Jack Bauer's Final Minutes
by Dick Polman
APRIL 1, 2010 TAGS:
It was Jack’s world, we only lived in it.
The world of 24, which will blessedly end in May when the Fox network airs the season eight finale, was so unremittingly grim, so vulnerable to evildoers of every conceivable ethnicity, so heavily populated by Washington schemers straight from the House of Tudor, it’s a wonder that as many as 15 million Americans chose to immerse themselves.
But we did it, because of Jack.
In the aftermath of 9/11, and for much of the decade that followed, Jack Bauer quelled our national anxieties. He was in sync with the jittery zeitgeist, a guy’s guy’s guy who could shoot and stab and torture his way to glory, armed only with his luck, his pluck, his pistol, his yen for yelling NOW RIGHT NOW, his bionic powers of recuperation, and his willful disdain for basic bodily functions. Exposing every conspiracy by fair means and foul, most notably foul, he made Dirty Harry look like Woody Allen.
Clearly, however, Jack’s final bow during the May ratings sweeps is long overdue. How much more physical abuse can Jack possibly endure, even if he is essentially a cartoon character? He has already been tortured on a meat hook, hung by a chain, and carted away on a slow boat to China. He has been irradiated by plutonium (and saved from certain death by some miraculous whatever). He once got himself addicted to heroin, just to crack a case. He once stopped his own heart to fake his own death, by means that I can’t begin to describe.
Granted, the guy is supernaturally strong, just as we’d wish ourselves to be on the front line of the terror war. At the start of one very long day, Jack came off a plane looking wan, bearded, and bedraggled after two years in that Chinese prison – yet, within scant minutes on that ticking clock, he was lean and mean and anxious to kick ass. He had apparently regained his muscle tone while ordering Chloe to reprogram the mainframe jigowatts, or whatever it is she does.
Still, what about the steep emotional toll? He had to cradle his dead wife after she was shot by his lover, who turned out to be a mole. (CTU, arguably the least competent national security agency in American history, is always riddled with moles.) He lost a longtime girlfriend who wound up comatose. He had to torture his own brother, who turned out to be an evildoer. He had to execute a CTU colleague, at the behest of a different evildoer. He had to face down his own father, yet another evildoer. He apparently hasn’t had anything to eat since 2001, which is probably why he never goes to the john.
And, by this point, he has surely exhausted every last option for extracting information via creative means. He has already electrocuted suspects with lamp cords, broken their fingers, stomped on their wounds, and one time he even put a bullet into the thigh of JoBeth Williams, who always plays nice people, and who naturally didn’t deserve to be the object of Jack’s ire.
Jack’s world was indeed dark, an endless succession of warehouses, factories, cellars, ports, docks, and loft spaces populated by techie geeks in the employ of Islamic zealots, Balkan warlords, Mexican drug lords, Chechen separatists, Chinese Machiavellians, Russian arms dealers, African mercenaries, American mercenaries, British mercenaries, you name it, all of them scheming to unleash nuclear fallout, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombs, suitcase bombs, dirty bombs, viruses, and nerve gases upon the innocents of our land.
Plus, the cougar. Let’s not forget the cougar, who tormented Jack’s winsome daughter while she wandered the California hills during season two. As she rudely discovered, during those ticking hours when the writers didn’t know what else to do with her, no place in America is safe.
That message hit home in the years immediately following 9/11. The bad guys could be anywhere - even inside CTU, which apparently has looser screening policies than your local Wal-Mart. Not only did our protectors have to work alongside the moles, they also had to endure a string of indignities, including a terrorist invasion of the CTU workplace, the unleashing of deadly gas amongst the cubicles, and (most recently) the loss of all electronics, thanks to a bomb-laden car that was driven right to the door of CTU, as if it were the frontage of a four-star hotel.
And Jack had virtually nobody to watch his back, certainly not the backstabbers who ran our own government. No safe place indeed.
The White House was a perpetual rat’s nest of conspirators – a president who plotted the assassination of his predecessor, and who in turn was the willing puppet of shadowy oil magnates who wanted to launch a war in order to pump more crude in Central Asia; a neoconservative aide, in the Karl Rove tradition, who hung himself; a hawkish vice president who sought to remove his cautious, comatose boss (yes, another coma) via the 25th Amendment; a president betrayed by her own craven daughter; a president who ordered the torture of his national security chief; a Defense secretary who ordered the torture of his slacker son … not exactly a celebration of democracy. It was more like a treatise on nihilism and the futility of voting.
But we watched anyway, not merely because we were willing to embrace the darkness, not merely because we surrendered to Jack’s hair-trigger certitude and the dictates of narrative entertainment, not merely because we marveled at CTU's uncanny knack for hiring closet jihadists. We watched because of the clock.
24 was in sync with our postmodern metabolism, our troubling need to multi-task and make every millisecond count. Americans are manifestly sleep-deprived, and here was a world of work junkies who never slept, who felt compelled to stay at their screens and achieve something with each tick of the digital clock. Relentless kineticism was the show’s true ideology.
As for Jack, we probably don’t need him anymore. The evildoers are definitely out there, plotting in the darkness and ducking the CIA’s drones, but, nearly a decade after 9/11, we have largely adapted with a dose of fatalism to the reality of danger. So Jack, you have our permission to stand down. Marry freckly Renee at season’s end (assuming you’re both alive); go home to California and watch over your daughter. You never know, there might be another cougar.
Dick Polman is national political columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He last wrote for Obit on Fess Parker.
The world of 24, which will blessedly end in May when the Fox network airs the season eight finale, was so unremittingly grim, so vulnerable to evildoers of every conceivable ethnicity, so heavily populated by Washington schemers straight from the House of Tudor, it’s a wonder that as many as 15 million Americans chose to immerse themselves.
But we did it, because of Jack.In the aftermath of 9/11, and for much of the decade that followed, Jack Bauer quelled our national anxieties. He was in sync with the jittery zeitgeist, a guy’s guy’s guy who could shoot and stab and torture his way to glory, armed only with his luck, his pluck, his pistol, his yen for yelling NOW RIGHT NOW, his bionic powers of recuperation, and his willful disdain for basic bodily functions. Exposing every conspiracy by fair means and foul, most notably foul, he made Dirty Harry look like Woody Allen.
Clearly, however, Jack’s final bow during the May ratings sweeps is long overdue. How much more physical abuse can Jack possibly endure, even if he is essentially a cartoon character? He has already been tortured on a meat hook, hung by a chain, and carted away on a slow boat to China. He has been irradiated by plutonium (and saved from certain death by some miraculous whatever). He once got himself addicted to heroin, just to crack a case. He once stopped his own heart to fake his own death, by means that I can’t begin to describe.
Granted, the guy is supernaturally strong, just as we’d wish ourselves to be on the front line of the terror war. At the start of one very long day, Jack came off a plane looking wan, bearded, and bedraggled after two years in that Chinese prison – yet, within scant minutes on that ticking clock, he was lean and mean and anxious to kick ass. He had apparently regained his muscle tone while ordering Chloe to reprogram the mainframe jigowatts, or whatever it is she does.
Still, what about the steep emotional toll? He had to cradle his dead wife after she was shot by his lover, who turned out to be a mole. (CTU, arguably the least competent national security agency in American history, is always riddled with moles.) He lost a longtime girlfriend who wound up comatose. He had to torture his own brother, who turned out to be an evildoer. He had to execute a CTU colleague, at the behest of a different evildoer. He had to face down his own father, yet another evildoer. He apparently hasn’t had anything to eat since 2001, which is probably why he never goes to the john.
And, by this point, he has surely exhausted every last option for extracting information via creative means. He has already electrocuted suspects with lamp cords, broken their fingers, stomped on their wounds, and one time he even put a bullet into the thigh of JoBeth Williams, who always plays nice people, and who naturally didn’t deserve to be the object of Jack’s ire.
Jack’s world was indeed dark, an endless succession of warehouses, factories, cellars, ports, docks, and loft spaces populated by techie geeks in the employ of Islamic zealots, Balkan warlords, Mexican drug lords, Chechen separatists, Chinese Machiavellians, Russian arms dealers, African mercenaries, American mercenaries, British mercenaries, you name it, all of them scheming to unleash nuclear fallout, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombs, suitcase bombs, dirty bombs, viruses, and nerve gases upon the innocents of our land.
Plus, the cougar. Let’s not forget the cougar, who tormented Jack’s winsome daughter while she wandered the California hills during season two. As she rudely discovered, during those ticking hours when the writers didn’t know what else to do with her, no place in America is safe.That message hit home in the years immediately following 9/11. The bad guys could be anywhere - even inside CTU, which apparently has looser screening policies than your local Wal-Mart. Not only did our protectors have to work alongside the moles, they also had to endure a string of indignities, including a terrorist invasion of the CTU workplace, the unleashing of deadly gas amongst the cubicles, and (most recently) the loss of all electronics, thanks to a bomb-laden car that was driven right to the door of CTU, as if it were the frontage of a four-star hotel.
And Jack had virtually nobody to watch his back, certainly not the backstabbers who ran our own government. No safe place indeed.
The White House was a perpetual rat’s nest of conspirators – a president who plotted the assassination of his predecessor, and who in turn was the willing puppet of shadowy oil magnates who wanted to launch a war in order to pump more crude in Central Asia; a neoconservative aide, in the Karl Rove tradition, who hung himself; a hawkish vice president who sought to remove his cautious, comatose boss (yes, another coma) via the 25th Amendment; a president betrayed by her own craven daughter; a president who ordered the torture of his national security chief; a Defense secretary who ordered the torture of his slacker son … not exactly a celebration of democracy. It was more like a treatise on nihilism and the futility of voting.
But we watched anyway, not merely because we were willing to embrace the darkness, not merely because we surrendered to Jack’s hair-trigger certitude and the dictates of narrative entertainment, not merely because we marveled at CTU's uncanny knack for hiring closet jihadists. We watched because of the clock.
24 was in sync with our postmodern metabolism, our troubling need to multi-task and make every millisecond count. Americans are manifestly sleep-deprived, and here was a world of work junkies who never slept, who felt compelled to stay at their screens and achieve something with each tick of the digital clock. Relentless kineticism was the show’s true ideology.As for Jack, we probably don’t need him anymore. The evildoers are definitely out there, plotting in the darkness and ducking the CIA’s drones, but, nearly a decade after 9/11, we have largely adapted with a dose of fatalism to the reality of danger. So Jack, you have our permission to stand down. Marry freckly Renee at season’s end (assuming you’re both alive); go home to California and watch over your daughter. You never know, there might be another cougar.
Dick Polman is national political columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He last wrote for Obit on Fess Parker.
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COMMENTS (1)
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Krishna Andavolu wrote on April 1, 2010 7:09am
He never once had to charge his cell phone did he...? [Report Comment]
