Breaking Down Bauer: Tackling the New Season of 24
Written by: Rob Van Winkle, CC2K Staff Writer
2-18-07
I realize that this latest update is very delayed, but it was due to the most timeless of excuses: my own personal stupidity.
A pending snowstorm necessitated a company-wide meeting moving from Tuesday night (where I’d have been conveniently out of town) to Monday night. (Full disclosure: I do not make millions of dollars writing for CC2K, and so yes, I do have a day job!) This meant that I would not be able to get home in time to either watch, or tape, the TWO HOUR EVENT of 24. However, being the genius that I am, I realized that there was a VCR at my workplace, and so all I had to do was insert a long tape and hit record. This is exactly what I did, and when my wife and I cuddled up on the couch and popped in the tape, we were treated to two heart-pumping hours of…CNN. I did everything right…except making sure that I was recording the correct channel.
Our situation was hopeless…until we turned to the internet. A few hours and swear words later, we had both episodes on our computer…recorded from a New York Fox affiliate…complete with Japanese subtitles. (I would include an image of this, but we deleted both files as soon as we were finished watching them, as though the Feds were on our trail.)
Because of all this, the first observation I had about these most recent episodes was that I couldn’t help but wonder if I was watching what the rest of the world saw. I think it was the Japanese characters floating across the bottom of my screen, coupled with the knowledge (or at least, the stereotype) that Japanese entertainment is SO much more intense than our own, but this was some scary shit! At various points, one man gets punched in the face, beaten with a baseball bat, half-drowned in a bathtub, and as a finale, has a power drilled shoved into his shoulder. I think it was when my wife had to run away from the screen that I had the thought: THIS aired on American TV?
And yet, by the end of the episodes, enough of the same old 24 shone through to convince me that indeed it did.
The thing that really struck me about this installment was that, despite the entire conceit of 24 that each episode constitutes EXACTLY one hour of a particular day, the show actually has a very liberal idea of real time.
At one point, Jack was on the phone with Chloe, attempting to disarm a nuclear bomb that was going to explode in three minutes. He did so on the sixth floor of a walkup apartment building. Less than ten minutes later, he was racing in a car back to CTU in his ubiquitous SUV. Morris O’Brian, the technician who was so brutally tortured in the first of tonight’s episodes, finds himself back at CTU within fifteen minutes of being rescued, fully bandaged up ten minutes later, and back at work ten minutes after that. Jack’s father learned what Jack was planning, and within fifteen minutes, was able to get a team of men to secure a house in West L.A., plant a bomb in that house set to go off seconds after entry, and then coerce his daughter-in-law to get Jack to that location. Oh, and speaking of Jack’s father, he killed his son (Jack’s brother), then used his daughter-in-law by threatening to kill his grandson to get her to help him kill his other son. Damn.
On the other front, we have a man who has dedicated his life to public service and serving his country, and now acts as the President of the United States’ chief advisor. Within two hours, he has forced another member of the President’s cabinet to resign, considered resigning himself when his latest policy was not accepted, and is now fully invested in a plan to assassinate the president.
Our villain, the evil Abu Fayed, after torturing O’Brian into creating a nuclear arming device, ran into the one room not raided by the CTU agents immediately, set the suitcase nuke to explode, escaped the apartment via a secret rope ladder, and got away on a medical helicopter, all before that nuclear device was set to go off. (That gave him five minutes to descend six stories on that ladder, then fly far enough away to escape the blast radius.)
It all leads me to the conclusion that, while I would not want to live in a world where nuclear devices were exploding throughout the country, and evil moles infiltrate the Oval Office more frequently than Britney Spears shaves something stupid…but you have to admit that it WOULD be pretty cool to live in a place where you could run faster than the speed of sound, and recover from trauma in the time it takes to microwave a burrito.
I guess you have to sacrifice in order to get ahead.