196049-24-live-another-day-with-another-health-threat

’24 – Live Another Day’ ‘Cause You’re Gonna Die Anyway

24 began sugared-up on gooey clichés of liberty and freedom -- and ended in hypoglycemic shock. Would a new series be worse for our health?

It seems like every other day there’s a story in the news – always with some hyperbolic headline – about either the wonders or the dangers of wine.

One week a ‘recent study’ will say that it’s bad for you: acid reflux, heart disease, liver damage. The next week it will be all good: it’ll help your cholesterol, your circulation, your brain function. Sometimes it robs years off your life, others it extends your sunset days exponentially. It stains your teeth; or it gives you better skin. It raises your risk of stroke; it helps to keep you from getting fat. It gives you cancer; it prevents cancer. It gives you unicorns; it gives your unicorns cancer. Back and forth, on and on, each time cited with some half-baked clinical trial and a photogenic white coat technician from the University of Overzealous Press Releases.

They do it with coffee, too. And beer. Sun-tanning. Videogames. It’s always some pleasure that rational thought would dictate is probably fine in moderation, but that would be a mistake to overindulge. But that’s all part of the dance. That fluctuation that has always been at the heart of headline journalism between ‘Hey, psst… Wanna know the ultimate secret?’ and ‘OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!’.

I mention this because of 24.

More specifically: the finalé of the latest season of 24: “Live Another Day”.

With rumours that there might be a new, perhaps Keifer Sutherland-less season of 24 on the way, it seemed a fitting time to catch up with the first time that the series had returned from cancellation in a truncated form (12 episodes instead of the eponymous 24), picking up the story four years after the previous season’s whimper of an ending.

While 24 is hardly an addictive chemical substance (even if that ticking clock does trigger some kind of Pavlovian response in our brain chemistry), whenever I watch the show it reminds me of all those news reports and the way they vacillate so wildly with such predictability. Not just because 24 itself frequently becomes the subject matter of such debates in its often cavalier depiction of torture and insensitive portrayals of other cultures. It’s because that flip-flopping is precisely the way that I personally feel about the show; those are the wild swings of emotion and sniping voices in my head as I watch each season play out. One week it’s ‘the greatest thing evah!’ the next it’s ‘the worst crap I’ve ever seen!’, and I can never resolve whether I think it’s a text that’s ultimately transformative or utter trash. (Except seasons six and eight — they were definitely garbage, front to back.)

As this latest, more condensed miniseries has shown, it’s like wine: it’s both and it’s neither.

It all depends upon your taste, and what you’re using it for.

* * *

I remember watching the first season of 24 back in 2002. At the time I was so enamoured with the conceit that not only could I forgive the necessary extra suspension of disbelief – the portals in spacetime Jack had to exploit to navigate LA in the time allotted him; the fact no one ever grabbed a sandwich on the fly, napped, or had a functioning bladder – I flew headlong into the adventure with rollicking abandon.

Hey, lookit! The split screens! The multiple angles! The that-guy-said-it-would-take-five-minutes-and-then-it-took-five-minutes! The ticking clocks that actually real-time clock ticked! There was Dennis Hopper doing the crazy eyes. There were ‘splosions – sometimes just ’cause why not? There were outrageous, status quo shattering twists (how could Nina be the traitor? She’s one of the cast members!) And there was the final, sombre sting in the tail: the needless death of Jack’s wife, just to disabuse the audience of the notion that this was all just some big, swaggering hero fantasy.

Yes, it sucks that in some ways Teri Bauer’s death could be seen as a variation on the woman-in-the-freezer trope (a sorry well that the writers would pathetically revisit again with the character of Renee Walker), but here it didn’t seem to have been done to motivate the ‘hero’, or even to further the story. It was a sign that in this world, no one was safe. Good people – resourceful, useful, loved people – could die; because in this narrative’s universes there are unforeseeable consequences for those who strive to do good.

It was exciting. It felt fresh. It was willing to do both slow burns and frenetic mayhem. In a network television landscape of formulaic action fare, 24 was like a revelation.

Then season two happened, and after starting strong – chasing a nuke through the city streets?! Yikes! – the formula that the show had traded up for started to bite into the narrative. From that season on stories suddenly began chasing themselves into redundant side alleys just to fill up screen time: double crosses and secondary villains, agents with personal problems and loser friends/family members/ex-boyfriends that would re-enter their lives to inject predictably tedious complications into stories that already contained the potential end of western civilisation.

I know she’s become a bit of a punching bag in criticism of the show, but perhaps the worst casualty of these treading water plotlines was Jack’s daughter Kim Bauer. In her several years of involvement it’s difficult to identify a single moment in which she forwarded the narrative. During season two in particular she became like a walking farcical game of ‘good news, bad news’:

Good news! Kim Bauer escaped the child abusing guy she was babysitting for. Bad news! She’s caught in a bear trap…

Good news! Did we mention Kim Bauer is caught in a bear trap so she’s not going anywhere? Bad news! Now there’s a hungry cougar lurking over her shoulder…

Good news! Kim Bauer gets saved by a loner weirdo in the middle of nowhere. Bad news! He’s a survivalist nut job who’s going to lock her in his dungeon…

On and on and on. Poor Elisha Cuthbert having to work overtime to sell the audience on her plight as she’s tasked with staring into the middle distance at unconvincingly mountain cat stock footage or reacting to cheap soap-opera peril. She got some marginally better material in her later seasons when she joined CTU (she joined CTU!), and yet it still seemed she was relegated to the role of most-hapless-intern, with corny ‘Don’t tell dad his partner is my boyfriend’ nonsense she had to sell.

Similarly, as the series continued, the shock value and theatrics overall were ramped up. Perhaps chasing the visceral jolt of the death of Jack’s wife, or the nuke blast in the middle of season two, the show just kept piling on the carnage, dialing up the threat.

It made for compelling viewing. At any given moment, any of the characters could be sacrificed. Just because you had a familiar face on 24 was no guarantee you were going to make it through the next commercial break (unless you were Kiefer Sutherland, naturally). One year, just to get things rolling at frantic pace, three of the principle characters were assassinated within the first hour. (Okay, so only two of those people were successfully assassinated, one returns all Winter Soldiered up. But you know what I mean.) In another season starter a nuclear detonation went off in Los Angeles. Those were only the opening salvos. From that point on it felt that the story could go literally anywhere.

24 was white-knuckle stuff; rambunctious and rollickingly paced. It might meander down ultimately extraneous narrative back alleys, but there was always the sense that things could kick off at any moment. Anyone was expendable (and almost without exception, they proved to be); everything was wired to explode.

But it became cartoonish. Only a couple of years in and Bauer had literally died and been brought back to life multiple times. Multiple. More than one.

It became a show where oil barons try to blow up Los Angeles (a city with no public transport system) to convince people to buy more oil. Where Jack’s father and brother are revealed to be villains, supplying nerve gas to Russian terrorists, because… something about ‘legacy’? Where the central conceit of an entire season (which I enjoyed, but that everyone else seems to have panned) was a previously assassinated character coming back from the dead (with an evil-Spock beard so that you know he’s not to be trusted).

Even at what is widely considered its best, it was still barking nuts: the season that won the Emmy revolved around the President of the United States being a scheming, murderous, moustache-twirling tyrant! The President of the United States!

…I mean, I know the obvious gag to make is ‘Nixon’, but come on. That’s a big card to play.

On a smaller scale it was a kind of mugging for the camera that even seeped into the production – my gods, the product placement! When Ford was sponsoring, you knew which vehicles Jack was going to go out of his way to hotwire (which, now that I think about it, is kind of a strange feature to advertise: ‘Look at how quickly someone can steal your car!’) Dell computers get to show you how accessible all of the country’s electronic infrastructure truly is.

This final season, when they switched on a Sprint mobile phone (in close up of the logo) uplinking directly with the president (who, wouldn’t you know it, is also on a Sprint plan!) to find him flashing a toothy smile and declaring, ‘You’re coming through loud and clear, Jack’, I thought perhaps I had entered into some weird Home Shopping Network co-production:

‘This is great coverage, Chloe. And at such an affordable price! I wonder what those terrorists are using?’

‘Probably AT&T – the freedom-hating bastards.’

The show’s only restriction was to its central time conceit – but in a striking irony, it was this concession to ‘reality’ that led it so astray.

24 had trapped itself in a rigid order – 24 hours, chronological, unbroken. It wore this convention as a guiding principle: this is what will evoke tension, this will give immediacy and weight to the premise. And it did. The only thing is – like a moral code – when you lose sight of why those rules are in place, why they are necessary, they can feel too much like a chafing restraint, like some shackle arbitrarily applied.

That’s what happened. Whenever 24 lost sight of the purpose of those rules, it reacted to them by piling on the gore, by ramping up the peril until it reached an hysterical pitch.

For a show thematically obsessed with how poised upon the precipice of ruin the western world perpetually stands, constantly flirting with how easily anarchy can overtake order, it’s fitting that the narrative seems to play out in precisely the same way. Locked into the restrictive real-time conceit, with multiple characters to juggle and impending deadlines unavoidably ticking down, it became clear that the writers really were just making it up on the fly, desperately trying to lay down the next piece of track before the oncoming train rolled over it – a fact they later confirmed.

Presumably there were broad arcs mapped out – characters earmarked as moles; revelations to spring – but for the most part, week to week, it was a giddy, long-form improv. There were minutes to fill, corners they wrote themselves into and from which they had to claw their way free.

What the writers proved was: it’s impossible to live like that, to tell stories like that, without making mistakes.

Slippery Slopes

When it works it has a thrilling immediacy; but when it doesn’t, when you let your resolve slip, it swiftly descends into nonsense. A character will get a convenient micro-amnesia; a President can be poisoned with no lasting consequence; a nuclear bomb can detonate in Los Angeles (a nuke!) and then after literally only a couple of hours never be mentioned again. It becomes a gruesome pantomime – skittish and flailing, illogical and desperate – where nothing matters anymore because all sense of substance and consequence is gone.

24 is meant to be a show about how vigilant one must be – how stoic – to maintain order; and it’s narrative through line and structure consistently proves this true, exhibiting, even in its failure, everything wrong with slippery slopes. It becomes a meme about a bear trap and a cougar.

It’s at this point that we have to mention the torture porn. Because it’s hard to not be revolted by the sometimes fetishistic way in which 24 presented the act of torture. Not merely because it was so willing to show some quite graphic material, but because it would so frequently go there, and with so little nuance. It became the last great hope of plot progression: We need this guy to talk and he won’t. It’s regrettable, and we’ll show characters looking remorsefully out a window as though mourning the death of innocence – but don’t worry, because it always works, it’s reliable, and Bauer is the maestro of pain. I’m glad that they took occasion in the last few seasons to inject a little more nuance to the presentation of torture – it didn’t always work, and can be inflicted on the innocent, but it always seemed to remain a lazy plot standby whenever the writers ran out of ideas.

24 is meant to be a show about how vigilant one must be – how stoic – to maintain order; and it’s narrative through line and structure consistently proves this true, exhibiting, even in its failure, everything wrong with slippery slopes. If you take your eye off the big picture, start chasing momentary indulgences, the whole thing can fall apart. Let the nutso Jack’s-a-junkie storyline slide and suddenly you’re knee deep in a he’s-got-terminal-radiation-poisoning story that has to be solved with magic. Let the torture get you the information one time, and soon your hero is a tweaked-out rage-monster, and the idea of personal liberties and the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is rendered meaningless.

It’s a highwire balancing act – one that the show could never consistently pull off. That’s why viewing it became such a war in my head. Because – to return to an already laboured analogy – 24 ultimately feels like one big contradictory argument about wine; endlessly fluctuating between sublimity and slop.

One season it’s like all great spy and suspense fiction, offering a sobering portrait of our contemporary paranoias; the next, it shamelessly leaps into hapless shock tactics and bombastic theatrics. One week it’s a portrait of the thin veneer of social order that is only held in check by clandestine, morally grey, watchdogs; the next it’s a flag-waving soap-opera with a cartoonish understanding of biology, physics, and basic human behaviour.

Compulsively watchable? Of course. But good for you? Impossible to say.

So, to “Live Another Day” is a 24 subtitle that at this point probably sounds like more of a threat than a statement of resolve. Because for me, that was what made this season was so good: not only the fact that it’s half-episode order allowed the writers to streamline their seasonal arc, but because it owned its own history of histrionics.

First, the story didn’t summersault into a series of endless nonsensical doublecrosses – the one inevitable CIA traitor was so obvious from his first appearance that you didn’t have to play the tired guessing game (Benjamin Bratt plays stalwart lead and sneaky scumbag so well that the moment he sagely warned Kate not to dwell on her husband’s betrayal it was clear he was the one who’d sold her out). There was no Russian doll of escalatingly superfluous villains – or rather, the connections seemed a little more organic this time around.

Even when the show risked feeling like a greatest hits package, each familiar set piece had an imaginative new twist. Jack could still hotwire a car in under three seconds and schematics of every building on the face of the Earth were once again being called up out of the ether, but this time Jack and Chloe were on their own, having to negotiate wi-fi hotspots in local pubs and scamper through the London Underground. The signature car chases were elevated by being stalked by drone cameras and missiles. Even the torture interrogation scene was actually just a bluff with a nice misdirect; Jack wasn’t the unhinged ‘bad cop’ for once, as it was new agent Kate (played magnificently by Chuck alumna Yvonne Strahovski) got to flip out and wave her gun around.

Sadly, the series revisits an unfortunate trope that it would be nice if it could grow beyond: the woman Jack Bauer loves has to get murdered. While thankfully not as distasteful as season eight’s assassination of Renee Walker (literally moments after she and Jack had slept together, just so the ‘tragedy’ really sinks in), Audrey Raines is killed in the final episode during a failed rescue attempt. Her death acts as a revealing catalyst both for Kate’s resignation, believing that she no longer has the dispassionate resolve necessary for the job, and for one of the most revealing moments of quiet and motionlessness in the entire span of the series.

While her death does ‘motivate’ Jack in a sense, what it actually does is expose just how unhinged he has become. Hearing the news that Audrey – the woman he loved from a distance – is dead, Jack collapses. He takes out a pistol, and for a lingering, static moment seriously contemplates blowing his own head off.

This, finally, was the best thing about the season: it seemed as though the writers were finally prepared to deal with the creature they had created by sacrificing themselves to an eight-year slippery slope of narrative. Here, in this condensed season we finally got the clearest portrait of the weathered, broken patriot, Jack Bauer.

It wasn’t pretty.

Because this Jack was terrifying at times, and not in a ‘Yay! Goku’s so mad he’s going Super Sayan!’ kind of way. This Jack was deeply unsettling. This Jack’s history genuinely seemed to weigh upon him, to twist him into a darker creature, which previous seasons had flirted with by using cheap gimmicks (he’s a drug addict now! his girlfriend died! he’s been tortured!) but never quite nailed down. (Although it should be said that it’s a mark of how masterful and layered Sutherland’s performance is that he was always able to stand at the centre of the show’s sometimes extremely silly frenzy and give it all a dignity and weight.)

In season one, Bauer was a fluffy-haired, true-believing patriot. He was a loving husband and overprotective father trying to rebuild his marriage; a man who trusted his colleagues, had faith in his country, and believed in all the gooey clichés of liberty and freedom. Over a decade later and that man is almost unrecognisable; scarred and beaten and brutalised. He’s a pariah. His family is lost, the country he sacrificed his personal life to protect now labels him a traitor, and almost everyone he ever knew or cared for has died in service of a corrupt system.

Whereas once he had personified a fantasy of cowboy righteousness that the western world wanted to invest in after the shock of 9/11, now he reflects the cynicism that has overwhelmed today’s political discourse. America is now a county known to spy on its own people. It sends drones to bombard foreign countries. It tortures its prisoners. It demonises and threatens figures like Edward Snowden or PFC Bradley Manning, charging them with treason to frighten whistleblowers into silence. The writers of “Live Another Day” might eventually have sullied its Julian Assange-cypher by turning him into a cookie-cutter terrorist whack-job, but they never resolved the outrage that a character like he, and by extension Chloe, were reacting to.

Whether acting in the public interest or not, America has revealed itself to be a country whose rhetoric and actions do not align.

So, when called back to service, Jack still responds, but this is not the same true believer. He now embodies this wounded, self-loathing, and contradictory world-view. After savagely interrogating a injured prisoner – the assassin daughter of a murderous zealot – he admits that part of him likes the torture. The punishing of bad people. He’s not doing it just for information, or to avert greater disasters; in part, he’s doing it for himself.

In the final season, when Jack captures the principle antagonist Margot Al-Harazi (a woman who, despite being a mass-murdering psychotic, was seeking revenge for a US drone strike that massacred her entire family), rather than take her into custody he becomes her judge and executioner, kicking her out of a window to her death. When he raises himself back up after hearing of Audrey’s death, when he focuses the rage and guilt that’s overwhelming him, he’s no avenging angel – he’s a maelstrom. He wipes out an entire boat of people in an ugly, vicious rampage. It’s not played as heroism – it’s slaughter.

If there is to be a new season of the show, devoid of the Jack character, it’s worth wondering whether this new figure will begin free of Bauer’s now consuming cynicism. Will the show reset with another plucky young true believer, brimming with well intentioned patriotism?

Because at present the show leaves us, in perhaps the most revealing moment of the series, with Jack handing himself over to the Russians. It’s a final scene in which he seems to almost relish the thought of the violence he has inflicted on others now being inflicted upon him in return. For all the pain that his actions have wrought, for all his collateral damage, there is a peculiar note of penance in the way that he is ultimately led off to his fate—quite a statement about Jack’s tainted moral compass that this is how he, and the show, now see their protagonist.

He’s a monster. Perhaps the only comforting thought is that he’s our monster. At least for now.

At the end of the final season, one of the most haunting notes was the sight of President Heller watching his daughter’s body being loaded onto Air Force One. He notes that the one virtue of his encroaching Alzheimer’s disease is that eventually it will wipe the horror of his grief away as he forgets her death – as he forgets her altogether. It’s a chilling pronouncement – but again, one that is tragically representative of the final season’s larger themes.

For the first time it felt that 24 was remembering all of its past sins, using them to warn its viewers and itself of how easily incremental compromise can destroy an ideal. The 24-hour narrative conceits are nice, but they have to be respected or they churn you up. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are grand, but if they are eroded away by surveillance states and ‘acceptable’ collateral damages and the persecution of the press then they lose all substance.

As Heller intones: forgetting your past, wiping away all that you’ve done and embracing a convenient lie might be comforting, but that just replaces reality with a hollow fantasy. A meaningless nothingness. Owning your actions, and the contradictions that they engender is the harder, but more consequential thing. Because it’s only by viewing the complexity of our own behaviour that any true discussion about the serious political issues facing the world can continue.

I still don’t know whether wine is good for you – I’m still not sure that 24 is a good show – but at their best I like them both a great deal. The way that they are spoken about and reacted to says far more about us as a culture than we are perhaps willing to admit.