"24" — Season Three
Fox
Tuesday, 9 p.m / 8 p.m. CST
Rule No. 1 of improv — the only rule of improv, as far as I can tell — is, "Don't say 'no.'" When a fellow actor makes you an offer, you can respond any way but to deny it. If told you're being attacked by elves, you can deal with them in any way except to deny that there are in fact malicious elves headed toward you.
The rules of improv are especially relevant to the writers of "24" because they claim to undertake their serial story without any sense of what's going to happen along the way. Writing drama without knowing the ending is tricky business since the ending has to be both a narrative and an emotional summary and recapitulation of all that's gone before, and for two seasons, the "24" crew managed it pretty cannily. Sure, there have been missteps along the way, but when each season wraps up its 24th hour, the final product stands up to emotional scrutiny, if not a rigorous standard of plausibility.
Then there's the curious third season, now halfway done. The sense that there's no one captaining the writers' ship is as strong as ever, with plot threads standing on end as if someone had rubbed the story's head with a balloon and let static electricity do its thing. It's the same feeling of helplessness/ cluelessness that that the show has overcome before, but it's stronger than before — Kim being stalked by three mountain lions, if you will.
The bogeymen in season three are the Salazars, a Mexican drug cartel fronted by Ramon, played by the terrific, unfortunate Joaquin de Almeida, whose major English language roles — in Clear and Present Danger, Desperado, the "Kingpin" miniseries — always make him the suave narcotraficante. (Although, to confound "24" fans, he did get 30 seconds in last week's "West Wing" as an Argentinian cabbage ambassador.) From the first episode, this seemed like a dangerous path to tread — Latin American drug barons are a major throwback from the au courant domestic/Eastern European/Arab terrorists of previous seasons. When Jack (series star Kiefer Sutherland) captured Ramon, brother Hector Salazar sent a virus-steeped corpse into Los Angeles to prove he was willing to wreak bioterror to get Ramon released.
From there, things either unfolded or got crumpled into a ball and thrown away, depending on your perspective. We were led to believe that Kyle, a young Angeleno, brought virus-laden heroin back on his first drug run. In an early episode, as Jack's Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) busted down the door, Kyle's mother dumped the tainted drugs down the toilet. CTU closes the sewer, but: No. The virus isn't in the drugs. CTU reasons that Kyle himself is also the payload, incubating furiously, and tries to find him, although he's also being tailed by the Salazars' handler — not to mention their inside man (CTU's third mole in three seasons). Acting on the presumption that they won't find Kyle before Hector's deadline, Jack gets covert permission from President David Palmer to spring Ramon from prison. The jailbreak goes horribly awry, killing many cops and cons, but Jack and Ramon get airborne … right before word comes that Kyle has been contained by CTU. The virus threat seems resolved, but: No. The virus isn't in Kyle.
Ramon, seething with resentment toward Jack, tries to kill him before departing on a private plane for Mexico, but word comes that Hector wants him alive. Arriving in Mexico, we learn that Jack has been acting as a double-agent against CTU, returning Ramon to Hector so the three of them can work together to buy the virus from its creators. That's right. The Salazars don't even have the virus, apart from whatever sample dose made it into the original corpse. But unbeknownst to the Salazars, the president or Jack's superiors, Jack is a triple-agent, working with that CTU mole — another triple-agent — to ingratiate himself with the Salazars so that this deadly new virus can be obtained and then destroyed. After much folderol (including the re-emergence of the double-agent that seduced Jack and killed his wife; the death of Hector's girlfriend, whom Jack has fallen in love with during his time undercover; and Hector's death at Ramon's hand) Jack and Ramon finally acquire the virus — they even see it spectroscopically verified — but: No. It's actually a bomb, which kills Ramon. The virus remains in the possession of those trying to sell it.
This may seem like it has the knottiness and subterfuge of a good spy thriller, but it fails as a drama for a reason that improv comedians know so well: Every climax is a false climax. Every carefully constructed scenario about the lethality of the virus is emotionally capsized when we learn that was never a virus threat to begin with — or when we learn that Jack knew what was really going on the whole time, and was only pretending to think his way toward the heroin, toward Kyle, etc., in the early hours. A few feints along these lines are de rigeur for these stories, but season three's constant frustration is nonpareil. In season one, Jack's assassination attempt on then-presidential candidate David Palmer happened in hour eight; in season two, the nuclear bomb went off in hour 15. The brilliance of the show was that it gave the story somewhere to go after the hook that brought us into the season was resolved. But here, there's no resolution, no sense of things progressing. And it makes for bad drama.
It does, however, make for excellent black comedy. "24" first premiered in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and quickly became a nervous nation's fantasy of homeland security. Season two, on its surface, was about a nuclear bomb intended for Los Angeles, but the real drama centered around the question of whether the president would declare war against presumed aggressors despite the lack of any hard evidence linking them to the attack. It was unprecedented for a prime-time drama from a major network to be so timely in its commentary.
From this vantage, season three stands revealed as the first great WMD comedy of the post-Saddam era. Everyone's hell-bent on getting the virus … but what virus? Who has it? Where's the threat? Not the drugs, not Kyle, not the Salazars, not the briefcase containing the professionally inspected looks-like-a- vial-of-virus vial of virus. The string of narrative denials that upend the drama become, under this light, worthy of Dr. Strangelove.
It would be asking a lot for "24" to fulfill this promise. That first casualty shows that this particular weapon of mass destruction does exist, and while the writers have previously demonstrated the kind of fancy footwork that would get them out of that corner, smart money has the virus being very real and Jack being very successful in destroying it. Action movies (and by association "24") are antithetical to real satire, and so in nine foreseeable cases out of 10, the writers will have to choose between their sly political message and a genre-prescribed ending. Granted, the minor miracles of the first two seasons suggest that the show's writers might pull off the hat trick and deliver all the goods. But in previous seasons, the show's upfront pleasures were satisfying enough that there was room for the subtext; in season three, the unfulfilling story suggests the writers are busy sweating the text, and that bodes ill. If "24" has shown skeptics anything, however, it's that a lot can happen in 12 hours.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
