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.