the ramble dump

[Warning: contains spoilers for Lost Seasons 1-5.]

I don't really watch much TV, but there are a few shows over the past few years that have got me hooked, and they're nearly all of the American serial thriller variety. Some of them fell off my radar after they lost their way and got a bit daft; others got daft but then won me over again, or I felt invested enough to keep watching anyway. I may have mentioned 24 once or twice already. The other one that I still watch is Lost.

Lost first showed up in my life in the form of this commercial back in the summer of 2005, which did the job of making it seem all very sexy and intriguing. I think I remembered to tune in every week for about half a season, probably less, at which point it fell out of my life again until I caught up on it sometime after Season 2 had been released. Since then, I've been watching it pretty much as it comes out. The first few episodes of the new season, though--the sixth and last--are still waiting for me.

Like all these long-running shows, juggling with a lot of factors during their production, Lost has its peaks and troughs. The writers have readily admitted to stalling and making some mistakes, but they've generally made a decent job of it and got a bajillion people, including me, hooked on one of the most nonsensical, farfetched stories to ever grace television. Lost has a number of strengths: a large cast of mostly interesting characters in whom they invest a lot of time; an ever-interesting and thorough approach to the narrative; tons of novel ideas; and the tortuous ability to draw out endless, excruciating suspense from the most meagre and infuriating of plot crumbs.

Aside from the stalling, though, and the fact that at least 50% of Lost is either people running through blurry forests or gaping at something while the camera rotates around them with a trumping orchestral accompaniment, the show has a few other bad habits or features; things that have occasionally, or increasingly, hampered the experience for me.

First: the hamhanded subtext. Lost is filled with characters who share the names of famous people--philosophers, scientists, authors, e.g. John Locke, Hume, Faraday, Austen--which I guess is supposed to have some relevance to the story of each of those characters, but it still stinks of pretentiousness. It's not really subtext when it rears its obvious head above the surface and shouts allusions at you, and, if it's not flaunting intellectualism, it certainly strikes me as a pretty cheap way to convey meaning. Fortunately, most of the characters are fleshed out enough to override it.

Second: the abuse of narrative conventions. Lost gets points for being more imaginative than any other show in how structurally to tell a story, but just occasionally it gets carried away. There have been a few dud episodes in which, following an obligatory flashback/present day pattern, they'll take the whole episode to reveal next to nothing about some aspect of a character, allowing only some inchmeal progression of the plot. It's a format that sometimes requires a lot of filler, in other words.

Other times, especially when the format gets more ambitious from the end of Season 3 onwards, they pull some dirty tricks. In the episode 'Ji Yeon', for example, we're deliberately misled into thinking we are watching two strands of the same story, only for the twist at the end to be that they both take place at different times. This is basically the equivalent of witnessing a split-screen phonecall on 24, only for it to be revealed later that we are actually being shown two halves of two different conversations. It's a cheat that makes the wrong kind of show of the format.

Third: everybody talks around in circles. Lost goes out of its way to avoid giving direct answers and the show is always coming up with fresh excuses to be obscure. It's part of the fun trying to guess the motives of all these different characters, but you're pretty much guaranteed not to get a motive that doesn't have some strained reason that it can't be revealed for at least half a season. Looking at some of the characters, you realise that they've pretty much formed out of this resistance to giving answers. This is especially the feeling with the Others, most of whom apparently ask no questions whatsoever. Similarly, we never seem to know what John Locke's thinking and it's not always clear that Locke or the writers do either. Daniel Faraday, the scientist with answers, is most of the time too flustered or preoccupied to properly explain anything in more than breathless rambling. And then there's Benjamin Linus, the compulsive liar; a character who, more than anyone else, seems to be the direct product of the writers' need to evade or obstruct.

Fourth: sometimes it tries too hard to plug itself into the real world. The show's extremely precise dating, geographical locations and the like are all part of the interesting detail of the story. But the apparent attempts to make it feel like it's all taking place in our world--above and beyond other shows that use more evidently fictionalised versions of times and places--doesn't always work. When Ben showed Jack that recording of the football game, for example, and mentions Red Sox and President George W. Bush and all that, it actually pulled me out of it a little bit. Not only did it feel like it was trying too hard, even given the context that Ben was trying to convince Jack too, but it brought my mind back to the world outside the Lost storyline and reminded me of its nature as fiction that way. When my brain's plugged in to the Lost world, it doesn't need or want to be reminded of real life contemporary events. Beliefwise, Lost is just too weird and wacky to come off for the better when it's yanked in the direction of reality like that.

Fifth: sometimes too absorbed in characters? This one is the flipside of one of the things I've always liked about Lost: the fact that it revels in the ambiguities and grey areas of all its characters and--except for some characters--lets us feel them out inside out over the course of several seasons. But sometimes it can be too much, and at this point some of the characters feel a little worn out. Specifically I'm thinking of the drawn-out love square between Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Juliet, and how during Season 5's finale all four of them were flailing around being utterly selfish, whining whingebags over the decision to set off a hydrogen bomb. Yeah, I get it: they all have their personal and conflicted and lesson-learned reasons and changes of heart that are at odds with each other's, to the backdrop of all these confused feelings for each other, and these are things that have got to play out. But my God. I wanted to slap them all. Hydrogen bomb, people!

And sixth: timetravel.

Timetravel is always very messy to deal with, and Faraday's explanations, when they finally come around, don't do much to appease the feeling that the writers have cut themselves loose from all sense in a desperate attempt to bring everything in their centuries-long saga together. Granted, it provides a lot of interesting new ways to spin (or evolve) the show's trademark flashback format and have all these characters from different time periods engage with each other, but if a show like Lost could ever sensibly be said to have jumped the shark, for me it happened with the timetravel.

Before the timetravel, all kinds of weird stuff had happened that you could argue was far more fantastical--the walking dead, smoke monsters, supernatural whisperings and the like. But back then, it could still have been anything. I had no idea how they'd be able to explain any of it in the end, but there was nothing to suggest that they couldn't in a way that I'd find reasonably satisfying. The timetravel felt like a nail in the coffin, though--the first definitive sign that the explanation wasn't going to be any less fantastical than the things we'd already seen.

The first sign of this unwelcome plot device was in Desmond's visions of the future, and of Charlie's death, back in Season 3. Even then, though it seemed kind of clumsily executed and unconvincingly presented, I could have accepted it, just about, as some kind of limited deterministic foresight, explainable in whatever way. But then, step by step, it got more and more outrageous and irretrievable: in Season 4, Desmond doesn't just get visions but his 'mind' actually travels through time; and then in Season 5 the whole island does the same, leaving half the cast in the present and half in the 1970s. Yep. And because I'd taken each of these steps one at a time, I didn't reject it as fast as I might have done otherwise and kept watching, but every time there was a glance exchanged with my Lost buddies and a kind of shoulder-shrugging resignation to the escalating nowayness. Now it just feels like we're watching with curiosity to see how it will manage to get even weirder and finally leap preposterously to its end, rather than watching with much anticipation of a satisfying conclusion.

You might ask if there's any good reason this story can't have a fantastical, supernatural explanation, and I would have to admit a bias there--the outright supernatural is simply less likely to convince me than a more realistic pseudo-scientific one, more so in Lost because they've gone out of their way to remind us that it's our world. Lost has always required some huge, continual suspension of disbelief to keep me going, but that's been part of the fun and the whole tone of the show. My objection to some outright supernatural conclusion is more than that, though. I think it's too easy. The characters can all timetravel and the island can teleport and the dead never die properly and nothing that's happened has necessarily happened and at the end of it an Egyptian deity can claim responsibility for it all and so what? We waited six seasons for that? ...Which is why I'm still hoping that won't happen.

And relating to the point about abusing narrative techniques, I already admitted that timetravel can make things narratively interesting, but you pull too many tricks like that and the narrative starts feeling like inconsequential mush. I'm sure the writers have got it all under control, but the story felt like kind of a mess at the end of Season 5. For not-good reasons, in a lot of ways the white-out of the hydrogen bomb felt like the only sensible way to end it.

The result is that I'm going into Season 6, the last season, with the feeling that I'm a just a little tired of these characters and the perhaps belated realisation that I'm going to have to accept some pulled-out-of-a-hat supernatural conclusion for everything that has happened, all the while asking myself, 'Well, what did you expect?' But there's a part of me that's still awaiting the clever storytelling and moving characterisation that the show has continually shown.

I might not even mind the supernatural if it's worthwhile for the characters and they don't all collapse as conflict-ridden husks. And I expect that on some level I'll enjoy it despite all this and get drawn into the final chapters of this mystery because, if nothing else, those guys sure know how to plot.

But I'll be holding my breath.

Labels: 24, i am the ramblemaster, lost

# posted by Chris @ 3:22 AM 0 comments

Warning: the following contains spoilers for 24 Season 7.

JACK BAUER
I can't tell you what to do. I've been wrestling with this one my whole life. I see fifteen people held hostage and...everything else goes out the window. I will do whatever it takes to save them and I mean whatever it takes. I guess maybe I thought...if I save them...I save myself.

RENEE WALKER
Do you regret anything that you did today?

JACK BAUER
No. But then again, I don't work for the FBI.

RENEE WALKER
I don't understand.

JACK BAUER
You took an oath. You made a promise to uphold the law. When you cross that line it always starts with a small step. Before you know it you're running as fast as you can in the wrong direction, just to justify what you started in the first place. These laws were written by much smarter men than me. And in the end I know that these laws have to be more important than the fifteen people on the bus. I know that's right. In my mind, I know that's right. I just don't think my heart could ever have lived with that. I guess the only advice I can give you is...try to make choices that you can live with.

The above exchange, from the final episode of 24 Season 7, book-ends an exploration of Jack Bauer's politics that began with his trial for criminal actions in the season's premiere. I don't really want to get into a debate about the actual politics here, but rather once again look at the way that such politics have been handled by the show in this latest season, whose thematic focus has been a specific response to the controversy surrounding the depiction of its protagonist's dubious actions.

As mentioned, this was done rather bluntly in the first episode by supposedly cutting straight to the chase and placing Bauer in a Senate hearing. I found this scene pretty obnoxious for the way in which it seemed to serve only as an opportunity for some self-righteous, grandstanding obstinance by the character of Jack Bauer, before a committee whose integrity was compromised by an individual, it is stated, with questionable motives. Combined with the introduction of very minor characters whose sole purpose was to give Bauer outpourings of sympathy and to berate the very idea of a trial in the first place, the whole premise felt like something of a bitter joke and a middle finger to the prospect of any genuine exploration.

Fortunately, the season improved. It was by far at its best when it avoided such clumsy handling of politics and went straight for the story, but when it did pause to ponder the actions of Jack Bauer and his associates, we soon learn that Jack isn't as certain about his actions as his public performance at the start would have us believe. The conversation quoted above serves as a kind of thematic epilogue, a welcome moment in which Bauer openly admits to having very human motives that may not always have led to the right decisions, even though he might strongly feel that they do. Though a little stilted and inelegantly inserted, it does allow Jack some room as a character in his own right by openly separating his justification from what appears to be the writers' tentative moral conclusion that the laws should always be upheld, a point that is emphasised by President Taylor's difficult sacrifice in the ending of a parallel storyline.

That both Jack Bauer and Allison Taylor seem to support this conclusion might seem to threaten the morality of the story with too much closure, and yet we see that Taylor is racked with guilt, acknowledging that her decision was at least difficult if not wrong, and Bauer has two clearly conflicting views that never completely resolve, leaving the matter very open to suggestion. In addition to this, Bauer's monologue is directed at Renee Walker, whom at certain points in the story had functioned as an alarmingly easily persuaded advocate of his questionable approach, despite some occasional slapping fits, and yet her anxious recourse to Jack's advice denies her, in this final instance, an easy answer. This resolves the potential problem of her portrayal as some kind of student for whom lessons are learned, a position that could very easily be extended to the audience. We never find out what she decides to do to the creepy, uncooperative bad guy. Thus the writers' moral conclusion remains tentative, never definite. Until next season, at least.

And this, of course, is just how it ends. Throughout the season, Jack has been challenged by good guys and loyal friends who are reluctant to compromise the law and won't abide by his more drastic measures: old pal Bill Buchanan refuses to torture a suspect despite a time-sensitive situation; Jack constantly butts heads with FBI Special Agent in Charge Larry Moss, who replaces the usual role of bureaucratic obstacle as someone who might just have a point; and it's even contrived that Jack gets to pay a visit to Senator Blaine Mayer, the man out for his blood in the earlier trial scene, where we discover that the Senator might not be quite the affront to heroism he was made out to be in his first appearance. The fact that all three of these men wind up dead is, I'm sure, purely incidental. And while in itself the court scene seemed guilty of pretty extreme and disingenuous posturing, the ongoing exploration of the theme renders it merely a starting point, from which some of the caricatures and assumptions are gradually dismantled.

24 remains, in many ways, pretty mindless entertainment, with the primary aim of pushing the plot along from one dramatic setpiece to the next. But its emotional and intellectual core, in its more successful storylines, has always been its investment in character, even if over time it has come to abuse and depend on the fact that we often find ourselves so gripped by the story just to see if a character will make it through the day alive. It's not great that the writers still resort to the hamfisted insertion of clumsy exposition wherever they can find a gap between the action, and there is still a little too much posturing in the kind of speeches we're offered--Jack's confession speech, for example, strikes me as a very deliberate, slightly pompous act by the writers of stepping back from the accusations that have been levelled at them--but it does something, at least, to return the focus to character. And it acknowledges the kind of challenge that has always made the series interesting beyond the excitement of gunfights and explosions--potential that was ignominiously shat upon by the obstinate, closed-book attitude of the season's opening scenes, or so it seemed. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't in it for the instant, visceral gratification as much as anyone else, but it wasn't this alone that got me hooked on the show in the first place, and I'm glad that, however bluntly they've done it, the writers have worked a little harder to treat the day-of-difficult-decisions premise with some of the complexity it deserves.

All in all, I thought the seventh season was pretty good. I get too caught up in my own rants to mention the things that I actually really liked, but there were plenty of them. And at least now a regular injection of hyoscine-pentothal to the brain is not needed to obscure my memory of Season 6.

Labels: 24, i am the ramblemaster, morality

# posted by Chris @ 3:57 PM 0 comments

[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 0 comments

So it's Christmas time again, and it's become tradition that every Christmas I get some delicious pop fiction to suit the dumbed-down state of my brain. It's a little break from the higher forms of literature that I spend my academic life consuming. As it's only Christmas Eve and I don't yet have a fresh supply, I've been reading one of last year's that I never got around to finishing: a 24 Declassified novel by Marc Cerasini called Trojan Horse.

Now, I've read two of these 24 novels before, and generally they're pretty decent for what they are. But there are a few things that really jumped out at me in this one as, well, plain bad form.

Take the following extract. This little section of conversation crops up as characters Tony Almeida and Fay Hubley are setting up equipment in their undercover hideout.

Tony folded his arms. "Funny how extending the RICO Act makes some people crazy. But if we can use these laws to prosecute drug dealers, why not apply the same laws to stopping terrorists, too?"

"Yeah, strange how no one complains about the IRS knowing every single financial transaction a citizen makes in a given year, but knowing what book a suspect borrows from the library is suddenly a problem."

"It's the theoretical world versus the real world," said Tony. "Most people aren't lying awake at night worrying whether the Feds know what book they borrowed from the library. They're worried red tape is going to prevent the government from failing to stop a terrorist attack like Beslan, or Bali, or London."

Fay fumbled with one of the laptops, almost losing her towel. "Here, check this out."

Sexual tension ensues.

But what the hell was all that doing there, so sneakily wedged in between some technobabble and a meaningful shoulder massage? Were we supposed to believe that this was part of natural conversation? There's nothing like sticking your opinion in the mouths of some righteous fictional characters as they're out saving the world to lend it some credibility, but could Mr Cerasini not have been a little less blatant? The TV show from whence this came also has a bad habit of less-than-subtle political posturing, but it was still a surprise to find it quite so barefaced, slipped into the scene as it was. A similar effect would be achieved by the TV show if Jack Bauer were in a scene brushing his teeth and suddenly turned to the camera to advertise the toothpaste.

And it gets worse.

He could see the war behind Castalano's eyes. "Believe me, Frank," Jack continued. "I can break this man, but not here. Police methods are inadequate in the face of this man's fanaticism."

Castalano's features darkened. "A couple of years ago, the loss of basic civil liberties you're talking about would have scared the hell out of me...but that was before I saw the horrors in Hugh Vetri's home this morning."

The detective paused, thought of that van full of innocent kids, thought of his own.

Context: Hugh Vetri is a movie director who is murdered by said man along with his wife and child. Detective Castalano is then recalling an event that took place once this murderer fled the scene in Vetri's car: the man, high on drugs and speeding, accidentally forces a van full of church-going kids off the road (along with the bus driver, described beforehand as 'a mother of five') before fleeing the scene again. Not very morally responsible of him, you might agree. But even though what happened with 'that van full of innocent kids' is completely incidental to the suspect's fanaticism, note the recourse to a 'think of the children' sentimentality used to help justify Castalano's decision anyway.

I'm not even going to get into the dubious logic of Jack Bauer's request. The politics behind it are questionable enough--Jack isn't even aware of any time-sensitive situation at this point, which is usually what the show uses to rationalise such actions--but Cerasini's attempts to feed it to us, his disingenuous manipulation of our emotions over such a tricky subject, strikes me as grotesque.

The man's eyes glazed once again and he struggled anew. His cries were in another language now. Castalano figured it was some form of Arabic because the words Allah Akbar were repeated many times--never a good sign.

Yeah, you hear someone uttering that and you know you've got a madman on your hands. If they say it ten times, you've got yourself a terrorist. Detective Castalano is experienced enough to know that his man didn't even need the fresh blood around his mouth from having recently ripped open a State Trooper's carotid artery with his teeth; he didn't need to be screaming or rambling or jumping about. He just needed to say the A-word, and Detective Frank Castalano knew in his stomach that something was wrong.

Maybe I should blame clumsy syntax, but I think Mr Cerasini just let slip a prejudice.

And now Mr Cerasini's most heinous crime, which I have saved until last.

"Listen, Milo...I updated the archives last night at nine o'clock, before I went home. You can see the update log right on the screen."

"Calm down. I'm not accusing you of anything."

"Can you isolate it?"

"W00t!" cheered Milo. "I already have."

W00t? W00t?

Labels: 24, morality

# posted by Chris @ 11:33 AM 0 comments

[Warning: the following contains spoilers great and small for 24 Seasons 1-6, and also Redemption.]

Despite its mangled politics, occasional stink of nationalism, stockpiles of kitschy villains and recent abuse of just about every convention that made it such a gripping show in the first place, 24 remains the best thing on television. When it succeeds, which it often does, it showcases the thriller as an artform: its primary objective is to keep the viewer gripped, immersed in the story from start to finish, through whatever means it has at its disposal. When it's at its best, the creators achieve a kind of fireworks display of cause and effect: cleverly interwoven plot-threads lead to countless perilous situations, small triumphs and unexpected outcomes. We find ourself engaged with characters we can love and hate and, best of all, not really know what to think of with the more complex characters about whom we're constantly trying to make up our minds. Supported by all the cinematic magic of camerawork, split-screen boxes, music and sound effects, reactive character dynamics are played off each other and multiple storylines collide with explosive results--all with the aim of throwing us into the next episode so that we can find out what happens next.

In other words, it makes for stellar entertainment. Pandering to the audience as it does (if it didn't do that to some extent, we'd probably never have reached Season 7), 24 would probably not get many marks from, say, Oscar Wilde for artistic merit, but, pure plot-machine though it may be, true to its genre it delivers the sheer thrill of the story itself. And it is still very much capable of delivering its share of interesting characters whose predicaments, moral or mortal or both, feel worth caring about--even if during its less successful moments the whole show ends up being carried by the presence of Jack Bauer alone.

The show's writers have in the past made public knowledge their lack of planning, which means to a large extent they're making it up as they go along. Sometimes this backfires and we're left, for example, with Kim Bauer stuck in Season 2's infamous cougar trap (amongst other things), the dubious writing off of Season 3's Salazar arc, Marwan's overstayed welcome in Season 4, or, let's be honest, the majority of Season 6--but this making it up as they go along doesn't mean that the show lacks substance or isn't worth investing in. Most of the time, through equal amounts of skill and perhaps happy accident, amongst all the action and technobabble and soap opera that is generated in a standard episode, the writers have an uncanny knack for finding gold.

This ongoing generation of plot can be just as fruitful as it is frustrating; for example, Seasons 3 and 4 both feature heavily contrived storylines with the apparently sole purpose of bringing back old fan favourites: Nina Myers and Sherry Palmer in one; Tony, Michelle and David Palmer in the other. But while, in my view, the second return of Nina and Sherry does nothing but damage their credibility as characters after the decent storylines they had in the previous two seasons (and even in Season 2, Nina's reappearance had the stink of contrivance), the writers' story for reintroducing David Palmer in Season 4 inadvertently gave rise to the majority of Season 5's incredibly compelling story, and one of the most interesting and complex characters in 24 history, in the form of Charles Logan. It's worth noting--to bring Oscar Wilde's points back into play--that it's pretty much never the regurgitation of fan favourites itself that generates the good story, and indeed most missteps in 24 seem to come from being overly attentive to the audience in this way (not dissimilar to the Season 3 stories of Sherry and Nina are the completely arbitrary shock deaths of main characters in Season 6, for example). On the other hand, when the writers are paying more attention to the story than the audience and seem to do a good job of getting a feel for the characters, that's when we get the good stuff. In Logan's case, the high quality of Gregory Itzin's acting is no doubt partly responsible for that character's success, and the same is true of Jean Smart's Martha Logan; but together these characters offer many of the most gripping, believable moments in Season 5 because, whatever the reasons are for why they emerged in the first place, the writers have, so to speak, listened to the needs of the story instead of just going for what the fans want. Their brief reappearance in Season 6 was, tellingly, less convincing.

* * *

What 24 is especially good at is presenting us with those grey areas of morality: putting us in those tense and tortuous dilemmas, forcing the characters to act in various situations and make choices that most people would be horrified to even consider. Where I think it disappoints, however (and somewhat paradoxically), is in sometimes being too black-and-white in then addressing these situations, at times very blatantly appointing itself as the moral arbiter. Jack Bauer himself is the perfect example of this paradox: as the seasons progress, he becomes an increasingly unhinged character, leaving us oggling as he tortures and later massacres his way through all these people to get to where he needs to be; but his conduct is somehow never questionable. One way or another, it's always justified by the writers and there is never any point at which we're meant to view Jack as anything but a morally absolute, heroic character. A 'greater good' logic to the character's motives is not only employed by the writers but endorsed, and however dubious or valid that logic might be, in the end it undermines the talking point of these complex situations by forcing the answer on us. Torture done by Jack Bauer, for example, is meant to be shocking--at least as far as drama is concerned--but it's also meant to be perfectly excusable whenever he does it. The writers are happy to show us all kinds of horrors portrayed by Jack Bauer for the purposes of entertainment--something to 'ooh' and 'aah' at--but they're constantly acting as apologists on his behalf, leading to a very confused sense of morality for the show itself.

In addition to this, the moral arbitration is often done disingenuously: whether it's to Bauer's greater-good imperative or unhinged character that we're supposed to attribute his murder of Marshall Goren in the first episode of Season 2, the act is excused by the fact that Goren is made to be a murderer and a paedophile and, on top of that, smug and unlikeable in every possible way, right down to blowing a dirty little kiss to Michelle. The majority of villains are so single-minded as to be cartoon characters, and we don't feel bad about the hundreds of people Jack mows his way through, because they're rarely given any character or backstory at all. They're evil, mindless goons because they work for the terrorist mastermind, and we don't have to deal with any of the possible reasons why they might have ended up where they are in the first place because they're just henchmen and that's that. This fact is enough to sentence them to death, and we don't even flinch when they go down. In the end, they're really nothing more than terrorist decoration. (Go buy the boxset for the Æon Flux animated series and watch 'Pilot'--it illustrates this point perfectly.)

There are a few occasions where the writers seem unwilling to morally arbitrate because they've offered us a moral complexity that seems too difficult for them to deal with conclusively, and they instead find the easy way out, like introducing a character just to get Stephen Saunders shot dead in Season 3, or having Dina Araz executed off-screen in Season 4, or killing off reformed terrorist Hamri Al-Assad in Season 6--a mistake seeing as he was one of the very few interesting characters in that season. In these cases, the characters are too morally complex to keep on living: they've served their purpose of putting some plotworthy moral complexity on display and then there has to be a way of removing them so the writers are freed from the responsibility of judging definitively in the way they can do so easily with the cartoon goons. Similarly, Mike Novick never has to suffer the true consequences of his role in Lynn Kresge's stairwell plummet because we never find out if she lives or dies. If she did die, Mike's character might be all the more tainted in our view; if she didn't, Mike probably wouldn't be in Seasons 4 and 5. But that particular part of Mike's history is essentially voided: he gets to reappear as if Lynn really is out of the picture, but without ever having to shoulder the responsibility of his complicity in her death.

The show also has the nasty habit of taking political potshots through its characters: Season 4's 'Amnesty Global' representative is a plot complication and therefore a hindrance to the show's righteous, ever-necessary brand of Jack Bauer Justice™; and Redemption's United Nations worker is nothing but a slimy coward. The writers are dutiful enough to balance their portayal of evil cartoon Muslims/Arabs with good cartoon Muslims/Arabs (we get that amazingly cringeworthy dialogue with the Arab shop-owners in Season 4), but one suspects that this has more to do with dodging the fallout of a controversial subject rather than any attempts to seriously address the situation.

As a result of all this, the kind of verbal sparring seen between Karen Hayes and Tom Lennox in Season 6 is just painful--not because it doesn't, in its very simple way, illustrate a potential debate, but because it really has no place in this show. As much as it might be a 'political thriller' and use the War on Terror as its subject matter from Season 2 onwards, the way the writers approach political issues in 24 strikes me as, by and large, irresponsible, and as much as I might agree with Hayes' side of the argument with regards to Lennox's 'detention facilities', I think the show would be better off if it didn't try so awkwardly to align itself at all (especially as, in this particular case, it feels like another very forced, shallow effort to defend itself against claims of political bias). A writer's personal opinion is always going to seep through into his or her work, but the subject matter can be dealt with in a way that's not so heavy-handed. The writers do later redeem themselves a little by balancing Lennox's character, and he ends up being one of the season's better offerings, but it's still clear that we're supposed to get behind Karen Hayes in that debate--an inevitable result of her being portrayed as the more sympathetic character, just like we're always supposed to be on Jack's side. A viewer's sympathies are always manipulated by the way characters are represented, and this makes using them as a platform for two sides of a supposedly objective debate distorting and dishonest.

* * *

When it achieves at least some level of subtlety, 24 demonstrates expertly the virtues of the thriller's structure, the whole plot taking the form of a kind of giant iceberg, or an onion, or whatever metaphor you like for the idea that there's always, always a lot more to the events taking place than we at first suspect--that things are not what they seem, and that any moment the floor can be pulled out from beneath everything we thought we knew. We hitch onto the back of the narrative of multiple characters, all of whom may yet present previously unseen sides to themselves, and follow their stories as in gradual increments all the layers of the plot are peeled back to reveal a new perspective--possibly a whole new onion. And on whatever level we're invested with these characters, be it sympathetically rooting for them or academically detached, we share their multiple experiences as they're left to keep their heads admidst a sense of mounting absurdity, constantly trying to form a picture for ourselves in the plot's continually shifting landscape.

Thus, the recipient is constantly left to mentally parse the way in which further aspects to the plot are revealed. It is the suggestion in these revelations, the implications of these new perspectives on how we view everything else in the story, that make the thriller a valuable tool for exploration of an idea. In this way, the author is repeatedly, deliberately, overturning the audience's assumptions. And this has the potential to extend a long way. Though the author will, of course, always have their own assumptions that will no doubt show up their work, the audience is deliberately prevented from ever absolutely trusting anything that the story says is occurring at any given time, encouraging them to engage in a process of perhaps doubting even those assumptions that were unintentional.

There will obviously always be limits to this: like the author, the viewer cannot be depended on to recognise every single assumption for what it is. But there remains a huge difference between something that presents itself as a moral arbiter and something that merely suggests. 24, along with most other pulpy thrillers, doesn't make the most of its potential for exploration nearly as much as it could: it forsakes the value of ambiguity, the complexity of suggestion, by telling you exactly what you're supposed to think, having the habit of making it very clear where you're supposed to align yourself, with a tendency to stomp the first hints of doubt about an absolute perspective wherever it can and quickly replacing it with another assumption, equally absolute and unquestionable: a character, for example, is usually either good or evil at any given time, else they are treated somehow evasively (see above). At the end of a 24 story, the big picture is supposed to be very clear. At the end of a thriller that's a little less presumptuous, the picture might remain complex and hazy, but in encouraging a more active participation on the part of the recipient, it would be more valuable as an artwork. As a political thriller, 24 has always had the potential to achieve this, and it would not necessarily have lost its grip for it--in fact, its grip would probably have been all the tighter as a result. Unfortunately, ratings have always been the show's primary concern, and ratings are rarely achieved by requiring from the audience anything but the least amount of effort.

I want to add that I'm not against something that offers nothing more than escapism, as I'm sure this has benefits in itself. But the purpose of 24 becomes dubious, if not downright dangerous, because its chosen subject matter necessarily makes it political--it would do even if the creators didn't so explicitly advertise it as 'relevant' in this way--and the writers' treatment of this subject matter, for all the reasons I've mentioned above, prevents the show's politics from being as considered as they should be. There are many times when 24 demonstrates brilliance at the art of immersive storytelling, but despite its conceits of exploring morally and politically difficult situations, more often than not easy answers, morally speaking, are offered in the name of passive entertainment and pushing the story along, turning these in-story dilemmas into something of a cheap thrill.

Labels: 24, aeon flux, i am the ramblemaster, morality

# posted by Chris @ 1:53 AM 0 comments

24 is one of the greatest shows on TV, and one day I may even write more about it. It's difficult to deny that it's been a pretty big influence on City of Anarchy, so I thought I'd pay direct homage by introducing this spring's brief run of the story with some of the show's addictingly stylised format - or at least, as much as I can do without the dynamics of sound, music and motion.

Of course, the nature of CoA means that I can get away with some slightly more ludicrous plot devices that let me bypass realism just that little bit more, such as...you know, having the characters eat every now and again.

The recap's an idea I've had knocking around for a while, and it took almost as long to get the thing done. I dug out the tiny graphics tablet Olli lent to me years ago and never wanted back. I spent weeks and weeks on Avgi by doing bits and pieces here and there; most of this last week has been spent on Holly, who actually has more than a head and shoulders; and Snails and Hermes, both whom were sketched out earlier, were done yesterday. Now that I don't have a deadline, I can finish up those bits I didn't need done for the recap, fix things that don't look right, and maybe upload all four complete portraits to the sketchbook sometime. We'll see. It's been good practice, at least.

These intermittent bursts of regular updates are probably going to be the way I do it for most things from here on in. It's better for me because it encourages me to be more productive and I can spend more time immersed in any one project, and it's better for the reader just because reading becomes slightly less fragmentary. And the recaps will probably help.

Labels: 24, city of anarchy

# posted by Chris @ 4:04 PM 0 comments

I've been watching the repeat of the first series of 24 for a few weeks now. This is the first time I've seen it. The BBC have been showing two episodes every Friday night. Next Friday I'll be on holiday in France, so what are they doing? They're showing three.

Indignation courses through my soul like a raging, caffeine-stimulated dragon of high-voltage electrical power.

Suffice to say, I'm buying the DVD.

In other news [shuffles papers]...

We got started the rewrite of Agaffa and went through the first two chapters scribbling down various minor changes, but I think we decided that there's a lot of major stuff we need to sort out, which might make a lot of these minor changes unnecessary anyway. No idea when we're going to do that.

The future of City of Anarchy looks uncertain as a huge argument breaks out on the message board I write it for, and now I'm really not sure I want anything to do with it anymore.

As a result, The Aberration is now my main focus, and the one I'm really going to work on during the next few weeks. I've been neglecting it, and there's still a lot of stuff I need to do.

Labels: 24, agaffa, boardfic, city of anarchy, the aberration

# posted by Chris @ 5:31 PM 3 comments