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 9: 8 a.m. – 9 a.m.

So where are we?

At the end of episode six, it seemed that Jack had reached a turning point — the end of the first act, with respect to Jack's character arc. The end of the last episode marked a different kind of turning point. As a character, Jack is still in the same position — fully committed and under the terrorists' thrall while his family is held hostage — so from a character sense, things haven't changed. But the conspiracy is at an end — Presidential-candidate-to-be Palmer was to be assassinated at that morning speech last episode. That act, of course, would have been the culmination of all the terrorists' planning: the explosion on the airplane, the subversion of Jamey, the fake ID, the plastic surgery to further the photographer masquerade, and especially the manipulation of the family. But that's all unspooled now.

It's interesting that Jack chose to assert the truth of his situation to his arresting officer, or whoever that was; it's definitely the kind of betrayal that could result in harm coming to Jack's family, but despite/because of that, it suggests that Gaines' power over Jack might soon be at an end. For Jack to be so outspoken and headstrong about stopping him and preventing the assassination shows that if his spirit had been broken, and it seems like it had, then he's already healed. It will be a surprise, and maybe even a stretch, dramatically, if Jack ends up under Gaines' thumb again.

Jack breaking free like that was a contrived set piece, but oh well — it was an effective one. This remains superior action for television — the truth of the matter is probably that Stephen Hopkins is a top-notch TV director and a, um, middle-notch film director. What's the distinction? We'll get into that some other week.

Kidnapping the waitress reinforces the idea of Jack as a compromised good guy, which is the right position to keep him in for now. … And threatening to involve Jamey's son! Hot diggity. That's Old Testament-style vengeance. And it was good to bring Jack, Nina, Tony and Jamey together for that conference call — a good centering moment, and we certainly won't see all of them together again for a long time.

Oh no. Don't let the waitress nursemaid Jack a la Three Days of the Condor. … Ha. It's our good fortune that, instead, they chose to pursue a clever reversal of that hackneyed situation, with her taking advantage of his good-guy nature and trying to walk out on him.

It's interesting that Palmer is being so intransigent about not trying to influence the media. It's comic on as many levels as it is dramatic.

So: The conspiracy. Palmer was apparently the actual target, not a red herring target, and the central manipulation of Jack was to smuggle the weapon to the event and then act as the terrorists' patsy. But the whole Palmer's-son-as-murder-suspect angle was never revealed to be a terrorist machination, which means it was just a longshot coincidence — in other words, a cheat to build drama, a little bit of reverse deus ex machina (using an impossible circumstance to muddle, not clarify, affairs) that allowed them to inject some hyper-drama into the Palmer storyline rather than just build, shall we say, "plain" drama. And the extremity of the terrorists' actions becomes highly suspect — blowing up a plane instead of just committing one murder being the central bit of craziness. Why not just get some explosives and blow up the convention hall where Palmer spoke? Fewer would have died, and it would have required a far less frantic set-up: no kidnapping, no plastic surgery, no acquiring a mole within CTU, etc.

Before the actual assassination attempt, there was always the possibility of discovering there was something greater at work — i.e. it wasn't really about killing Palmer, or that killing Palmer was part of an even greater conspiracy. And this is as good a time as any to ask just what's going on with the whole assassination idea. Who wants Palmer dead, and why? That's a reasonable, serious question to be asking in hour eight of the show. One thing that is apparent is that the Gaines-led conspirators, as dreamed up by the writers, achieved a peculiar middle ground — smart and far-reaching enough to envelop the kidnapping of Jack's family, but small enough to be easily thwarted. "24" has lacked that "X-Files"-sense of the conspiracy being larger than life, making it instead seem more like a tiny group of extremely well-organized nuts. But that just reinforces that "24" isn't really a conspiracy story, with everything that term denotes; it's an action thriller, which subscribes to a whole different ethos.

"Love Shack" wasn't an '80s song. That's poor appropriation for a "That '80s Show" ad. … Well, OK, technically, the six weeks that "Love Shack" were on the Billboard Top 10 were in the '80s, but it was November and December of 1989. I don't know if producer Mark Brazill counts the decade as stretching from 1980-1989 or 1981-1990, but either way, you can hardly claim "Love Shack" was evocative or representative of the '80s anywhere near as much as it was of the early '90s.

Ohhh … . The Palmer's-son subplot is going to be a tool that Sheila uses. It still doesn't reduce the longshot nature of it, but it provides a reasonable dramatic justification. And the wedge that this issue continues to drive between Palmer and his wife is also dramatically utile. And, again, a move away from a conspiracy story — this coincidence is going to favor the terrorists by increasing Jack's negative publicity and media scrutiny (remember that the LAPD already hates him), and coincidences never favor the bad guys in conspiracy stories (randomness and deviation from the status quo is supposed to hinder them).

This has perhaps been the most soap operatic of the episodes, and I mean that in a good way. All the action was compacted into the first few minutes, and the character interactions have all been well-formed: Jack and Lauren, Tony and Jamey, Nina and Tony, Jack and Nina and Tony and Jamey, Palmer and Sheila, and especially Teri and Kim. Many people thought that the overly saccharine speech that Teri gave last episode was a stone-cold presage to her death; it was more surprising, I think, to make it a presage to her rape. And the rape, to a certain extent, saves her life; it would be too much, dramatically, to have her raped and killed, even though you could argue that by some terrible calculus, Teri "gained" from the rape — both saving Kim and getting the cellphone.

And since I've spent the bulk of this piece dredging up unresolved issues about "24," here's one last one: The action-packedness — by which I mean action action, not just violence action — of the show remains, to a certain extent, its inescapable Achilles heel. You can't really fault it for this, but any argument you or I might make about the credulity of any particular event or scene takes a backseat to the fundamental disbelief that's necessary for the show's propulsion.

Oh, wow. I don't think anyone expected that from Jamey. I figured she'd have escaped or something, but not that. And, equally wow, maybe their smartest cliffhanger, and a double cliffhanger for good measure. The show's problems aren't negligible or happily ignored, but I will say this: The show has lived up to all the good things that have been said about it. This was a deeply satisfying episode.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)