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 6: 5 a.m. – 6 a.m.

So we're coming in on this false start of the daughter's suddenly critical condition — and, to play by their rules, they've already lost two minutes to credits and recap, meaning that she's been not breathing or whatever for a considerable amount of time. Still nothing … still nothing … pause for exposition … cut away to Nina and the corpse … so now it's been five minutes. I think we're entering brain damage territory.

Who would have pegged the guy with the triangular goatee as the protocol freak? Do those go together? … Well, Ming the Merciless, I guess. He was kind of a fascist.

This is interesting; with psychological tactics like having to bury your own ex-partner, they're setting it up like something that might actually resemble a hard-line terrorist outfit. It's not The Battle of Algiers, but it's a more interesting bit of organizational character development than just passing cash around and killing whoever gets in your way.

Interesting dissension in the Palmer ranks. Looks like the reporter's allegations of Keith's actions may be real … which makes it even more interesting in terms of it being part of the conspiracy, which it obviously is. And drawing in more of the family makes it almost too good to be part of the conspiracy, so there's yet another credulity double-bind: It's either an unbelievable coincidence or an act of unbelievable skill on the conspirator's part. In fact, they're so good that they can't be out simply to kill Palmer.

So I was incorrect in an interesting way last week; I called Fred Zinneman's High Noon the granddaddy of real-time features films, implying that Alfred Hitchcock's Rope came after. But Rope, a 1948 film, was released four years before High Noon. The nature of my misapprehension may be related to the fact that Rope is more complicated than simply a real-time narrative; it's real-time and makes the illusion of being in one continuous shot.

The dialogue has been kinda slipshod this week compared to the more natural phrasings of previous weeks. It reinforces how important realism in that aspect is to convincing you of the reality, or at least plausability, of the whole undertaking.

And the first Jack-and-Teri-together scene since the first hour (although I think he'll live to regret saying he'll never leave Teri again). … And see, what did I say about Janet pulling through in an inconsequential way? Cheap thrills and cliffhangers; the show has generally been good about avoiding them, or at least weaving them in a little more tightly. But they consistently have trouble coming up with a sufficient head of steam to hit that gotta-tune-in-next-week note in an appropriate way. Maybe it's just unrealistic to expect a story to be able to peak every 60 (or, to look at it another way, 44) minutes.

Apparently marital discord is the theme of this episode; the good row Palmer and his wife are having (which undermines my early point about disappointing dialogue), and the flare-ups that I expect to see between Jack and Teri all episode.

It may be because the action in this episode is more confined to interior spaces, but the use of split screen that was so effective in heightening the tension in enclosures like the office is mostly missing here; this episode is much more conventionally shot. Technique can be used as a gloss to amp up insufficient emotion, but "24" has been integrating it smartly, and the abstention is noted.

That was the killer Jack and Teri moment, where they have to reckon with the fact that Kim's been kidnapped by the assassins. It's the big emotional scene; I'm trying to determine just how — let me say if — this is structured. Rather than counterbalance the important character stuff with the plot slowdowns — i.e., having something really meaningful happen between Jack and Nina in episode four — they've stuck all this really loaded, emotional content in, if my idea about the show's episodic structure is correct, the middle of an arc.

I have a bad feeling about this, what with Alan going to see his daughter alone.

That long shot of Jack walking down the corridor away from his wife is a nice counterpoint to his earlier comment about not ever leaving her.

Oh, I knew it. OK. What a crummy bit of subterfuge. Alan was the terrorists' protection against Kim and/or Janet getting away? Did they kill Janet's dad so "Alan" would be able to be home to answer the phone in episode one? The makes of the show cheated, didn't they? They showed Alan alone, walking around Karen's house like it was his own when Teri called, or even that last scene, where he rubs his temples like a concerned father. The only time they really telegraphed Alan's possible double-facedness was when he delayed the proceedings by harassing that cop, and even that only set off the radar of the most paranoid viewers. And I was really sold by his performance in the last episode that he was genuine; the way he reacted to his daughter, etc.

Of course, that's a huge problem with acting: How do you convey the level of deceit appropriate for someone who's lying? It must be hard to act like you're acting well instead of what must be the simpler activity of just acting well. Hence the problem with those kinds of betrayals in TV and movies — they can never be set up properly. It's either too obvious, or so subtle that the actor's good acting overcomes the meager hints you're offered.

When I posited the series might be a sequence of roughly four-episode mini-arcs delimited by the death of a major character, I was consciously ignoring the death of Ralph in the second episode. Now that "Alan" has killed his "daughter," that means someone is dying every other episode, which suggests that every two episodes form a couplet. This makes sense; now that Alan and Teri are alone again and we know the truth about Alan, the story spins in a different way. Of course, two hours' worth of episodes equals one movie's worth of time, and that's interesting — the idea that two hours is about the right bite-sized chunk for a story. But we also have to reckon with the idea that there's simply only one or two ways that the makes of the show can present the story — the causality is so rigid and the chronology is so fixed that any rising actions or arcs outside of the simple swell of a single episode, repeated 23 times, are perceived only by reading too much into it.

That, by the way, is an example of a good cliffhanger.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)