24-Yet Another Season Of Mind-Numbing Torture

I had high hopes that this season of 24 would make up for the generally awful last season six. Tony Almeida, long presumed dead, was returning as one of the series main villains. He had plenty of reason to be bitter. When he was supposedly killed about two thirds of the way through season five, he was a victim of then current President Charles Logan, who killed Tony’s wife, and assassinated former President David Palmer, in a convoluted plot to prevent Palmer from revealing the truth about a shady plot Logan was involved in. He intended to set up Jack Bauer to take the blame for the assaults to cover his tracks, Jack having gone into hiding in order to prevent his being handed over to the Chinese for an earlier assault on their embassy, which resulted in the death of a Chinese diplomat in season four. Jack of course came out of hiding to clear his name, and when we finally learned the truth, and Logan was finally brought to justice, he ended up getting a slap on the wrist in order to prevent the nation being traumatized.

Now it turns out that Almeida was revived within ten minutes of his death by a rogue British agent who then took him in as part of his crew of domestic terrorists. (How all this happened so quickly, with Tony’s body in custody of the government agency for whom he worked, has so far not been satisfactorily explained) When Jack is subpoenaed away from a Senate Committee hearing, where he is being grilled for his use of torture in the interrogation of suspects while a member of the now-disbanded CTU (Counter-Terrorism Unit), and remanded to the custody of the FBI, he learns that his old friend and partner is now not only alive, but a domestic terrorist. The group to which he belongs has gained control of the nation’s protective firewall, giving them the power to affect the national power grid, air-traffic control, water and sewage treatment plants, and a host of other things. Their goal-to blackmail current President Allison Taylor into calling off an assault on the rogue leader of an African nation bent on genocide. In the meantime, we learn that high-level officials of the American government are on the payroll of the despotic general, whose nation is rich in diamonds. As if that is not enough, Jack quickly learns that the FBI has a mole in its ranks.

So far so good, but then it all falls apart. Tony is in fact working undercover to bring down the terrorist group. As if that’s not enough, it also turns out he is working as part of a secret group of counter-terrorists made up of Jack’s former compatriots in CTU.

In other words, what was once the sharpest, edgiest show on network television has turned into a satire of itself. Something has happened to the writers of this show. They are no longer willing to take chances, the kind of chances that made this show several notches above your average television fare, and now they are pandering to the audience. That’s a sure sign of doom. First, the writers in conjunction with the networks insult their viewers intelligence, and then they throw them a few crumbs to string them along.

There was no reason to bring Tony Almeida back. He should have stayed dead, but the writers couldn’t resist using the popularity of Carlos Bernard as a ratings ploy. It would have worked too, if Almeida truly was a villain, but under the circumstances, his return to the show is meaningless drivel designed to attract viewers and shore up ratings. The use of characters Chloe O’Brien (Mary Lynne Rajskaub) and William Buchanan (William Morrison) in the ridiculous plot device of devoted government servants struggling in anonymity to save the nation from the dastardly corrupt villains who have infiltrated the government, is just adding insult to injury.

True, they could salvage this season-and the show-by turning it around, but I doubt now this will happen. I have a feeling the entire series is already in the can, and so it’s probably too late to rework this obvious mess.

In the past, when 24 sprung a shocker, it had impact. You never saw it coming. In almost every season-even the god awful season six-there were usually at least one “WTF” moments that defined the season, for better or worse, even if it made no difference to the overall worth of the season.

Season One stands out still as the best of the lot. It was a non-stop nerve grinding suspense ride, starting from the abduction of Jack’s daughter and her friend by two young thugs on the payroll of a Balkan based terrorist group determined to blackmail Jack into assassinating then Presidential candidate David Palmer. This led to the later abduction of Jack’s wife Terri, who was later raped, and then finally, at the end, murdered, by Nina Meyers, the one CTU agent Jack trusted, and with whom he had previously engaged in an illicit affair, and who turned out to be the CTU mole in an unfortunately too oft-repeated plot device.

Season Two saw the sacrificial death of CTU chief George Mason, who flew an activated nuclear bomb out to a remote area of the Nevada desert, where it exploded in relative safety. Mason had been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, and so his death was a given, but still gut wrenching in that he was previously seen as something of a heel.

Season Three saw Jack forced to do the unthinkable-he was forced to murder his then CTU boss Ryan Chappelle, in order to secure his cover in an attempt to recover a biological weapon sold to a rogue British agent by a Mexican drug cartel. Jack had previously engaged in heroin use and become an addict as part of his cover, and so this action threatened to send him into a further downward spiral. Chappelle knew it was coming, and tried to weasel out of it, but in the end, he was on his knees as Jack sent the bullet crashing into his brains. At the end, Nina Meyers was finally killed, as was Sherry Palmer, the President’s treacherous wife, and Palmer himself was forced to resign in the face of his wife’s actions-she had murdered a man to prevent him revealing his wife’s affair with the Presidents brother and Chief-of-Staff.

Season Four-Palmer’s presidential replacement was incapacitated by an attack on Air Force One, necessitating his replacement by Vice-President Charles Logan, who seems totally out of his element in the face of this season’s terrorist threat, and so calls for advice from Palmer. In this season, Logan seemingly represents a kind of perverse comic relief. He is corrupt, but seemingly incompetent, and willingly sells Jack down the river in order to keep himself politically viable.

Season Five-As already explained, former President Palmer is assassinated, as is Tony Almeida’s wife Michelle, in an assault that almost kills Almeida as well. He is later seemingly killed by a captured conspirator when he gets a little too careless in his interrogation of the man, who jams a needle with what is supposedly a lethal dose of some drug into Almeida’s stomach. It is only later that we learn that President Logan himself is the Chief ringleader of a group determined to extend America’s influence into the Central Asian region by enabling a terrorist attack by way of smuggled Russian missiles. By the end of the season, both Logan and Jack are in custody-Logan by the government, Jack by Chinese espionage agents still itching for revenge for the earlier assault on their embassy. They would later agree to return him to an almost certain death in the following stinker of a season.

Season Six-Yes, even as horrible as it was, it too had its moments, as in at the very beginning, where we learn that one of the ringleaders of the Logan cabal, a mysterious dorky looking unnamed character, was actually Jack Bauer’s treacherous brother, and that Jack’s own father is involved in a conspiracy to control the government. Both of them are killed, the brother unfortunately early on. The rest of the season devolved into nonsense. Someone decided it would be cool to make President Palmer’s brother, the aforementioned Chief-of-Staff of Season Three-the next President Logan. The only thing that salvaged this season was the re-introduction of the Chinese espionage agent over the course of the last several episodes, and in retrospect, even that now seems forced and hackneyed.

So what will be the defining moment of current Season Seven? I don’t really know, but I think it’s already come and gone. The producers of the show have lost a golden opportunity, taken what could have been a compelling idea and plot device in the resurrection and villainy of Tony Almeida, a man seemingly twisted by the drive for revenge, and turned it into just another television cliché.

Television shows succeed when they grab the viewer’s attention and make them want to tune in for more, and the key factors here are suspense, mystery, and the element of surprise. When television shows start pandering to their audiences, they throw those elements out the window. Then the viewers tune in to How I Met Your Mother.

Of course, I could be wrong, but when a series jettisons its most promising and compelling plot device this early on, it’s not a good sign.