It's Been Six Days and Jack Has Yet To Smile
24: Day Seven
FOX
THE NATIONAL POST
The events I am about to describe, or at least hint at, take place on your television screens over a period of two hours on Sunday night and another two on Monday. After that, we'll be back to an hour a week until we reach the titular total of 24. This is Season 7. As we join it, Jack Bauer is up before a Senate Committee, which is investigating his extensive record of torturing terror-suspects: not, you may feel, before time. (Jack would agree with you.) Tony Almeida, whom we saw graphically dead in Season 5, is (gasp) alive and (double-gasp) working with terrorists himself.
Jack appears before the committee wearing a suit, a state of affairs that we know from previous experience cannot continue long. And indeed, the proceedings have hardly got started before he's subpoenaed by the FBI who need his help in tracking down Tony. "We'll adjourn till this time tomorrow" says the committee chairman, unaware that in the 24 universe "this time tomorrow" doesn't exist. Before the adjournment, the chairman seems to be standing in for all the prissy liberals whom Joel Surnow, the show's right-wing creator, famously holds in contempt. (Has there ever been a lawyer on 24 who wasn't a traitorous scum-bag?) Jack, meanwhile, pleads guilty to having perpetrated what the law defines as torture but asks if the government would rather have civilians killed than let him pummel the truth out of suspects. But, as has often been pointed out, the "ticking bomb" scenarios presented on 24 never seem to crop up in real-life investigations. Not to mention that none of the alleged torturers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo seem to have had Jack Bauer's alternative track-record as daredevil heroes. Most people can tell the difference between fact and fiction, but the show itself seems to have them confused at this point. It makes a feint at examining the issues and then abruptly calls time.
Not that the Jack we meet in this new season is any less world-weary than the one we already know, but it remains a given rather than something explored. The "redemption" that was the subtitle of last year's prequel doesn't seem to have taken. Or maybe it's just a slow process, not that this show has room for those. Some other things have changed. CTU as we knew it is no more, which seems less a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater than of demolishing the bathroom altogether. In compensation, Jack does encounter the same personality-types at the FBI as at his old stomping grounds. There's the suspicious, by-the-book senior agent (Jeffrey Nordling) who really needs to get real or get slapped. There's the superefficient female agent (Annie Wersching) whose attraction-repulsion relationship to our hero suggests that she's being groomed as today's love-interest. (Someone should warn her of how badly these things always turn out.) There's an operative who acts like a mole, and so probably isn't. There is, somewhere, a real mole. And there's an earnest, unintentionally funny computer genius, adept at hacking and tracking, who's played by comedienne Janeane Garofalo and who has to be the bizarro Chloe. One longs to see her going head to head, or screen to screen, with the real Chloe. Well, it might just happen.
In fact (why try to keep a secret that everybody knows?), Chloe does reappear this season, her skills and her hero-worship of Jack still intact. Did you know - Jon Cassar, the producer told me - that at CTU's nearest real-life equivalent, they call all their computer whizzes Chloe, regardless of gender? Meanwhile, there are the usual problems, and the usual infighting, over at the White House. Principled president Allison Taylor is poised to invade Sengala, the imaginary but all-too-believable African country where Jack was supposed to get Redeemed and where there's a genocide in progress. Not on her watch. In real life, her intervention might pose a pretty moral-political problem for liberals and conservatives alike; here, it's all mixed in with the domestic terrorist plot, which involves the theft of a firewall-destroying device capable of killing thousands and crippling the entire U. S. infrastructure. As Madam Prez, a troubled-but-determined Cherry Jones is starting to justify her high theatrical reputation, though Colm Feore as her husband seems stuck with a stick of a role. He keeps ducking out to investigate the supposed suicide of his son. As of the close of Episode 4, it's all beginning to tie in. President Taylor is facing a one-hour ultimatum; she will undoubtedly get out of it, only to be faced by 19 hours of additional frustration. The season so far is decently tense, and more coherent than its immediate predecessors. But it's also full of barefaced variations on tropes and characters we've met before: the ice-cold disaffected Brit, the psychopath threatening mass destruction to avenge a death in the family. How long before Jack and the President meet and discover a deep mutual respect? How are they going to bring back Aaron? Will Kiefer Sutherland's Jack maintain his record as the longest-serving TV character never to crack a smile, let alone a joke?