"24" Begins Another Interminable Season

I'm going to part from the general wisdom of my fellow bloggers to talk down a show which is perennially among their favorites: "24." The show, which began a new season this week with a 2-hour special, is based around the incredibly cool premise that everything happens in real time. It originally began by demonstrating the lengths to which a man would go in order to save his family: in the first season, Jack Bauer's wife and daughter are kidnapped by bad guys with a hidden agenda. The extreme measures Jack uses in order to rescue them are ones with which we are familiar, having seen them before in film and television. We too would do anything to save our loved ones. In the course of his family-saving heroics, Jack alienates his friends, his employer and--in an interesting twist--his country. Plot twists abound, including one in which we learn the identity of a mole in the Counter Terrorist Unit where Jack works.

However, the show inevitably moved past Jack's immediate family in the second and third seasons and this, combined with their emphasis on illogical ruthlessness on Bauer's part, was the show's undoing. This was the precise point at which you could see the suspense-laden drama of the first season turn into Jack Bauer torture porn for TV. The show still follows the same, formulaic pattern in which Jack stretches the law and truth in order to find the preordained "bad guys," while alienating his friends and co-workers, but without the familial urgency, all of his actions makes little to no sense. There are actually so many flaws with Jack's logic that list form is the best representation for them all:

1) Jack trusts whomever he trusts with all of his soul...until he doesn't trust them anymore. Once you are on Jack Bauer's good side, you could tell him that aliens with octopus heads have landed on the White House and he will scream into telephones and torture anyone in order to prevent the deadly alien invasion. However, if the show's writers see fit, Jack's child-like trust will suddenly transform into fits of rage where he points guns and sharp objects at the character and threatens their life and the lives of all of their family members. In later seasons, these turns happen with such frequency and such speed that one begins to suspect Mr. Bauer of bipolar disorder. One season, I kid you not, he fights through terrorists in order to bring a suspect into custody alive after...wait for it...shooting to death a friend and member of CTU for reasons I still can't understand.

2) Jack will fight to the death in order to save...the USA? The deepest mystery the show has managed to maintain throughout the later seasons is the real motivation for any of Jack's actions. They may reveal this at some future point as some incredible plot twist (Jack is actually a robot from the future!) but I won't hold my breath. Ostensibly, Jack is trying to save the USA from attack or collapse. But since his bipolar disorder prevents him from using logic and reason, he has trouble calibrating his responses to actions throughout the series. He tortures US citizens as easily as foreign ones, so he clearly doesn't believe that the US is defined by its citizenry. He's deposed at least 2 presidents and other major leaders of the country, so he clearly doesn't believe that the US is defined by its leadership. And since he ignores literally every law enforcement agency as superfluous, he clearly doesn't define the US by its institutions. So what the hell is he fighting so hard to protect? Write to me if you can figure this one out.

3) Torture is the panacea for all intelligence problems. Of all of the show's ridiculous memes, this could be the most ridiculous of all. In the later seasons, there isn't an ounce of counter-intelligence procured by Jack that doesn't have, at its source someone on whom actual force or the threat of force was not exercised. Let's leave aside the fact that many respected members of the intelligence community both past and present say that torture is far more likely to produce poor intelligence than any other form of intelligence gathering. Let's ignore the fact that, as mentioned above, Jack tortures friends as easily as he does terrorists. Even without all of that, the fact remains that this methodology makes Jack Bauer both boring and predictable. (Oh, Jack's got a suspect in his hands, I wonder if he's going to...yep there goes with the electrodes to the nuts...wow, he got another impossible lead which will provide just enough information to lead us to...sigh, the next suspect in his custody).

With all of that being said for the general failures in the show, this season is probably the most boring yet. With a repeat showing for most of last season's cast, we are placed in a familiarly gritty urban setting (New York, this time) with familiarly foreign terrorists and familiarly growling Jack Bauer. If you're into Kiefer Sutherland snarling at the camera for an hour while waltzing through a plot an 8-year-old could probably write, then you'll love this season of "24."