TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

24

I didn’t like 24 at first – it was exciting for a few episodes, but after three hours of excitement you start to lose interest a bit. There’s also something rather comic about the this guy having ordeals that last precisely 24 hours every few years, so I watched a bit of series five last time I was in the States to laugh at it. The show has a formula that’s easy to mock, because there are only a certain number of things that can happen within its parameters, and over one-hundred hours of programming they tend to happen quite a few times each. There’s a mole inside CTU! The boss of CTU is being a dick! Jack’s gone rogue! There’s a mole in the government! That terrorist plot was just a cover for a much larger one, involving nukes! The least interesting character’s been kidnapped! Oh no, a bomb!

But there’s a fairly smooth gradient from mocking something to enjoying its silliness without laughing, and from there to just enjoying it. And by that time, something truly extraordinary has usually happened. Every series of 24 has a handful of moments that make you take your tongue out of your cheek and just gape. They come from the fact that terrorist thrillers generally revolve around forcing the good guys to make impossible decisions, and in Jack Bauer they’ve lumped themselves with a good guy so unflinchingly logical and ruthlessly dedicated that such decisions are trivial. So to create the pivotal moments, the writers have to put him in absurdly difficult situations, in which he has to do everything short of shooting his own daughter for just the slimmest hope of stopping a terrorist plot that could kill thousands more.

Jack’s now so used to sacrificing himself or innocent lives for the greater good that he usually saves people the bother of asking him to do it by jumping in there and volunteering. At one point a terrorist leader calls an Amnesty lawyer to protect an accomplice CTU have in custody from the torturous methods they need to use to get the information they need from him in time to stop a warhead headed towards- I forget, probably Los Angeles. Jack’s solution is to release the prisoner, immediately resign, then break his fingers in the parking lot as a private citizen in order to protect CTU from liability. This has been read as advocacy of torture as an interrogation method in general, of course, but that’s over-simplifying. The reason not to legalise these methods is that you can never be certain that their use will save lives in any given circumstance. Jack is always certain, to an extent that doesn’t exist in the real world.

The truly horrible calls don’t come up too often, but that’s part of what makes them so much fun to watch. You’ve been watching Jack be almost effortlessly ruthless about so many tough decisions that seeing something make him hesitate – even if only for a few seconds – is incredibly powerful. There’s a moment at the very end of season three, which involves some of the nastiest thing’s Jack’s had to do (including one with a fire-axe and a close friend) when he’s sitting alone in his car, with no urgent mission for the first time in twenty-four hours, and just sobs.

This new series is off to a good start: he’s already had to do something that made him both throw up and cry, and- well, the thing that happens while he’s doing that, for those who’ve seen it. The aforementioned silliness of one man getting caught up in this many twenty-four-hour ordeals probably puts people off, but I’m hoping they’ll keep going for another five seasons. As it progresses it gets both darker and more absurd, making it more entertaining in diametrically opposing ways. Jack gets more interesting as he loses more of his humanity and his family feature less, and I have a feeling Kim’s going to cop it this series. The plots get more intricate as they try to avoid repetition and simultaneously up the stakes – though neither very hard; this is American primetime after all.

Season six also has one of my favourite actors: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi – whom they somehow thought would be able to play a middle-Eastern character convincingly – normally speaks English with a perfect Received Pronounciation accent, so it’s always rather weird watching him pretend to wrestle with the language in his Arab roles. But he’s the main reason I like Star Trek – his Dr Bashir was the first truly likeable character I’d seen in any sci-fi, and the reason I gave it a chance. Here his role isn’t a terribly likeable one – he just has to look angry all the time – but I still find him endlessly watchable. If he turns out to be the series arch-villain I’ll be especially happy.

24: Drink When…

• Someone annoying is kidnapped.
• A terrorist informs another terrorist that “Everything is proceeding as planned.”
• A terrorist assumes Jack is dead.
• The person in charge of CTU makes a bad call.
• Jack goes rogue.
• Jack is fired.
• Jack is arrested.
• Jack breaks out of CTU.
• Jack is reinstated to CTU.
• “Protocol.”
• Someone gives a hopelessly vague order (“Take precautions.” “Make something happen.”)
• Someone gives a redundant order (“Proceed as planned.” “Execute the next stage.”)
• The president screws up a common phrase (“Keep me closely posted.” “We’ll cross that bridge when the situation presents itself.”)
• Someone at CTU has to go behind their boss’s back to help Jack.
• “We don’t have time!”

A Couple Of Things!

• I’m in one of those swamp months, where everything seems to take five times longer than it ever possibly could, and usually go dramatically wrong at three different points. This is why I was in the office until nine tonight, despite working on a section for the issue after the one whose deadline the others were crunching to. Also there was free junk food and liquor, by way of Ross’s efficient repurposing of the bribes we receive to incentivise and energise overtimers.
   
• The one thing that did go swiftly and without hitches was a short story I wrote to submit to the Machine Of Death collection, a set of short stories based around the concept put forth in this comic:
  

  I’m going to put it up here in a day or two, once I’ve tinkered with it a bit. It’s a little over six-thousand words, divided into five short chapters, and covering a lot more time and events than my 50,000 word novel was ever going to. I’m not trying anything of book-length again until I’ve done a few more of these – it’s gratifying and intoxicating to fly through something like this without sweating it. I’m not keen to go back to a vast mess of ideas without enough narrative string to tie them together, no matter how I re-squish them.

• Lastly, Heroes was excellent. I hope they don’t do too many of these single-story episodes or it could become Lost (there is not a scale by which I could measure how little I cared about anyone or anything in the last episode of that), but Glasses Guy is one of the few characters who can carry one with ease. The actor has always been superb, taking a very tough role to make interesting and managing to give him an uneasy mix of creepiness, likeability and mystique. All while wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He’s even better without them, though, and he’s convincing enough as both a loving father and a demon that even towards the end, you’re not 100% sure which side he’s going to come down on. And ultimately it’s the one you believed in slightly more, which is itself a feat. Not just to act each well, but to know exactly how well you’re doing it and stop short of perfection on the one your character’s heart wouldn’t quite be in. 24, Lost and Studio 60 are all losing it at the moment, I’m so pleased to see the most flawed show of the lot outshining them all.

A Minecraft Diary And My Black Ops Review

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on. Continued

Aaron Sorkin’s Next Show

Graham: I’m reading the pilot script for Sorkin’s new show. I will send it to you, but as a preview, simply close your eyes and imagine that Aaron Sorkin was writing a TV show. Bingo! You now have all the contents of this script in your head. Continued

Adventure Time

Years back, Craig linked me to a pilot for a cartoon about a boy and a shape-shifting dog voiced by Bender from Futurama. It was eight minutes long, and amazing. Here it is: Continued

British Airwaves

You’re supposed to feed a cold and starve a fever, I think, but I’m not sure what you do if you have a cold and a throat so sore that you can’t swallow food without hitting something and saying “Motherfucker!” afterwards. So far I’m dosing Halls, Lockets, Oraldene, 300% of my RDA in Vitamin C and Zinc and 200% of my RDA in sleep – to no avail.

I’m blaming British Airways, this time, for sitting me next to a door. a) Why would you put an Expensive Class seat somewhere too cold for human survival even under a blanket with the heating on maximum, and b) shouldn’t the doors on a plane be, like, airtight? Might my freezing be a symptom of a rather more serious problem at umpteen thousand feet? The two things BA can’t seem to get right are sending your baggage to the same hemisphere as you and an in-flight entertainment system that actually works. If they’re also failing to maintain hull integrity, I’m not sure they even qualify as an airline anymore. ‘Airborne torture wagon’ might be closer.

Are flights in one direction faster than in the other direction because you’re so high up that the air you’re flying through isn’t quite rotating on the Earth’s axis as fast as the ground? Because that’s kind of awesome if it’s true.

Anyway, since actual remedies aren’t working and pretty much everything causes an equal amount of pain now, I’m coiling up with chorizo cheese on toast, a flagon of coffee and a Damages triple-bill. I’m slightly gay for Tate Donovan.

Death Note

Almost anything that features a master criminal fancies itself as a battle of wits between him and the star detective. In practice, all that usually means is the bad guy leaves no evidence, then blunders into an obvious trap by the cop. Death Note actually is a battle of wits, though: the entire series revolves around two people desperate to eliminate each other, but prevented from doing so directly by the complicated mathematics of suspicion, guilt and uncertainty. Continued

Dexter

Plenty of awesome things starting on US TV at the moment, and plenty of awesome things returning, so I missed that an intriguing show I read about in the paper months back had started – until Graham supplied the pilot. Played by best-thing-about Six Feet Under Michael Hall, Dexter’s a sociopathic compulsive serial killer with a day job as a forensic analyst for the Miami police, specialising in blood-splatters. And killing murderers. It’s not about him taking out the guys the police can’t prove their case against, it’s about him desperately needing to sate his bloodlust and deciding to at least restrict himself to the more deserving victims. And it is, of course, superb.

Dexter fakes normal, happy life with aplomb, making the atmosphere absurdly sunny and upbeat. His boss fancies him, his sister depends on him, and he has a doting rape-victim girlfriend he dates because neither of them are interested in sex. Forensic science is a world in which everyone has to be ghoulishly indifferent to murder just to get through the day, joking about corpses over donuts, so Dexter’s bona fide ghoulishness blends in seamlessly. Only one cop thinks Dexter’s a sick freak barely attempting to hide it, and loathes him violently and openly. Dexter is relentlessly nice in response, and inwardly slightly saddened that only one person seems to have noticed.

The joke, of course, is that Dexter has a superb insight into the workings of a serial killer’s mind, and has to actively try not to catch them in his official capacity in order to keep himself in potential victims. In the pilot, he comes across an ongoing case in which all victims are found neatly dismembered and entirely drained of blood, a style Dexter admires so breathlessly that he has trouble maintaining a professional veneer when he first sees the body – “Why didn’t I think of that?”. His usual distaste for the killers he kills is completely eclipsed by his awe at this man’s style, and the two of them are starting to become fixated with one another – the killer stalking Dexter in the most chilling way, which Dexter takes as a friendly hello.

Really the remarkable thing about him is not that he’s a serial killer, it’s that he’s a well-written sociopath. Like Highsmith’s Ripley he fakes his civilised persona so well that even you are won over by it, and like Ellroy’s Terror his compulsion is so compellingly depicted that you empathise with it almost as much as Monk’s OCD. It proves that a protagonist can be sympathetic irrespective of his crimes if his personality is appealing enough, and you couldn’t ask for a more delicious twist on the traditional ace-detective archetype.

The comments hereafter may be spoilerific for anyone not up to date with the latest episode aired in the States.

Dexter Again

Yes!

Hopefully a facial expression can’t be considered a spoiler, but if you’re not keeping up with Dexter this ought to tell you enough to realise that you should be. If you are, you’ll recognise it as one of the best reaction shots in the history of man.

Dexter Series Five

Ow, this was hard going. If you’ve seen all of season four, the John Lithgow series and the best yet, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, don’t read any more of this. I’m pretty sure I’ve already ruined it for both the people adjacent to me on the plane when I watched it. “Whose funeral was that?” “Uh…” Continued

Dexter: Series One

It’s over. Did sir care for it? Would sir grace us with his comments? Then might I direct sir to the spoilerific discussion following the original post? Very well.

 

Discovered In 2011: Boss

Boss is the evil West Wing: a political drama about a powerful figure concealing a degenerative illness, but one in which no-one is likeable or trying to do the right thing. It’s still about smart people working hard to do their job well, they’re just terrible, terrible people with horrible, horrible jobs. Continued

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

After proudly announcing a return to normal programming, I studiously wrote the first line of eight different posts and then watched Futurama until I passed out. I’ve been working for fifteen consecutive days at this point and I don’t sleep for long, so you might have to bear with me a bit.

This needs blogging about urgently, though, because it’s an online televisual event that will happen at an actual time! Tomorrow! Written by Joss Whedon and some other people, starring Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris and my close personal friend Felicia Day, it has two things in common with Firefly, and it’s about a supervillain, and it’s got Felicia Day, who is interviewed in the issue of PC Gamer on-sale in two weeks. Run, don’t walk, to your newsvendor. But run slow enough that you get there around the end of July.

It’s also a musical, and admittedly I haven’t liked one of those since Dancer In The Dark, but still. The three acts go up Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and stay up till Sunday, but I’m particularly keen on watching it as it comes out, because I am as mentioned in love with the idea of international premieres.

The premiere is something the internet’s sort of destroying and recreating at the same time: movies are splattered across the release schedule as people pirate them early, wait for the DVD, or wait to pirate the DVD. TV is Tivo’d and DVD sets are Netflixed bit by bit, but increasingly significant things are getting put out as webisodes. And in that, we’ve got the communal excitement of every fanatic devouring new content at the same time, world-wide instead of country-wide.

…

S’cool.

Update! Spit! This thing is the exact opposite of what I just said! It’s being broadcast via the evil Hulu, which is US-only. Way to defeat the whole spirit of the thing, jerk-wads!

Nevertheless, it is live now, and if you just grab Hotspot Shield or another sneaky proxy service of your choice, you can disguise yourself as an American and watch. Think of it as a baseball cap and a few extra pounds for your browser.

Update! It’s good! But doesn’t get very far in its 14 minutes. I now advise waiting till it’s all out on Saturday and watching then, since someone blew the whole worldwide premiere idea. Felicia suggests non-US people wait ‘a bit’, and adds a smiley face. Make of that what you will.

Update! As Iain and Graham note, the US-only restriction seems to have been removed.

Update! Act 2 is out and even better! Also, the whole thing is getting crazy popular, which is awesome. Provided they can refrain from fucking up the region thing, more of this sort of thing!

Update! It’s over! What did you think? Spoilerific comments below. I thought it went from good to great and back to good. The end seemed to be leveraging an emotional investment that I didn’t really have. I was there for the lols.

Finally, On Lost

Man, there was a time when Lost was so exciting I’d blog about it here. When a series loses its way, as pretty much all of them have to in the merciless American format of multiple seventeen-hour seasons, it’s amazing how quickly it wipes your memory of how good it used to be. I was a Heroes fanboy, once. Continued