Coming To Terms – Dealing With The Worst Season Finale of 24 Ever

[This article is part of a three-part series. Go here for part 2 on The Sopranos]

[Again, much inspiration, as well as some of the videos, were drawn from this Progressive Boink article]

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR 24 SEASON SIX

In the season finale of 24, Karen Hayes, Bill Buchanan, and Jack Bauer risked everything to save…Jack’s supposed nephew. There was no nuke, no biological weapon, no assassination attempt; just a blond whiny kid with a rice bowl haircut. After they were done with this ridiculous and unsatisfying storyline, Jack headed over to Heller’s house (conveniently just a few minutes away) to chew him out about his insouciance from earlier. In the show’s final scene, Jack looks out at the waves, reflecting on the sociopath he’s become and his own mess of a personal life. The audience wept, but not out of sadness for Jack; rather, for the 24 hours we knew we would never get back.

This was the worst season of 24 ever, often painful to watch. Even the President of Fox thought so. I’ve already written at length about why this season was awful and I stand by my points. But rather than rail endlessly about how bad it’s become (although that will happen during this post), I thought I’d channel my energy into thinking about five things that can make the show better next season. In no particular order, they are:

1) Don’t Set It In Los Angeles – In Season 1, the possibility that presidential candidate David Palmer might be in LA for the day was extremely plausible. In Season 2, the possibility that terrorists might try to nuke LA was vaguely believable. By Season 3, the idea that LA would be the place where terrorists would want to launch a biological attack began to make LA seem like one of the unluckiest places on Earth. And by Season 4-6, the idea of using LA again just made our eyes glaze over in disbelief.

As this article by Cracked can attest to, it’s no real mystery why they set the series in LA. But it’s killing the series, taxing our suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, and basically disrespecting the audience to an astonishing degree.

(From Flickr user Kaptain Krispy Kreme via CC)

To paraphrase Seinfeld, it's flattering to think that your city is bomb-able. But we've had enough of Hollywood's self-indulgence in this matter.

2) No More Office Romance – The last compelling office romance in 24 was in Season 2, between Tony and Michelle (do we even want to remember Kim and Chase’s baby adventures in Season 3?). Since then, office romances have been a waste of time, reaching their nadir this season with the insufferable Milo and the witless Nadia (and to a lesser degree, with Morris and Chloe). When Tony and Michelle worked at CTU, you rooted for them because they were really good at their jobs and they fought for the right thing (i.e. Jack Bauer).

Nobody cared about what happened to the characters this season because more often than not, they were shown to be incompetent, bickering, and petty, to an extent never before seen even for 24. There was no reason to care why they got together or not because most of the time, they pissed you off more than they endeared themselves to you.

Witness the painful awkwardness of this scene:


3) No more CTU – Every year it's a target for hostile takeover by Division or Homeland Security. Also, it's full of moles.

Every single season of 24 has involved the same premise; either Jack is the head of CTU, leading a team from CTU, or is made to lead a team from CTU after he proves his competence.

I understand the need for Jack to use CTU; it allows him access to government-grade weapons and gives him the opportunity to continually bark “I need that information NOW” over the phone. But it’s become clear that CTU, plot-wise, has become an encumbrance to the series, with its bureaucratic redtape, its murky and sketchy superiors from “Division,” and its tedious personnel disputes.

(From Flickr user Phantasmak via CC)

Get rid of CTU next season (from the plotline, at least). Please.

4) Stop Killing Characters…Or Do It Better – This season saw the loss of President Logan and Curtis (not to mention Kumar from “Harold and Kumar”!). It seems as though just as we’re beginning to care about someone, 24’s writers take great pleasure in killing them off for us. As I’ve written before, when you do this respectfully, it pays great dividends; when you do it like 24 does it, it makes the deaths seem senseless and wasteful.

For example, what was the point of this:

or this:


And from this season, what, for the love of god, was the point of this?:


Although it gave him a nice story arc, Curtis was basically black Jack Bauer. By killing off Curtis, unceremoniously, the writers of the show killed off a lot of fans' good will. And by having Jack recover from it almost instantly (despite a 2-minute cry) is another example of the writers' continuing disdain for the emotional intelligence of its audience.

Look to Season 3 for a character's death done right:


(And Chappelle wasn't even a character we cared that much about!)

5) Bring Back Jack – Jack Bauer is the reason we watch this show. Season 6 introduced a bunch of new characters, including a potential Jack Bauer replacement (Doyle), then asked us to be emotionally invested in them without telling us why. But really, the only one person we care about on the show is Jack Bauer and he was getting crowded out (screentime-wise) by all of these nobodies.

Whether Jack is being a detective, doing some plain old killing, or physically and mentally torturing suspects, Kiefer’s performance is a joy to watch:



Proof positive - One of this season's most intense, amazing scenes was this climactic fight between Bauer and Fayed:


Even when Kiefer is showing his weaker side, Bauer remains an extremely compelling character. See the end of Season 3, when Bauer breaks down (something we should have seen slightly more of this season):

The problem was, Season Six didn't give us nearly enough of any of this.

Please give us more of Jack doing what he does best. As intense as ex-Scrubs nurse Doyle is, he can’t hold a candle to Bauer.

**

I’ve recently finished re-watching Season 2 of 24 on DVD and the difference was palpable. Despite Kim’s antics, Season 2 was one taut, nerve-jangling season (and as much as I hate to admit it, even the various situations Kim found herself in were directed with skill and intensity). There were suspenseful situations in which the split screen and real-time conceit were used to great effect. There were fantastically evil and chilling villains. And there were touching moments like this one:



NONE OF THESE ELEMENTS WERE PRESENT IN SEASON 6. [For any fan, I’d urge you to go back and watch Season 2 again; it will remind you why you fell in love with this show.]

The series needs a reboot in the way “Casino Royale” kicked the 007 series back into high gear. Hopefully they’ll surprise us with something completely new. Otherwise, I’m really going to have to stop watching, which makes me sad because the Jack Bauer Power Hour used to be one of my favorite weekly events back in the day. It looks like Executive Producer Howard Gordon has already gotten the message; let's hope he brings it home for Season Seven.

[Edit: Changed some of the language/videos in the "Bring Back Jack" section]

Five Reasons Why "Twenty Four" ("24") Has Fallen

Before we begin, please take a look at the following posts if you can:

- My original post before Season Six began
- http://www.progressiveboink.com/archive/24100/1.html
- http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=1498
(those lasts two links have given me a lot of inspiration, not to mention the videos you'll see in this post)

Before Season Six of 24, Kiefer Sutherland gave many great interviews (here’s one of them) in which he promised the following:

“We've had five years of him saving a large thing; this one's much more about him saving his own ass. He'll go from being the one who hunts people down to the one who's being hunted, so that in itself turns the show around.”

Season Six was supposed to be the season that turned “24” on its head, the season that delivered something fresh after the first five seasons of the same ol’ thing. Indeed, the first four episodes positioned the season to deliver on that promise. After having been tortured brutally for 18 months, Jack Bauer was released from a Chinese prison and forced to sacrifice his life in exchange for a terrorist’s location. But when his captor turned out to be the real mastermind behind everything, Kiefer Sutherland chewed off a guard’s neck and escaped to get the word out just in the nick of time.

Then a nuclear bomb went off near Valencia. Wow. We were left to wonder: What will be the consequences of a mass-casualty attack on American soil? How would our freedoms be affected? What implications would the atomic explosion have, both physically and emotionally, on the people in the blast radius? These were questions with dozens of potentially exciting storylines that could have unfolded as the season went on. This could have been one of the best seasons of 24 ever, if not some of the most compelling material on television.

How far the show has fallen.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that this season of “24” has been the worst season ever. For a variety of reasons which I’ll get into shortly, the show wasn’t doing that well for the first half of the season or so, but “24” unquestionably reached its nadir two episodes ago (Day 6, Hour 15), when a mentally challenged/autistic/Rainman-like character was introduced in a brazenly manipulative subplot that found Jack Bauer coaching him through a dangerous exchange with a terrorist. It’s as if the writers knew we didn’t care about any of the other characters (whose fault is that?), so they shoehorned in a mental disability to MAKE us care. I'm sad to say that it worked, but it made me feel dirty afterwards.

If two episodes ago was the low point of the show, then last episode (Day 6, Hour 16) was when the series officially jumped the shark. A Supreme Court that convenes within minutes and hears cases within the hour? A blond, sexy assistant that is willing to drink the Vice President's Kool Aid, only to be blackmailed by a spying Chief of Staff? And a preposterous storyline in which Gredanko CUT OFF HIS OWN ARM and bled out on a beach, rather than cooperate with the US government, even with the slight risk of Jack Bauer getting medieval on his ass? It's like the show decided to throw any last vestige of reality out the window and go for broke as the most insane and cringe-inducingly-campy-but-unaware-of-its-own-campiness show on television.

I’ve seen every single episode of “24” when it has originally aired. I’ve always been a huge fan of the show, but this season has taxed my devotion more than anything else. Here’s why:

1) We've seen the same thing before...really

Many shows ripoff other shows. "Twenty Four" brazenly rips off itself, to an extent rarely seen in television. You may have gotten a strong sense of deja vu this season; that's because we've already seen "Unstable woman unexpectedly kills domineering man" (Season Four, with the sex slave). We've already seen "Cabinet invokes 25th Amendment to unseat President" (Season Two, with David Palmer). We've already seen "Terrorist somehow manages to slip through CTU's sieve-like perimeters" (Seasons 3-4). We've already seen "Wrong woman from CTU get accused and interrogated for being a mole" (Season Four). For that matter, we've already seen "Mole suspected in CTU" (Seasons 1-5). The only thing we've seen before that we're not tired of seeing is Jack Bauer kicking ass, and he hasn't even been doing that as much! (See #4)

Fans need to see something fresh, or else they won't be tuning in again next season.

2) Increasingly less believable political figures

For the first few seasons, Dennis Haysbert played David Palmer as a firm, dignified president who was commanding, yet gentle; idealistic, yet wizened. Last season saw Gregory Itzin portray the delightfully slimy President Logan, and although he was a character we all loved to hate, his ascension to the presidency was at least believable. This was partially due to some of the plot dynamics at the end of Season Four, but also because of Itzin’s amazing performance.

This season, we’re led to believe that Wayne Palmer is President of the United States. Let’s pause for a minute to contemplate this development. First of all, wouldn’t Palmer’s connection to the murder/suicide at the end of Season Three have virtually eliminated his political future? (Then again, this is a world in which David Palmer won the Presidency as a divorced, single man). And secondly, Wayne Palmer wasn’t even the most popular character on 24; how could he possibly have been the most popular character in a presidential campaign? Can you honestly imagine him giving a stump speech? The man has the charisma of a withered tortoise.

But Wayne Palmer’s ascension is nothing compared to Vice President Daniels, who is so cartoonishly evil that I would wager he has no soul. Although I suppose he could just be a ringer for Dick Cheney…

In any event, the America in “24” has plunged past the realm of “Banana Republic” and into the nether regions of “Wildly Insane.” The show has taken our courteous suspension of our disbelief and run it straight into the ground at 100 mph.

3) Killing off characters…poorly

In Season Three, the killing of Chappelle (from Division) was one of the most moving and powerful moments that year. Somehow, the writers had found a way to provoke a reaction from the death of a character who was basically a non-character. Chappelle’s duties on the show mainly consisted of trying to slow things down with bureaucratic red tape and generally being a jackass, yet when Jack is finally forced to pull the trigger, you could almost feel a tear come to your eye.



All of that emotion, that consideration, that respect that was given to character deaths is gone now.

At the beginning of Season Five, they offed David Palmer, Michelle Desslar, Edgar, and Tony Almeida, all within a short period of time and for no real discernable purpose. But it was Almeida’s death that was the most pointless of all; he went out like a wimp at the hands of Henderson. Fans far and wide complained that there was no silent clock for him, a dignity which even Chappelle got. And Tony’s death seemed to be forgotten by Jack as quickly as it was by the writers. This season, Curtis’ death was forgotten equally quickly, and Ex-President Logan’s death wasn’t even mentioned in the next episode (!)

Killing people off is a perfectly good way to advance the plot, to grab your audience’s attention, and to deepen their connection with the surviving characters (See: Last episode of Season 1). But when you do it so quickly and the characters don’t respond to these deaths in any believable way, it lessens the impact considerably.

4) Where is Jack Bauer?

The writers made a bad decision when they decided to take Jack Bauer out of the “Twenty Four” equation this season. Season Six has seen less of Jack Bauer than any other season. Instead, we’ve been given an insufferable Morris/Chloe subplot, a lame romance between Milo/Nadia, and way too much of a dead-end plot involving Regina King and Walid (what a waste of my time and life). We've seen more of Tom Lennox than we have of Jack Bauer. And that, my friends ia shame.

Let’s face it: Jack Bauer is been the reason everyone, male or female, tunes into this show. It’s not to see Wayne Palmer wax ineloquent on the dangers of a nuclear bomb going off. But even what little we’ve seen of Jack has been unequal to his previous antics.

Remember in Season Four when Jack just up and decided to storm the terrorist stronghold, rogue-like?



Aside from the episode when Jack ate a man, this season has given us nothing close to a siege that audacious. Where has Jack Bauer gone?

5) The heart is gone

In Season One, Jack Bauer was just a normal man put into extraordinary circumstances. Even in the face of conspiracy theories, hot lesbian assassins, and Dennis Hopper’s Serbian accent, the core of the season remained Jack’s emotional connection to his wife and child. The impact of this was felt very clearly in Season One’s finale episode:



In Seasons Two and Three, the same thing applied. Despite how annoying Kim Bauer was, I will argue that she was important to the series in that she imbued Jack with some sort of humanity and kept him grounded in the real world as a family man.

But after Season Three, Jack seemed to become more and more superhuman by the episode, shrugging off injuries (even rising from the dead…twice), and enduring and inflicting countless brutal torture sessions including one on his own brother. Jack was no longer the skillful but desperate head of CTU we saw in Season One; he was an unstoppable relentless killing machine.

This has ultimately been what the show has been losing, and continues to lose: its heart. Jack Bauer is the guy we all want protecting our borders and foiling terrorists plots. But he’s no longer a guy we’d want to ever spend time with because he’s no longer a person that can exist in the real world. He’s not the type of guy you’d want to grab a drink with at a bar, or share a meal with (because he doesn’t eat). Also, he’d probably kill you with his pinky if you spilled on him by accident.

As bad as the cougar-licious Season Two was, it still brought us this intensely moving scene between Jack and George Mason:



This one of those times when it's okay for men to cry. Nothing since then has really come close to having the same emotional impact, this season least of all.

**

In the above post, you might think that I’ve argued that Jack doesn’t do enough killing and yet also argued that he has killed too much. This may seem contradictory, but let me explain: I don’t mind Jack going on unstoppable killing sprees so much as I mind the fact that he no longer appears to have any relatable motivations to go on those sprees. In Season One, we could relate to the fact that Jack’s family was held hostage and he was pushed into an extraordinary situation. But now we don’t really have a firm handle on what his motivations are and I think the show has suffered greatly because of it. You can argue that he has an undying commitment to this country and its values, but even if you could articulate what those values are, how can we relate to a man whose commitment is so total, so all-encompassing?

At its best, “24” has been a campy, streamlined, wildly unrealistic thrill ride that has wowed us with Jack Bauer’s badass-ery and caused us to think a little more deeply about the political world around us. At its worst, it’s a lame soap opera in which we care about none of the characters and where there's a complete lack of tension, despite the attempted use of real-time format. This season it has edged ever more towards the latter. I honestly think the show can still be salvaged but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen anytime soon. I’m still holding out hope for a Season Seven in which a CTU-less Jack just goes on a revenge killing spree to find Audrey’s killer. The show desperately needs something fresh to keep loyal fans excited to be coming back. We can always hope….

(Note: This is an update of an earlier post)

Five Things To Make 24 ("Twenty Four") Better For Season Six

I still remember the first time I watched the Jack Bauer Power Hour. I was a freshman in college and at the behest of a dorm-mate, I gave the show’s first episode a shot. Instantly, I was hooked by the real-time format and fascinated by how they could maintain it from week to week, even from a technical standpoint. Not only did they pull it off, they made it immensely addicting; what really got me were the little moments at the end of each episode, the hooks that would ensure you’d tune in next week to find out what would happen in the next moments of Jack’s Bauer’s longest day (though of course, by now we know he’s had several ‘longest days’)

Ever since the first season, I have watched every single episode of 24 when it has aired for the first time on Fox. I have re-arranged study session, put off homework, neglected work-related and familial obligations, all to watch Kiefer Sutherland kick some terrorist ass from week to week. I have been, by turns, breathtakingly amazed and crushingly disappointed by some of the plot developments. Season Two, for example, had Kim Bauer getting trapped in the forest with a cougar, only to be taken hostage by some creepy underground bomb shelter guy, only to be taken hostage by an unstable convenience store robber. On the other hand, Season Four’s first ten episodes, which chronicled a terrorist cell masquerading as the family-next-door had some of the finest, most riveting television ever (Shohreh Aghdashloo’s performance as Dina Araz was particularly moving…and whatever the hell happened to Behrooz anyway? I think the last we saw of him, he was getting his homing chip removed from his neck, forcibly).

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the show, with the four-hour premiere almost upon us, and without further ado, I present to you five things I think would make Twenty Four better for this upcoming season…call it a “wish-list,” though of course by this point in time, many of the decisions have already been made, though with Twenty Four, you never know. (It should be noted that I have read no spoilers for the upcoming season, so I don’t if they’ve divulged that any of these will/will not happen…):

[SPOILERS FOR “TWENTY FOUR”, SEASONS ONE THROUGH FIVE, TO FOLLOW]

1) Characters We’d Like To See More Of -

Curtis Manning – Curtis is pretty much the only potentially worthy successor to Jack that we’ve seen thus far, yet he’s been relegated to the thankless role of black/minority sidekick. Can we please, please see more of Curtis destroying some terrorists, possibly alongside Jack if the opportunity arises? Thanks.

The Logans – Gregory Itzin’s portrayal of the President you love to hate was something that got me riled up, week after week. Jean Smart also gave a spine-tingling performance as the beleaguered First Lady. I’ll never forget that episode when she basically gave up her body to distract the President while the plan to take him down was executed; I was overcome with a horror I rarely experience while watching TV. Logan may be rotting in some prison by now, but hopefully they’ll find some way to bring him back into the show. The anger he inspires is completely unparalleled.

Morris O’Brian – He was delightful in the short time that he was on-screen for Season Five…and I need some more insight into the psyche of a man that would marry Chloe. Perhaps he can teach patience and endurance to all of us men…

Please also leave out characters and plotlines that have no bearing on the main plotline and exist only to generate false tension. As I type this, I’m giving the evil eye to Chase Edmunds’ baby and Erin Driscoll’s mentally unstable daughter (Did you even remember these characters before I mentioned them just now? Honestly?)

2) Institute a Strict Maximum of ONE Double-Crosser This Season - Nina Myers. Mike Novick. Gael (kind of). The President of the United States. The list goes on and on…double-crossers, whose ulterior motives are introduced midway through the season to the surprise of both viewers and the actors that portray them. It’s in these moments through which the show demonstrates that it does still, indeed, make up the story as it goes along (Seriously, the Nina Myers double-cross makes less and less sense on repeated viewings. If she was really on the terrorists’ side, then what the hell was she doing for all of Season One?! Am I the only one who thinks this?). Capping the number of double-crossers at one would ensure more creativity in generating tension. Necessity is the mother of invention and revealing that someone is a mole gets kind of old and lazy after the 8th time you’ve done it.

3) Let Jack Do His Own Thing – Every single season of Twenty Four has seen Jack Bauer frustrated by the bureaucracy of CTU and the federal government, which he fights so hard to protect. Even Season Five, which started out with Bauer being officially dead, eventually ended up with him getting the keys of CTU handed back to him. For Season Six, let’s please have Jack breaking away and doing his own thing, maybe going rogue and taking out some people that have hindered his efforts in the past, or otherwise flagrantly disobeying orders with no consequences. An unencumbered Jack is a happy, violent, and deadly Jack.

4) Split-Screen Is Good – Remember early on, when almost every episode of Twenty Four had numerous instances of this:



You may not be able to tell from these screencaps, but what I'm trying to demonstrate is that early on, split-screens weren’t just placeholders for the ticking clock, nor were they clumsy transitions (which is what they’ve become); they were exciting ways of driving the action and/or tying the four stories together, simultaneously. Seasons Four and Five had hints of this, but never really exploited it to its full potential. Hopefully Season Six returns the split-screen to its former glory.

5) End The Show – This one is a long shot; it was big news awhile back that Kiefer had signed on for two more seasons, not to mention a movie deal that, while sure to be a blockbuster, would break from the show’s real-time format. But could it all have been a red herring for Kiefer's imminent demise this season? Here's hoping...As much as I love the show, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. When the show premiered in 2001, its first episode made the bold move of having an airplane being blown up by an assassin. In the wake of 9/11, executives didn’t even know if the show would last till the end of its first season, let alone go on to become a huge cash cow for the network and spawn countless imitators. While this unexpected success blessed us with five additional years of Jack Bauer, it became obvious how unexpected this was as season after season, writers have tried to draw out the series and to make Jack’s day ever worse and worse.

Early trailers of the new season have teased that Jack will sacrifice his life for his country this season. I can think of no nobler way for Jack Bauer to go out. It would certainly be better than going out by sucking every last drop of revenue from the withered teat of commercial success.


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