The Latest Hour of '24'
***SPOILERS THROUGHOUT***
So we are now in the final stretch of the fourth season. With two hours to go, we only have so many directions the plot can take. Not that this negatively impacts the series, because I think from the perspective of the drama the producers want to inspire in the hearts of the audience, tonight's episode was one of the best. All the complaints I have about things such as the Atlas-like battery power in Jack Bauer's cell phone are great fun to point and laugh at. However, I really become engaged in Big Stories like this season purports to depict. It really doesn't get much bigger than
- the serious threat of direct military confrontation between China and the United States
- the imminent launch of a U.S. (!!!) nuclear warhead from American soil intended to attack American soil by a Muslim/Arabic terrorist cell
- the decision to end, in person, literally vital medical attention the husband of your lover in order to save the life of another because that person may know something about that nuclear attack
- the potential treason of the Secretary of Defense's son, who may have helped the terrorists
- the attempted murder of the sitting President
And so on. I think what makes 24 so enjoyable, despite all my problems with the actions of the characters within it, is the mixture of conflicts the audience is supposed to categorize in one of two natures: personal and social. The personal problems are scattered liberally throughout this year's show: husband and wife; adulterous lovers; divorcees; boyfriends and girlfriends; co-workers; fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and all the various combinations; employee and employer; colleagues and functionaries; complete strangers. These are the personal, the individual relationships that we are all aware of and that serve to provide no small amount of the support we use to get by each day.
Even if the crude medium of TV could be refined with the best acting and the best direction and the best production, it would still amount to an approximate take on how two people think and feel. We are left to fill in the gaps of awareness with our own experiences, relating fiction to reality and history. I'm aware these conflicts are present in most shows to some degree, but I think they've served almost as an effective counterweight to the other kind of conflict: the social.
It is here that I think tends to get the most attention, if simply due to the confluence of events away from the TV. These are between terrorist group/ideology and opposing government/ideology; local/national government entity to local/national government entity. It is a fact that most people today, when asked to value the life of one stranger against the lives of many strangers, are more likely to pick the welfare of the collective over the single when all options are exhausted (sometimes sooner than that). This choice permeates us in the news and has an almost undefeatable grasp around the neck of politics.
It is nice to see the Trees get some attention, specifically because it means the Forest isn't getting the customary limelight.
Or maybe I'm just trying to salvage a show on artistic grounds when on moral grounds it hurts so much to watch.
In any case, the show continues to display what the inner workings of the federal government during a possible nightmare scenario. I've noticed a few things about this. One, meetings are not where most important decisions are made. Rather, they are the set-up to a future situation where it comes down to one person's choices. Even though some effort was made to show that CTU holds regular meetings several times an hour, the bulk of the work is done by technicians and field operatives. The upper echelon or executives, to the extent it even knows what's going on, set the broad outline of what they want done. Thus, executive power is cast far from the position of those who are elected to wield it and into the hands of people who are hired.
I would assume that most people, when presented with this, would say, "So what? When snap decisions are to be made, shouldn't those decisions be made closer to the people involved instead of further?" I'd agree with them. I'd also ask them what kind of deliberate intellectual blindness allows them to say that and still defend the existence of government that takes barely countable lives and vast wealth (our very time) into it's hands thousands of times a day to redistribute as anything but just as important.
The other thing is something that happens just as frequently (in fact, with the same exact frequency) as the above. These things called "laws" that the government makes and enforces don't seem to mean a damn thing in times of emergency. The regulations governing inter-agency cooperation and coordination fall by the wayside even faster. Prohibitions against murder, assault, theft, extortion, and the act of credibly threatening to do them are violated. What was already a very precarious situation regarding individual rights becomes palpably worse.
This ties in with the first because one of the justifications in having a government is that it protects us from ourselves and external threats. What is to stop a government from preying on the citizens (anyone, really) living inside the geographic reach of that state? The separation of powers? But we've seen how the most immediate threat to the liberty and welfare of citizens - the people in the executive branch - begin to shrug off the institutional yokes placed on their backs. So far, 24 has only tangentially dealt with the judicial branch and has almost left the legislative branch unmentioned. It is the case today, though, that the judicial will tend to yield or give the benefit of the doubt to the executive branch when "national security" is concerned. It is a simple task to find examples of the judiciary ceding the moral ground to power to accomplish executive tasks that have nothing to do with national security, regardless. To top things off, one needs to only look at the historical Congress to know that often enough it is the body of state that wishes to trample on individual rights to a greater extent than the other two.
Audrey Rains had a very powerful moment this episode. It has been hardly half an hour since she watched her husband die on an operating table - not because the surgeons were incompetent or because his medical condition was impossible to improve, but because Jack held his service pistol to the head of the lead surgeon and demanded he stop working on Paul and instead save the life of Lee Jong. Audry vehemently protested but was restrained by CTU agents and taken outside the OR. Paul flat lines and dies even though Jack and Curtis attempt to revive him. Audry is distraught.
Chinese Consul Koo Yin is killed during Jack's escape with Jong. The Deputy Consul, Su Ming, demands access to CTU and CTU agents to see if they had anything to do with the assault. A cover-up story is quickly concocted after Ming demands to see Jack's hourly activity sheet: he and Audry were working together on data processing for more than an hour during the raid. Before Ming questions Audry, Jack stops by to tell her she has to say what needs to be said in order to keep Ming out of CTU's business. Up to that point, she wasn't aware of the Consul's death and Jack tells her this to emphasize how important it is for her to lie.
She stares at him for a second, clearly shocked by this. Jack tries to make his standard case for acting in a way that he would normally consider wrong, but Audry silences him with a simple (I paraphrase), "And what has that done for you? Where has it gotten us?" The impact on Jack's face is visible and he replies that she, her father the Secretary of Defense, and others are still alive. Jack is called away before anything else could be said, but I think Audry had the upper hand in that exchange. Though she was pointing out the consequences of his actions and their utility, the implication when tied with what he had done in the OR was one of concern for objective, individual morality. He couldn't answer that question on those grounds.
A final comment. Tonight I became aware of something 24 has showcased since the beginning. The principle characters in this show are confronted with choices that can and do determine the well-being of human lives. Those choices are almost binary in every case and the two options are framed in the same two ways. One option is to do whatever is necessary to accomplish the mission and the other is to respect either some unspoken moral code or the rules set up by state and social institutions. The former is categorized as the necessary thing to do because anything less will result in death and misery. The latter is categorized as a needlessly strict process. However, both are imbued with moral righteousness by their proponents and the choices are always cast such that they are the only ones that can be made; that when a problem confronts someone, there are two fundamental choices to pick from. They are either to ultimately have the individual or the group primarily in mind.
Previous entries: 24 and Torture, Fox's '24': A Libertarian Nightmare, The Jack Bauer Power Hour, Inner Outrage; The Enslavement of Behrooz Araz, The Total Erosion of the Fourth Wall, The '24' Embrace of Contemporary Politics, and Humanity Revealed in FOX's 24
UPDATED 5/17/2005 2:05pm
Quickie '24' Blog Items with an Emphasis on Richard Heller
UPDATED 3/13/2006 9:45am
My Take on FOX's '24' Ethics