After almost two years in captivity, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is freed by the Chinese.Bombers Strike, and America Is in Turmoil. It's Just Another Day for Jack Bauer.
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The New York Times
Published: January 12, 2007
It’s morning again on “24,” and Day 6 is looking bleak. Among other things, teams of suicide bombers are blowing up buses and subway cars all across the United States.
Every new season of this Fox thriller is another twist of a kaleidoscope: the same pieces — terrorists; counterterrorists (and, almost inevitably, a mole); an innocent suburban family; and the president, his aides and his family — are tumbled together to form new patterns around the central figure of the special agent Jack Bauer.
And that makes the four-hour, two-part premiere on Sunday and Monday both comfortingly familiar and strangely gripping. Jack (Kiefer Sutherland), who last season was headed for a Chinese prison, is set free — at a very high cost — so he can once again come to his country’s rescue. Only this time, Jack is not asked to avert a looming terrorist attack; major cities are already under attack. The best he can do is try to prevent the disaster from getting even worse.
Even in its sixth season, “24” remains remarkably compelling. The ratings have steadily increased since the series began in 2001. The first four episodes suggest that this season could be one of the best thus far. The countdown clock — each episode takes place over one hour of a 24-hour period that ends at the conclusion of the season — is just a gimmick. And it’s not just that the action zigzags between at least three separate but interconnected story lines or that the characters are richly imagined. (Actually, many are cartoonish.)
“24” prolongs suspense with detours and surprise twists, and not just in the plot. The series also thrives on ideological red herrings — it leans Tom Clancy right, then suddenly will feint left and then back again.
Torture, presented with gusto and almost no moral compunction, is an increasingly popular way of gathering intelligence on “24.” If anything, the new season seems even more intent on hammering home the message that torture is necessary in the war against terror, and that despite what some experts claim, torture works.
At one point, Jack plunges a knife into a suspect’s shoulder, then relents, convinced that the man will not talk. A more ruthless associate disagrees and plunges the knife into the captive’s knee, ripping upward until the man screams out the location of his leader.
But “24” also jukes to the far side of political correctness and even left-wing paranoia. In two different seasons, the villains seeking to harm the United States are not Middle Eastern terrorists but conspirators directed by wealthy, privileged white Americans: in the second season, oil business tycoons tried to set off a Middle East war, and last year, Russian rebels turned out to be working in cahoots with a cabal of far-right government officials. By those standards, the current crop of Muslim terrorists intent on nuclear Armageddon could yet turn out to be a front for French-Canadian separatists.
Then again, the meddlesome naïveté of civil rights purists is also a leitmotif on “24.” In Season 4, a lawyer for Amnesty Global is dispatched by a terrorist mastermind to free a suspect before he can be interrogated, and the government lets the terrorist walk away. (Jack quit the Counter Terrorist Unit so he could break the suspect’s fingers as a private citizen and leave his bosses plausible deniability.)
This season, the president’s sister, Sandra (Regina King), is a lawyer for an Islamic American solidarity group so passionately intent on protecting her client’s constitutional rights that she deletes the personnel files to prevent the F.B.I. from seizing them — on principle.
Family ties have a way of knotting up on “24.” Jack’s daughter is not around this season, but his estranged father, Phillip Bauer (James Cromwell), makes his first appearance later in the series. Morris (Carlo Rota), the ex-husband of Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub), is back at C.T.U. as an analyst, while the boss of the unit, Bill Buchanan (James Morrison), turns out to be married to the national security adviser, Karen Hayes (Jayne Atkinson), whose name sounds like that of Karen Hughes, a former counselor to President Bush who is now the under secretary of state for public diplomacy.
The televisions at C.T.U. headquarters and the White House are tuned to Fox News. When a rival cable network is shown, the report is brief and labeled CNB.
For obvious reasons, the series is a favorite of the Bush administration and many Republicans. Last season, Senator John McCain made a cameo appearance (despite his objections to torture), and in June the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, held a panel discussion titled, “ ‘24’ and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?” The guests included Ms. Rajskub, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security.
That kind of partisan favor is not surprising. Officials in the Clinton administration rubbed elbows with the cast of “The West Wing”; his former press secretary Dee Dee Myers worked as a consultant to the series.
Oval Office deliberation is one of the more colorful elements of “24,” more compelling than even the high-tech satellite snooping and interoffice sniping at C.T.U. headquarters.
It’s like a video game version of a John F. Kennedy School of Government model of presidential decision-making: presidents on “24” are confronted with split-second choices and horrifying moral dilemmas, like choosing to sacrifice the life of a visiting head of state to save American lives. The Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days; on “24,” the life-or-death consequences of a decision become clear within three commercial breaks.
Last season proved a high point in White House intrigue and indecision. President Charles Logan (Greg Itzin) was irresistible as a caviling, craven commander in chief who manipulates his pill-addled first lady, Martha (Jean Smart).
The newly elected president, Wayne Palmer (D. B. Woodside), the brother of the assassinated president, David Palmer, is more resolute, but he too wavers between hawkish aides who want to put Muslim Americans in detention camps and those who fret about violating the Constitution. The debate can stiffen into a 10th-grade civics lesson.
When the F.B.I. director points out that in wartime, other presidents had suspended many protections, President Palmer snaps, “And Roosevelt interned over 200,000 Japanese-Americans in what most historians consider a shameful mistake.” The wording makes it sound as if the scriptwriters couldn’t agree on whether it was truly shameful, and threw in “most historians” as a palliative.
One thing never changes: the president and his aides keep making the critical blunder of not trusting Jack’s instincts.
This time, however, even Jack is hobbled by self-doubt. He returns to the field altered by his ordeal in China and uncertain whether he can handle the task. On his way to track down a terrorist, Jack suddenly stops, his shoulders slumped, his voice shaken. “I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he says.
His not very sympathetic companion gruffly replies, “You’ll remember.”
24
Fox, Sunday and Monday nights at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.
Created by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran. Mr. Surnow, Mr. Cochran, Howard Gordon, Evan Katz, Jon Cassar, Kiefer Sutherland and Brian Grazer, executive producers. A production of Real Time Productions and Imagine Television in association with 20th Century Fox Television.
WITH: Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer), Chad Lowe (Reed Pollock), D. B. Woodside (Wayne Palmer), Regina King (Sandra Palmer), Jayne Atkinson (Karen Hayes), Peter MacNicol (Thomas Lennox), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe O’Brian), Roger Cross (Curtis Manning), James Morrison (Bill Buchanan), James Cromwell (Phillip Bauer), Greg Itzin (Charles Logan), Jean Smart (Martha Logan), Kal Penn (Ahmed Amar), Marisol Nichols (Nadia Yassir), Alexander Siddig (Hamri Al-Assad), Harry Lennix (Walid Al-Rezani), David Hunt (Darren McCarthy), Eric Balfour (Milo Pressman) and Carlo Rota (Morris O’Brian).
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