24
Fox
Tuesday, 9 p.m / 8 p.m. CST

Fox's "24" is an action-espionage drama that unfolds in real time — meaning that the hour it takes you to watch it corresponds to an hour in the lives of the characters. Correspondingly, Flak will be providing a written-in-real- time-alongside-the- show review of "24" each week for the duration of the series or until the gimmick of the review becomes tiresome.

Episode 19: 6 p.m. – 7 p.m.

"Someone will die in this hour of '24.'" Ah, Omniscient Narrator Man, the wonder of narratologists everywhere.

So that's a starting place for discussion. To make it worth that kind of stinger, it would have to be: Jack, Teri or Kim; David, Sherry or Keith; Nina or Tony; George; or Rick. My bet: One of the last two.

This house-alarm gimmick is pretty clever, particularly if it's what saves Teri from the assassin. If it doesn't, well, that's less clever; that makes it a time-filling, scare-mongering contrivance. But it brought the police (or rent-a-cops; who responds to these things?), and they're going to go a perimeter check, so we'll see.

Hmm. The conspiracy gets filled in a little here, with David telling Jack about an address in Saugus, which falls within the power-grid coordinates given by the conspirative flunky killed in the last episodes. And Jack's only way out there is with his shady superior George; that makes George my pick for this episode's body bag material.

And here's Rick, "waiting" for Dan, his late partner who's never going to show up. … And, man alive, "Death Wish" Kim just gave up the fact that Dan's dead to Dan's psychotic, gun-toting brother. This is such a terrible subplot. Although Kim's incomprehensibly, reprehensibly dumb behavior marks her as my favorite victim of the screenwriters' machinations, this set-up is so bad that, from a plain story rightness standpoint, it would be intolerable if she were to die here.

Ah, the David and Sherry dinner-table-with-the-kids smackdown. And the race card falls for the first time in the show as Sherry dresses down Keith for considering blowing the conspiracy wide open.

Wait. What's up with Nicole, the character (the Palmers' daughter) so marginal I can't even remember her name? Some kind of panic attack brought on by all the arguing. Surely she's not the one under the deathwatch.

And Jack and George, making nice, with George continuing to cover up the fact that Teri and Kim are lost and unsupervised. So that's the extent of George's character; when Jack comes to realize that George has lied to him and that Teri and Kim are not safe, then Jack can exercise his rage against him. Until such an event happens, George isn't dying. Will it be this episode? We'll see.

What's Dan's brother's solution to not being able to pay the en-route drug dealers? Have a bunch of friends with a bunch of guns come over!

So Sherry made a point on the idea that David's candidacy is a special case because he's black, and that, in and of itself, this should be a factor in the decisions the family makes. In the context of the Palmer family argument, this isn't much of a thing; it's not like Sherry would be making a less impassioned speech if her potential-president husband were of a different race, or if there had already been a black president to set that precedent. But that's just it — there hasn't been a black president, and David is black, so it is and should be a thing. It's not inappropriate for a thriller to handle a story element of that magnitude, and while I don't mean to make this out to be more than it is, to cast a black family as a potential First Family just to show how colorblind you are in your casting isn't progressive — it's ignorant. Having David be black is inherently interesting, and drama will naturally rise up from it. For no drama to have risen from it for the first 18 hours of the show makes the very lack of it seem forced.

David basically made this same point when he and Jack determined the vengeful nature of the assassins — he said something to the effect of "It's doesn't matter that I'm black." It felt like a cop-out then and, many episodes later, it still does.

And so, in the final analysis, Sherry capitulates to David's Boy Scout tendencies and family togetherness spiel. Nicole's drama is supposed to be the event that made a unified front out of them, apparently. There's something to that, and yet in the case of Sherry's psychology, the whole is less than the sum.

It's dirty pool to cut to commercial in the middle of David's press conference — this address is the payoff for so much of what's gone before that we, the viewer, should be allowed to luxuriate in a well-written, well-acted monologue. Cutting away to Karl, the henchman of David's crooked financiers, was bad enough, but being kicked out of the broadcast altogether is a sorry move.

Flak contributor Mark Yarm pointed out to me last week something so obvious that I'm ashamed I didn't make the connections myself. The producers of "24" couldn't be sure that Fox would pick them up for a whole 24 hours, so they had to be able to steer the story to a resolution after 13 hours (a typical denomination of episodes for a less-than-full season). That, more than anything, must have been the driving logic behind freeing Teri and Kim and killing off Gaines, who was a much more interesting character than the Serbian baddies we've been left with since. Because that all happened in episode 13 — and, similarly, we didn't start getting keyed into the larger, vengeance-fueled, family-affair conspiracy until after episode 13. If the final verdict on "24" turns out to be that its most serious liability is how awry the subplots in last half of the season went, that'll be a pretty damning indictment of entertainment corporations' shortsightedness and inability simply to place faith in their product.

Nina and Tony are facing off about George not telling Jack about the situation with his family. And … Nina is calling George. Yep, George is dead meat.

And Jack's giving George too much info. It's the reverse of the bad guy explaining too much to the doomed hero; Jack's explanation only lays George's treachery oh so plain, especially with George suggesting that Jamey, the late mole, needed someone higher in the organization protecting her. This is square, ooga booga stuff.

Speaking of which: Can we have Kim in the room when the shootout takes place? That seems sensible. Yeah.

To return to the topic of Fox's shortsightedness: Here's a report about how "24" is likely to come back next season, but as a non-real time show that just chronicles the exploits of Jack Bauer and his Counter-Terrorism Unit. The new format would still take advantage of the ticking clocks and the idea of 24-hour stories, but only in the sense that each episode would be a self-contained narrative that resolves itself over the course of one day. On one very small level, this is a worthwhile idea, in that they've taken the care to establish these characters, and it's possible that we'd care about their further exploits. On every other level, it's a terrible idea; too harsh though it may be, this New York Times piece is dead-on in saying that the top two things "24" has going for it are its concept and the edge-of-your-seat execution of its concept. Rather than let the "24" crew develop a new real-time series with different characters that would capitalize on everything that they've learned about real-time storytelling so that they can deliver something stronger and more coherent in a future season, they're just going to stuff these characters into an old format. They're just going to walk the dinosaur around the track for a few more laps. Sad.

This maternal protectiveness of Teri and Kim on the part of Nina is an interesting character moment for her. Is her concern professional? Personal, as relates to Jack? Personal, as relates to her sense of herself as a good person?

Ha! The thing with Kim and drug dealears is a sting! That's great! Or, at least, so much better than the scenario was turning out to be. Although that leaves Kim with the narc branch of the LAPD, which is unlikely to be infiltrated by the Drazen crew; is she going to be permanently safe now? Are they removing her from harm's way because they need to narrow their focus for the last five episodes?

What a nice moment between David and Keith; redemption, played straight.

And Tony rides in to save the day in a nickier-of-time, hair's-breadth moment than the show usually gives. It's a pretty mean thrill; we heard Tony say he was going to check up on the agent who'd been assigned to the Bauer house about 10 or 15 minutes ago, and, without cutting back to the CTU office to clue us in, he realized that the other agent was dead and just drove out there himself to save Teri with less than seconds remaining before the assassin's trigger was pulled. Furthermore, Teri's memories are coming back.

Returning to the Palmers: That's a strong, true-to-character moment for Sherry — walking out past David and Nicole's embrace. It's good to know that hotbed of tension's not totally cooled off yet.

So just whose is the promised death? Teri's never-consummated near-lover! The doctor introduced at the end of episode 17 and whose been so minor I don't even know his name. Omniscient Narrator Man, you've led us astray.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)