24
Poet William Blake once wrote that to be innocent was to "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour."
Jack Bauer knows all about eternal hours. But innocence? Not so much.
Bauer, protagonist for Fox's long-running thriller 24, never has a boring day. Whenever we see the fellow, he's saving the world from terrorists/assassins/nerve gas/nuclear weapons/electronic sabotage/static cling from dawn to dusk to dawn again. The bad guys change from day to day (this go-round he's thwarting evildoers from the fictional African country of Sengala), but the plot is much the same. He slogs his way from gunfight to gunfight, car chase to car chase, without so much as a Twinkie to keep him going. Bathroom breaks? Jack says they're for wimps.
"He's never won," Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack, told tv.ign.com. "Not one year has he ever walked out with his goal being accomplished, but he's a guy who's gonna give everything he can and try as hard as he can." And he does it in the face of gut-wrenching loss, staggering treachery and a mountain of red tape. He's a Wild West gunfighter in a 21st century ethos, battling not just the black hats, but bureaucracy, politics and postmodern sensitivity. Put that in your TV juicer and squeeze.
"When are you people going to stop thinking everybody else is following your rules?" Jack asks this season. "They're not."
All of this goes a long way toward explaining the enduring appeal of America's most tortured tormentor—a guy who sacrifices everything to save the day, including his own humanity.
What Would Jack Do?
The show has its merits. It's an undeniable thrill-ride with unexpected nuance. Jack is, in some ways, a heroic champion. Some Christians have even labeled the counterterrorist operative a Christ-like figure.
But in his seven days on the job, Jack has—among many other atrocities—killed his supervisor, shot an innocent woman in the leg and bit out a terrorist's jugular. Not exactly Christ-like material. This season alone, Jack kills more than a half-dozen people and buries alive his own de facto partner, FBI agent Renee Walker. In one recent episode, he forced medical personnel to revive a nearly dead man so he could whisper unspeakable threats in his ear. Then, when the man falls senseless again, Bauer cuts open his chest (blood spurting and smearing) to retrieve a buried data chip. It's telling, I think, that Entertainment Weekly's recap of the episode asked, "And hasn't 24 cut a gizmo out of someone before?"
24 has other problems, of course. The show is part thriller, part office soap opera—complete with lurid kisses and forbidden affairs. Expletives fly right alongside the bullets.
But 24's most cutting sin is its lavish use of murder, torture and gore to advance its plot. And it's not just the guilty who pay. One woman this season is ambushed in her own apartment and stabbed to death in a scene that'll make your eyes roll back in your head. Another's killed in a horrific traffic accident. A third gets shot in the gut: She slumps to the floor, spitting up blood as the killer watches her slowly die.
Jack is determined to stop such injustice even as he perpetrates it. He threatens families and puts innocent lives in jeopardy. He chokes and beats information out of wrongdoers.
Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock
In a recent episode, Jack and Renee encourage a frightened innocent to spy on one of the season's big bad 'uns. The ruse works, but ends badly for the girl. She dies on the streets of Washington, D.C., a casualty of a war she barely knew about.
Jack shrugs off her "sacrifice" with war-weary discipline. "What we did wasn't wrong," he tells Renee. "It was necessary."
It's a shaky line of reasoning, especially for those of us who don't face life-or-death situations each day. Some might believe it's "necessary" to cheat on an Algebra test to get an A; to smoke pot to fit in with the right people; to lie; to steal. These sorts of moral slippages aren't as dependent on the difference between right and wrong as they are on how we define necessary. Almost any action can be excused if we deem the payoff "necessary" enough.
But Sutherland has little patience for those who take issue with 24's murky morality.
"Yes, I believe in the constitution of the United States," he tells tv.ign.com. "I believe in due process. I do not believe in torture. But in the context of our show, these are unbelievably extreme events that within matters of hours, the entire place will be gone. It's a fantasy about that and those are the devices that we use in the fantasy. And again, anyone who's got a problem with it, there's 500 channels on the television."
The latter sounds like sage advice to me.
Episodes Reviewed: Jan. 11, 12, 19, 26, Feb. 2, 9, 16, 23