How to fix 24.
*CONTAINS 24 SPOILERS*
I don't write in this thing anymore as I've been far too busy recently. Plus, as you can probably see from any online conversations that you've had with me lately, my grammar has taken a dangerous turn for the worse. Desperate times call for desperate measures though, so I'm going to have to write about something that has really been bothering me as of late. I am of course talking about what was, as of a year ago, absolutely the best show on television. Chances are that if I'm writing this and you're reading it, you very well already know my extreme fanaticism for Jack Bauer and his cohorts, so the fact that the article contains all kinds of spoilers from the previous seasons will probably not bother you. Now, onto the meat of this journal entry...
24 sucks. hard.
Wait, let me rephrase that so you don't start calling up the police thinking that the real me is bound and gagged in a car trunk somewhere.
This season of 24 is horribly shitty and squanders the good name of 24.
Now, this isn't some sort of snap judgment, after watching the DVD's of previous season, it's easy to see that season six isn't bad in the sense that the other seasons were awesome and the standards were set to high. It's just really bad. So here are the following suggestions I have to bring 24 back to it's former self.
1) Give Jack a team.
After watching the beginning of season three, I realized that while Jack is always awesome as a solo badass, we really don't care about anyone else. Up until last season, we always had Palmer and Tony around for the side stories and now that they're both gone, the story lines for the other characters have become nothing but a cheap soap opera. Having Jack at least start with a team of people next season will force us into a situation where we start caring about them because they're in direct contact with Jack and are trying to help him as opposed to preventing him from getting his job done.
2) Bring back time.
Now, if you're any fan of 24, you already know that the entire show is ludicrous when it comes to time. In fact, most of the qualms I've heard about the show from people who haven't watched it are from the fact that it's stupid that so much stuff can happen in one day. Well, as far as season 6 is concerned, they're absolutely correct. I mean, if you've been watching this season, you know that Wayne Palmer was blown up. And in a coma. Then revived after three hours. Then put back into a coma. Then woken up again. Then giving a speech. Then put into a coma. Then shot in the neck. Then revived. Then shot while being woken up.
I think you get the idea.
I realize that some things in 24 are kind of stupid, but the whole "Wayne Palmer is blown up but isn't really unconscious until we start another story" deal was ridiculous. I know, I know, you're probably pointing right now at season 3 when Tony is shot in the neck, and my justification for that is that reviving Tony had some direct implications on the story line. Palmer's waking up was incredibly pointless because VP Daniels ended up taking the presidency anyways. Had Palmer stayed in the coma, we'd be in exactly the same position as we are right now. Do you know what be a really good twist? If VP Daniels had done what Palmer did and pulled out the "threatening the foreign country with a fake nuke trick". Then we'd have gone along the whole time thinking Daniels was an asshole, but was really intelligent. We'd have a two for one as we'd start to like the VP and start to care for his character in the presidency.
Sorry, got a little carried away there.
Anyways, one of the things that 24 has forgotten is to use the presence of light to their advantage. Usually it hasn't been a problem because if you think about it, season one was really the only season to use time of day for it's plotlines (think Gaines' and his shoot out/hunt or Jack in the underground black ops holding cell for Drazen). If 24 uses shopping or business hours to their advantage, perhaps we could see more interesting scenarios in the show, like maybe Jack having a shoot out at a crowded night club or something. Or Jack having a fight in the middle of a rush hour packed highway. Or even better yet, makes sure that there are events that take place over a 4 to 5 episode arc again, what's been happening since season 4 are stories that get resolved within a two episode max, which is not only frustrating because it fails to create any tension, but subsequently forces the writers to constantly create new story rather than focus on the one their trying to tell.
3) Get rid of all WMD's.
This one's pretty straight forward. I don't care if there are nukes in LA. I don't care if there is gas in LA. I don't care if there are nukes in LA again. I don't care if there's a virus in LA. I still don't care that there are snukes in LA. Basically, what I'm saying is that the macguffin isn't the most important thing in 24. The nuclear football, the Cordelia virus, and the Sentox gas are all pretty much exchangable. What I care about in 24 is Jack and his companions, it doesn't matter to me that they're around because I know that unless they blow up all the characters in one blast and the screen goes black with "THE END" written on it, they will always be tracked down. The writers need to put Jack into an interesting situation that doesn't involve the macguffin, that's why Season 5 was so awesome, because it started out with a simple premise of "jack is framed and needs to prove himself not guilty".
4) Stop with the season twists.
One thing that 24 has always been famous for are its twists. Ever since the first season ended with one of the biggest tv shockers in history, subsequent seasons have tried to fill that requirement of having something crazy happen that sets up the next season. The problem with this is that the writers end up having to write themselves out of a corner for the next season. Season 5 was lucky, because it was able to craft a storyline directly from the events of the previous season, but Seasons 2 and 5 has proven that by having an awesome twist at the end, you essentially force yourself to write an extension of the twist. Without a season ending twist, you're not only left satisfied with the end, but you're free to write whatever situations and story lines you want in the next season.
5) Have Jack start off the season with the bad guys.
I've always kind of wanted Jack to play it evil in the first 6 episodes of one season, without any help of CTU or the Prez. This way we can be like "WTF!Monkey" before we find out it was a sting operation. Of course, the writers would really have to write him to be a horrible person, like killing innocent people or eating cute little kittens, in order to fool the audience. Plus maybe you could have CTU trying to track down a threat and we slowly reveal that Jack is part of that threat. Then you can have the stories converge when the two meet up and reveal a few more twists as to why Jack was working undercover, this is kind of a lead up to my next point.
6) Make Jack question himself.
One of the few story lines that I really liked in Season 6 was the good/bad terrorist plot. It was interesting to have Jack working with a terrorist because it kind of showed the thin line between what Jack does, and what they do. As much as we'd like to believe Jack is a good guy, if he wasn't on our side, then he'd pretty much be the world's craziest and hardest to kill terrorist ever. I mean he's hijacked a plane from the luggage compartment for Christ's sake. Having Jack question whether what he does or is forced to do is a great because of his circumstances makes for great television and shows us a character trait that a hero like Bond would never easily fit in any of his films.
7) More cougars.
One of the most best moments in season two was when Kim escaped police custody only to enter a forest where Johnny Drama was hiding out in a bomb shelter with canned food and no telephone which was used only as a vehicle for him to get laid. That moment was one of the single greatest story lines of the season because it showed off how fucking stupid the writing 24 can be. Luckily the other story lines had enough weight to not care a whole lot about losing 6 minutes to seeing Kim in a cougar trap. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this season is super sparse on any sort of story lines that we care about and I liked it when 24 flooded the shit out of how many stories we'd have to follow and was able to drop the ones that didn't work out so well.
8) Destroy all the sets.
I hate the way 24 is shot and looks these days. Everything is too nice and clean, even the warehouses are far too sanitary for my tastes. I feel like one of the most charming things about the first three seasons was that most of the episodes were shot in either horribly dark sets like CTU or on location in some third party place that was cheap enough for the show to afford shooting there for like 8 weeks in a row. Nowadays everything on 24 looks to well planned, the cameras don't follow the action, they create the action. The lighting is too flattering in CTU, it looks like a movie set, not a basement with computers like it used to. We're starting to see 24 turn into a formulaic looking show, where we know just when the cameras are going to do a shock zoom or when they're going to slowly reveal a surprise.
Here's an example.
Try and remember: the third episode of season one when Kim and Janet York are trying to run away from their kidnappers, there's this awesome shot where we follow the two running away, then the camera spins around Kim freaking out while we hear Janet getting railed by a car. The camera then pans down to show Janet lying in the middle of the road, dead. This sort of shot wouldn't happen on 24 these days, instead it'd just be a standard wide shot of Kim running down the street, then a split screen with a shock zoom of Janet getting smacked by a car. The cameras in 24 are to carefully planted nowadays and have totally forgotten about the whole "documentary" style format that we'd started out with.
9) Stop blowing shit up.
Seriously, sit down and watch the beginning of Season 6. Off the top of my head, I can think of 5 different scenes that include shit blowing up for little to no reason. First there was the air strike house where Assad was hiding, then there was the subway explosion, then the weapons storage compartment, then we saw Jack's dad blow up the non-Gredenko house. Oh yeah, and then a nuke went off somewhere in there. The point is, shit blowing up is pretty cool, but isn't cool when it happens some 5 times in the first 7 episodes of the season. Same thing with gun fights. The most memorable parts of 24 aren't the gunfights because there honestly isn't enough time for Cassar and his team to come up with any sort of fresh gun choreography in the two week period they have. Gun fights and explosions are better when used in sporadic bursts, look at the start of season one or season two, there are only two or so gun battles in the first 12 hours of those seasons. Now, every third episode sees Jack jumping into a situation where he can pull out a gun and shoot a bunch of nameless terrorists that we don't really care about because they hold no real threat to him. 24 shouldn't be Die Another Day, it should be Casino Royale.
10) End it this way.
I've always imagined the best way for 24 to end would be not to kill Jack Bauer (this idea is what everyone on the web thinks should happen), but to have a single season of Jack Bauer just living out his ordinary life in real time. Like sitting on the john for 7 minutes or going to the groceries and *shock* finding out that they're out of corn flakes. For an entire season.
But then one of my co-workers totally took my idea and took a shit on it with his far greater idea. And here it is.
FINAL 24 SCENE
INT. CENTER OF A TERRORIST CESSPOOL
Terrorists are everywhere and there's no chance for Jack to escape. He's disarmed and in a locked room with a single light swinging away overhead. The camera cuts to what's going on outside, there are terrorists with crazy amounts of weapons and awesome bandanas on their foreheads signifying their badassness. Some could even have scars on their faces, perhaps a sweet tat of a tear next to their eyes. Basically these guys are just crying to be killed, it's just a shame that Jack is chained down to a solidly mounted pipe and has absolutely no chance of escaping this locked room as there are no props around for him to kill anyone with. That's when we start to hear footsteps from outside the door. That's also when we see the door slowly open to reveal...
Nina Myers.
JACK
(shocked)
Nina? You were behind all this? I thought you were dead...
NINA
Stranger things have happened Jack.
Nina reaches to her holster and pulls out a pistol. She points it at Jack, but not close enough for Jack to be able to reach for it. Jack sits there, defenseless, no one at CTU knows that he's been captured or where he is. All of his friends and allies are dead. He has nothing. He just sits there, waiting for the trigger to be pulled. Nina, still holding the gun, presses her finger down on the trigger.
BLAM.
The gunshot rings out loud as we cut to Nina's face. There's a bullet hole in it. Nina, drops down to the ground and the camera comes to focus to reveal.
TONY ALMEIDA
(whispering intensely)
That's it Jack, we have to go. NOW!
JACK
(shocked)
Tony, you're still alive? I thought you were dead?
TONY
Stranger things have happened Jack.
Tony, with the magic of his being Tony, rips the handcuffs off of Jack sans a key. He then pulls up Nina's pistol off the ground and hands it to Jack. The two take a brief look at each other then bolt out the door with their pistols out. We then spend the next 10 minutes seeing them double team all the terrorists in the building in the most violent ways possible.
Cut to clock.
I don't write in this thing anymore as I've been far too busy recently. Plus, as you can probably see from any online conversations that you've had with me lately, my grammar has taken a dangerous turn for the worse. Desperate times call for desperate measures though, so I'm going to have to write about something that has really been bothering me as of late. I am of course talking about what was, as of a year ago, absolutely the best show on television. Chances are that if I'm writing this and you're reading it, you very well already know my extreme fanaticism for Jack Bauer and his cohorts, so the fact that the article contains all kinds of spoilers from the previous seasons will probably not bother you. Now, onto the meat of this journal entry...
24 sucks. hard.
Wait, let me rephrase that so you don't start calling up the police thinking that the real me is bound and gagged in a car trunk somewhere.
This season of 24 is horribly shitty and squanders the good name of 24.
Now, this isn't some sort of snap judgment, after watching the DVD's of previous season, it's easy to see that season six isn't bad in the sense that the other seasons were awesome and the standards were set to high. It's just really bad. So here are the following suggestions I have to bring 24 back to it's former self.
1) Give Jack a team.
After watching the beginning of season three, I realized that while Jack is always awesome as a solo badass, we really don't care about anyone else. Up until last season, we always had Palmer and Tony around for the side stories and now that they're both gone, the story lines for the other characters have become nothing but a cheap soap opera. Having Jack at least start with a team of people next season will force us into a situation where we start caring about them because they're in direct contact with Jack and are trying to help him as opposed to preventing him from getting his job done.
2) Bring back time.
Now, if you're any fan of 24, you already know that the entire show is ludicrous when it comes to time. In fact, most of the qualms I've heard about the show from people who haven't watched it are from the fact that it's stupid that so much stuff can happen in one day. Well, as far as season 6 is concerned, they're absolutely correct. I mean, if you've been watching this season, you know that Wayne Palmer was blown up. And in a coma. Then revived after three hours. Then put back into a coma. Then woken up again. Then giving a speech. Then put into a coma. Then shot in the neck. Then revived. Then shot while being woken up.
I think you get the idea.
I realize that some things in 24 are kind of stupid, but the whole "Wayne Palmer is blown up but isn't really unconscious until we start another story" deal was ridiculous. I know, I know, you're probably pointing right now at season 3 when Tony is shot in the neck, and my justification for that is that reviving Tony had some direct implications on the story line. Palmer's waking up was incredibly pointless because VP Daniels ended up taking the presidency anyways. Had Palmer stayed in the coma, we'd be in exactly the same position as we are right now. Do you know what be a really good twist? If VP Daniels had done what Palmer did and pulled out the "threatening the foreign country with a fake nuke trick". Then we'd have gone along the whole time thinking Daniels was an asshole, but was really intelligent. We'd have a two for one as we'd start to like the VP and start to care for his character in the presidency.
Sorry, got a little carried away there.
Anyways, one of the things that 24 has forgotten is to use the presence of light to their advantage. Usually it hasn't been a problem because if you think about it, season one was really the only season to use time of day for it's plotlines (think Gaines' and his shoot out/hunt or Jack in the underground black ops holding cell for Drazen). If 24 uses shopping or business hours to their advantage, perhaps we could see more interesting scenarios in the show, like maybe Jack having a shoot out at a crowded night club or something. Or Jack having a fight in the middle of a rush hour packed highway. Or even better yet, makes sure that there are events that take place over a 4 to 5 episode arc again, what's been happening since season 4 are stories that get resolved within a two episode max, which is not only frustrating because it fails to create any tension, but subsequently forces the writers to constantly create new story rather than focus on the one their trying to tell.
3) Get rid of all WMD's.
This one's pretty straight forward. I don't care if there are nukes in LA. I don't care if there is gas in LA. I don't care if there are nukes in LA again. I don't care if there's a virus in LA. I still don't care that there are snukes in LA. Basically, what I'm saying is that the macguffin isn't the most important thing in 24. The nuclear football, the Cordelia virus, and the Sentox gas are all pretty much exchangable. What I care about in 24 is Jack and his companions, it doesn't matter to me that they're around because I know that unless they blow up all the characters in one blast and the screen goes black with "THE END" written on it, they will always be tracked down. The writers need to put Jack into an interesting situation that doesn't involve the macguffin, that's why Season 5 was so awesome, because it started out with a simple premise of "jack is framed and needs to prove himself not guilty".
4) Stop with the season twists.
One thing that 24 has always been famous for are its twists. Ever since the first season ended with one of the biggest tv shockers in history, subsequent seasons have tried to fill that requirement of having something crazy happen that sets up the next season. The problem with this is that the writers end up having to write themselves out of a corner for the next season. Season 5 was lucky, because it was able to craft a storyline directly from the events of the previous season, but Seasons 2 and 5 has proven that by having an awesome twist at the end, you essentially force yourself to write an extension of the twist. Without a season ending twist, you're not only left satisfied with the end, but you're free to write whatever situations and story lines you want in the next season.
5) Have Jack start off the season with the bad guys.
I've always kind of wanted Jack to play it evil in the first 6 episodes of one season, without any help of CTU or the Prez. This way we can be like "WTF!Monkey" before we find out it was a sting operation. Of course, the writers would really have to write him to be a horrible person, like killing innocent people or eating cute little kittens, in order to fool the audience. Plus maybe you could have CTU trying to track down a threat and we slowly reveal that Jack is part of that threat. Then you can have the stories converge when the two meet up and reveal a few more twists as to why Jack was working undercover, this is kind of a lead up to my next point.
6) Make Jack question himself.
One of the few story lines that I really liked in Season 6 was the good/bad terrorist plot. It was interesting to have Jack working with a terrorist because it kind of showed the thin line between what Jack does, and what they do. As much as we'd like to believe Jack is a good guy, if he wasn't on our side, then he'd pretty much be the world's craziest and hardest to kill terrorist ever. I mean he's hijacked a plane from the luggage compartment for Christ's sake. Having Jack question whether what he does or is forced to do is a great because of his circumstances makes for great television and shows us a character trait that a hero like Bond would never easily fit in any of his films.
7) More cougars.
One of the most best moments in season two was when Kim escaped police custody only to enter a forest where Johnny Drama was hiding out in a bomb shelter with canned food and no telephone which was used only as a vehicle for him to get laid. That moment was one of the single greatest story lines of the season because it showed off how fucking stupid the writing 24 can be. Luckily the other story lines had enough weight to not care a whole lot about losing 6 minutes to seeing Kim in a cougar trap. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this season is super sparse on any sort of story lines that we care about and I liked it when 24 flooded the shit out of how many stories we'd have to follow and was able to drop the ones that didn't work out so well.
8) Destroy all the sets.
I hate the way 24 is shot and looks these days. Everything is too nice and clean, even the warehouses are far too sanitary for my tastes. I feel like one of the most charming things about the first three seasons was that most of the episodes were shot in either horribly dark sets like CTU or on location in some third party place that was cheap enough for the show to afford shooting there for like 8 weeks in a row. Nowadays everything on 24 looks to well planned, the cameras don't follow the action, they create the action. The lighting is too flattering in CTU, it looks like a movie set, not a basement with computers like it used to. We're starting to see 24 turn into a formulaic looking show, where we know just when the cameras are going to do a shock zoom or when they're going to slowly reveal a surprise.
Here's an example.
Try and remember: the third episode of season one when Kim and Janet York are trying to run away from their kidnappers, there's this awesome shot where we follow the two running away, then the camera spins around Kim freaking out while we hear Janet getting railed by a car. The camera then pans down to show Janet lying in the middle of the road, dead. This sort of shot wouldn't happen on 24 these days, instead it'd just be a standard wide shot of Kim running down the street, then a split screen with a shock zoom of Janet getting smacked by a car. The cameras in 24 are to carefully planted nowadays and have totally forgotten about the whole "documentary" style format that we'd started out with.
9) Stop blowing shit up.
Seriously, sit down and watch the beginning of Season 6. Off the top of my head, I can think of 5 different scenes that include shit blowing up for little to no reason. First there was the air strike house where Assad was hiding, then there was the subway explosion, then the weapons storage compartment, then we saw Jack's dad blow up the non-Gredenko house. Oh yeah, and then a nuke went off somewhere in there. The point is, shit blowing up is pretty cool, but isn't cool when it happens some 5 times in the first 7 episodes of the season. Same thing with gun fights. The most memorable parts of 24 aren't the gunfights because there honestly isn't enough time for Cassar and his team to come up with any sort of fresh gun choreography in the two week period they have. Gun fights and explosions are better when used in sporadic bursts, look at the start of season one or season two, there are only two or so gun battles in the first 12 hours of those seasons. Now, every third episode sees Jack jumping into a situation where he can pull out a gun and shoot a bunch of nameless terrorists that we don't really care about because they hold no real threat to him. 24 shouldn't be Die Another Day, it should be Casino Royale.
10) End it this way.
I've always imagined the best way for 24 to end would be not to kill Jack Bauer (this idea is what everyone on the web thinks should happen), but to have a single season of Jack Bauer just living out his ordinary life in real time. Like sitting on the john for 7 minutes or going to the groceries and *shock* finding out that they're out of corn flakes. For an entire season.
But then one of my co-workers totally took my idea and took a shit on it with his far greater idea. And here it is.
FINAL 24 SCENE
INT. CENTER OF A TERRORIST CESSPOOL
Terrorists are everywhere and there's no chance for Jack to escape. He's disarmed and in a locked room with a single light swinging away overhead. The camera cuts to what's going on outside, there are terrorists with crazy amounts of weapons and awesome bandanas on their foreheads signifying their badassness. Some could even have scars on their faces, perhaps a sweet tat of a tear next to their eyes. Basically these guys are just crying to be killed, it's just a shame that Jack is chained down to a solidly mounted pipe and has absolutely no chance of escaping this locked room as there are no props around for him to kill anyone with. That's when we start to hear footsteps from outside the door. That's also when we see the door slowly open to reveal...
Nina Myers.
JACK
(shocked)
Nina? You were behind all this? I thought you were dead...
NINA
Stranger things have happened Jack.
Nina reaches to her holster and pulls out a pistol. She points it at Jack, but not close enough for Jack to be able to reach for it. Jack sits there, defenseless, no one at CTU knows that he's been captured or where he is. All of his friends and allies are dead. He has nothing. He just sits there, waiting for the trigger to be pulled. Nina, still holding the gun, presses her finger down on the trigger.
BLAM.
The gunshot rings out loud as we cut to Nina's face. There's a bullet hole in it. Nina, drops down to the ground and the camera comes to focus to reveal.
TONY ALMEIDA
(whispering intensely)
That's it Jack, we have to go. NOW!
JACK
(shocked)
Tony, you're still alive? I thought you were dead?
TONY
Stranger things have happened Jack.
Tony, with the magic of his being Tony, rips the handcuffs off of Jack sans a key. He then pulls up Nina's pistol off the ground and hands it to Jack. The two take a brief look at each other then bolt out the door with their pistols out. We then spend the next 10 minutes seeing them double team all the terrorists in the building in the most violent ways possible.
Cut to clock.