the ramble dump

[Warning: the following contains very minor spoilers for the first two episodes of 24 Season 7.]

I finally got around to watching the two-episode premiere of 24 Season 7. It's pretty good, so far, though it's amazing how different it feels just by giving everything the subtle blue bias of its Washington DC location rather than the old yellow. The story hasn't really got a great pace going yet, but I'm hoping that will be remedied in the next few episodes.

I'd already seen the first fifteen minutes as a bonus feature on the Redemption DVD, so I'd already seen the bit I'd been wincing at since they'd shown bits of it in the trailer: Jack Bauer on trial. In the context of the show's internal history, we'd feel that maybe Jack Bauer should have earned a little more respect by saving the (American) world as many times as he has--which is exactly what the writers are angling for, and might have been something they got away with more comfortably had the show not insisted on being so politically charged.

By that I mean that there's no way that this isn't some kind of pointed response to the controversy about the show's repeated depiction of torture. And it's a bit I knew I was going to dislike, because even in the trailer the Senator conducting the trial is characterised as smug, elaborated on in the actual episode as someone with an agenda who is somehow false in his supposed representation of the American people. Once again, the writers are disingenuously attaching negative personality traits to put down those political views critical of the kind of Jack Bauer Justice that the show continually touts.

The fact is, Jack Bauer is 'above the law' because he exists under fantastical terms. Throughout the show's history, the writers have granted that nearly all of Jack Bauer's hunches be proven correct in all the situations that they have contrived, so much so that even in the earlier seasons it had become a character trait. It's in the same way that torture is always depicted as a failsafe method of extracting the truth, with only one or two exceptions. So when people like US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia try to defend Jack Bauer-like actions in the real world, what they don't seem to realise is how mind-bogglingly unlikely it is that this will be the case with any real person and any real instance where torture might be considered. It seems painfully obvious to say, and yet apparently it still needs saying: any greater-good logic you might want to apply in policy-making is just not validated by the fictional actions of Jack Bauer. The way the world works in 24 is skewed to evoke sympathy and respect for a protagonist who is just as fantastical as any other superhero. And a superhero he is.

So this is why I found the trial scene so obnoxious. Bauer makes it clear that he's willing to have his actions judged by the American people, but it's so obvious that the genuine opinion of 'the people' (as opposed to that represented by the Senator) is assumed to be in his favour, and by extension in favour of the show's politics generally. This is evidenced a short while later by Bauer's conversation with the FBI agent in the car, who says that he believes putting Bauer on trial was 'wrong' and that he's 'not the only one who thinks so'. In the context of Jack Bauer's world alone, where someone like Jack Bauer exists and has done what he's done, it might make sense for us to share the FBI agent's opinion (assuming the trial is as unfair as purported, and not just trying to establish the truth). And in a similar situation in the real world, we might even decide the same. But the writers can't seem to let Bauer just exist as a character who has done a lot of questionable things, whatever his reasons might be for doing so and even if we feel that he is generally a good person. They insist on being Jack Bauer apologists and going out of their way to excuse or even applaud everything he's done. As always, he's made to be completely absolute and unquestionable, and it's not necessary. The writers become exactly like the Senator: guilty of deliberate distortion for the sake of an agenda, and eager to pre-emptively deal moral judgement in place of having 'the people'--in this case, the audience--decide for themselves.

As scenes like the trial demonstrate, 24 is explicitly reacting to outside criticism, to the point where it appears to revel in the controversy, if the Fox website's recent promotion in the form of the 24 Dossier is anything to go by, using it as a selling point. This strikes me as a little perverse, for as long as they're going to be so insistently black-and-white in their treatment of Bauer in the show itself. It's a case of the writers once again failing to address an issue with the integrity it deserves. Whether 24 wants to be taken as displaying real political consciousness, or whether it's supposed to be taken as pure entertainment--which I just don't think is possible, given its subject matter--posturing like this just shouldn't take place.

In his conversation with the aforementioned FBI agent, Bauer says:

It's better that everything comes out in the open. We've done so many secret things over the years. In the name of protecting this country, we've created two worlds: ours and the people we promised to protect. They deserve to know the truth. And they can decide how far they want to let us go.

This is good stuff. It's just a shame that the writers give it so much bias in their insistent arbitration. For as long as they do, the show remains an unsuitable platform or medium for such discussion. In any debate about the show's politics, it has to be acknowledged that there are two worlds here also: Jack Bauer's world and the real world. And the show's creators are only widening the gap when they do what they've done by putting Bauer on such a sham of a trial.

Still...I'm expecting good things this season. Aside from all the above stuff, it's made a promising start.

Update: I just watched episode three, blissfully free of the mangled politics that plagued the first two episodes. And you know what? 24 is awesome.

Labels: 24, i am the ramblemaster, morality

# posted by Chris @ 5:36 PM