. And if the series casts a person in a good light, like giving him empathetic moments with the principals, you can trust that he's going to turn out to be a mole. And if the series casts a person in a negative light, like having stand around a lot with his arms folded across his chest in disapproval of Jack Bauer, or introducing him as seemingly working at cross-purposes to Jack Bauer, then you can trust that that person is a red herring to the real threat. In being utterly unpredictable, the show becomes entirely predictable.
Besides which, you *know* the terrorists will never pull anything off that'll actually kill a significant number of people. The terrorists are never given a chance to explain themselves in a meaningful way. Especially in the season I'm watching now, where the terrorists are Chechen rebels in all but name, and I find it very hard to not be empathetic to the cause of a people who are fighting for independence from another larger and militarily superior country. As the gentle reader will recall, our own country had its origins in groups of such rebels. But *24* has little time to debate the moral validity of asymmetrical warfare techniques--it just needs to show the terrorists as bad guys whom Jack Bauer needs to kill. The terrorists are smart and tough and savvy, yes, but still absolutely evil from an American point of view. Essentially, if Jack Bauer had been born in any country other than the United States, he would be one of these terrorists. Ah...but opening up that can of morally ambiguous worms would cripple the show's capacity to find violent solutions to its problems.
And you *know*, no matter what, no matter how bleak the situation seems, that Jack Bauer isn't gonna die.
Which is not to say that I don't like it. I respect the writing of the show. Not because I think it's terribly smart--it's mostly technobabble mixed in with furious commands and dispassionate threats. A lot of the political dialogue that occurs between power-players in the office and the White House is particularly vapid; the political dialogue tends to be a lot of blather about protocol and one person asking another to "Keep me in the loop." Just the same, I have to give the writers and the editors credit for keeping so many balls in the air all at once, and for delivering what is usually an exciting and interesting show, in spite of its being spread out over four or five plotlines and four or five groups of characters in any given episode. That's not easy to do--making each of those situations tense, and also keeping all of them interrelated so that they feed off of each other, and contribute tension to each other.
The acting in the show...well, I don't think any of the characters are terribly morally complex. The CTU agents just have to act ulta-competent or flustered, which they do well. Jack Bauer is either fiercely confident or awkwardly sensitive, depending on the situation, and while there's not a lot of range there, I do think Keifer Sutherland sells it exceptionally well. He branched out a bit in Season 3, when he we got to see him in an undercover identity and also struggling with a heroin addiction, and I liked that season the best largely for those reasons. Jack was a real character in that season; he wasn't just on or off. And having to negotiate with Nina, knowing that Nina had killed his wife? Wheeeeee. That was tight. I've yet to see the series approach that emotional highpoint in the subsequent two seasons. The Presidential plotline in that season was also particularly poignant--Dennis Haysbert was superlative as a president whose own cabinet was threatening to remove him.
Most often, the Presidential layer of the show just feels tacked on, like an unnceccesary and less-than-exciting layer of people who are removed from the action getting stressed out about things, but I liked that episode. Seasons 4 and 5 have done a better job of making the President central to the action, but I still would rather watch Jack do his thing than watch the President dither over diplomacy.
What ultimately make this show more than anything else, I think, are the cinematic action sequences. The gunfights and explosions and car chases are as good as or better than anything you'll ever see in a movie. There's nothing too smart about this, nothing too morally complex, but it is laudable, nevertheless, in that the show does its stunts and set pieces so well. So, really, that's why we watch *24*, isn't it? For the explosions and the gunfire? We shouldn't be ashamed of that, but we shouldn't take it for more than it is, either.
And one last thing...they shouldn't have killed Edgar Stiles. He was one of my favorite characters. He was my "in" to the show. He, along with Chloe who proved to be an absolutely necessary addition to the mix, provided a humanizing element to the otherwise stiff and over-tense environment at CTU. He made mistakes. He wasn't aggressive or ultra-cool; he was like the rest of us. And now he's dead. Boooooo. I'm really hurt by that. It's almost as bad as watching Wash get it in the *Serenity* movie. Why do they have to kill my favorite characters?