No sentient being could avoid knowing that the new season of 24 begins this week. I don't think I'm giving away anything that wasn't in the promos or the premiere last night, but you should probably beware the spoilers below anyhow.
Many critics (and fans) have noted that the real-time structure of the show requires a certain suspension of disbelief by viewers. Last season, at the end of one episode, the devious president and his crazy wife were seen getting ready to hit the sack, but at the beginning of the next one, ostensibly five minutes later, they were dressed and getting into a limo. Biggest of all, at the very end of the past season, Jack Bauer saved the world again, only to find himself at sea on a Chinese freighter approximately three minutes later. Last night, we had to accept that Bauer could recover from from 20 torture-filled months in Chinese custody, and another 10 or 15 torture-filled minutes back on American soil, swiftly enough to be able to kill one of his captors using the single most bad-ass method in the history of the series. (Proving that you can find anything on the Internet, here's a site that catalogs all of Bauer's kills, by season, with video clips.)
So, accepting the implausible is vital to enjoying 24. And after one night, we already have to accept A) that Wayne Palmer is now President of the United States; B) that martial law and concentration camps haven't already been introduced despite 11 weeks of suicide bombings and other terror attacks on American cities; C) that such a campaign could be orchestrated by a single terrorist; D) that another known terrorist would be dispatched to the United States to stop the first one and E) that CTU, the federal agency tasked with stopping terrorists, would completely confuse the mission of one with the mission of the other. Of course, as we've learned in past seasons, the miserably dysfunctional CTU usually gets things right in the 24th hour after repeatedly fucking up in Hours 1 through 23--but after watching for five seasons plus one episode, nobody should be surprised if we found out at some point that the entire agency is a division of FEMA.
Some things 24 gets right, though. Palmer's oily chief of staff, who's violating the president's orders (and the Constitution) by "positioning" for martial law and concentration camps in anticipation that the president will eventually want them, would be right at home in the Bush Administration. (It wouldn't take 11 weeks of attacks in our reality to start the positioning, though--I've suspected for years that we're one bus bomb from instituting both.) Raging anti-Muslim paranoia, with average citizens assuming that everyone of Middle Eastern descent is a terrorist and acting accordingly, would undoubtedly increase to toxic proportions in our reality, too. I'm afraid they're also getting torture right. Over the weekend, I read somewhere (don't remember where, so I can't link) that there were five times as many torture scenes on all American TV shows last year than in the previous five years combined--and 24 has always led the way in this regard. And the word is that we're going to see even more on 24 this season.
To a certain degree, 24 is a victim of the adrenaline rush that's its trademark. An addict always needs higher doses to get off, and so 24 has to keep jacking up the violence, the suspense, the spectacle, and ultimately the sense of dread that makes it seem, implausiblities aside, more like a horror-house mirror than anything else on TV. As a result of the envelope-pushing imperative, 24 has promised far more than it ended up delivering in the last two seasons. At midseason last year, I called it the darkest, grimmest program ever to appear on American TV, and said that the only way to make it darker would be to start killing random viewers at home. Now, with season 6, the producers are trying to do that very thing. Where past terror attacks have targeted individual cities, primarily Los Angeles, now nobody's immune. Putting all of the show's faults aside, now, more than ever before, it's easy to imagine what's happening in 24 happening to you.
And based on what happened tonight, well . . . be glad it's only imaginary. For now.
Ramblin' Guys
Jerry Bowles
J.A. Bartlett
Culture Warriors
Groom Lake
Blackdogred
Political Pundocrity
John McCreery
Josh Hammond
Michael Scott
Leftcoast
Krugies
Empathy, Ed Psych, and the Football
No Deal
Quote of the Day
Followups
Sports Page
The Fraud
So Long Saddam, So Long Oh-Six
A Ford, Not a Lincoln, or Those Other Guys, Either
White Bread, Red Meat
Don't Move, Claus--You're Under Arrest
May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007
