24: Season Seven (1 Viewer)

[Doug Schiller]

Huh? Is that is what the writer's wanted us to think?

What exactly do you think she is going to do?

Rip off his shirt and hook up a car battery with jumper cables?

Pistol whip him until he talks?

or, most likely, cry and sob on the floor until he gives up some information?

Geez, I wish I could watch the show with that hat on.
I guess I am too jaded.
I didn't feel any threat from her at all. I see that guy with his big grin on his face, laughing at this 100 lb, frail weakling coming in the room.

 

[TravisR]

Yes. If Jason's summary is not what they meant, what do you think happened? I know you love nitpicking (warranted and unwarranted) but I can't think of any other reasonable interpretation of that scene.

 

[ScottH]

I'm with Doug...I think that scene is open to interpretation. Just because we saw her close the door and start to walk into the room doesn't really mean anything. If the writers really wanted us to believe one thing or the other, they would have shown it. They wanted to leave it open.

 

[Jason Seaver]

Aaaand you're missing the point of the scene. It's not about what specific thing Renee is going to do to him, it's about what she is willing to do.

 

[TravisR]

I agree that the scene is open to interpretation of what she did once in there but, to me, that's not what Doug is saying.

 

[Simon Massey]

Count me in as one who enjoyed the finale with reservations. This has been way better than Season 6.

Personally I dont think the misstep was here with the finale, it was with making Tony bad in the first place. Considering how pissed off I was with that, this is probably the best outcome I could accept in the show. Its as if the writers knew they have made a huge mistake and were trying to correct it in the best way they could.

I see Tony and Jack going out in a blaze of glory next year

Tony will be redeemed in someway (presumably dying saving lots of people or Kim/Kim's baby) and Jack will die in the final hour. You heard it here first

 

[Chris Atkins]

Simon, I pretty much agree with this. Considering the colossal misstep of making Tony "bad," the finale did about as good as could be expected with the resolution of Tony's arc. It was the rest of the plot that really let me down.

 

[Doug Schiller]

I'm pretty sure what they intended...

They wanted viewers to be sweating in their seats, yelling at the TV for her not to turn to the dark side and do a Jack Bauer on this evil man.

I would pay top dollar to be able to have that experience like I guess you did.

To me, I see a shakey waif, who cries at the drop of a hat. Nothing in the past 24 hours displayed any strength or fortitude.

Plus, the failure to establish this person as the ultimate bad guy. They introduce him too late in the game and tell you why he is bad through Tony almost as an aside in two mintues.

I was glad to see this season end but it really needed another hour flesh out these last minute story lines.

I honestly think the writers ran out of steam and stretched out 22 hours to 24.

 

[JediFonger]

when the 24th hour ended, i thought to myself, where is the "25th" hour? is there MORE to this? totally disappointed in a 'wtf' fashion.

obviously, bauer will be alive due to kim's procedure... but hopefully she doesn't survive, lol. then we'll see 'grand-dad bauer' with a baby strapped to his back. i'm thinking of that parody ben stiller made of action hero w/the twin babies in his front in Tropic Thunder. everytime kim is onscreen it STILL slows all action down even though she hasn't been on for a few seasons. she's just a brick they need to really drop.

as for fbi, she is HAWT!!! =D.

as for Tony, i semi-predicted that. though i didn't expect it to be that sloppy.

i dunno if som1's mentioned this already, but

Tony's character this season is what Jack could have been if Jack truly went to the dark side to justify all of his actions just to 'save som1'. it is kind of like a mirror, and that's why Jack wanted to be 'forgiven of all his sins' so to speak at the end of his life.

it's actually pretty relevant to the current US political scene about the use of torture, whether it is justified or not, or maybe just in extreme circumstances? Tony and Jack are 2 sides of the same coin. Jack lost his wife as well, but never truly went to the dark side to the extent Tony did. and now the new FBI chic is the new person that could possibly go down either Tony's path or Jack's path.

BTW did we know that Michelle was with Tony's kid in the previous seasons?

 

[TravisR]

No, that was just a new invention to give Tony more reason for wanting revenge.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

...and the sloppiest part of that whole episode, if you ask me. I don't think Tony needed any more reason; I know as an audience member, I didn't need anything else. Tony's always been something of a hothead, and we've already seen him faced with a situation (in Season 3) where he chose Michelle's safety over his job and national security concerns. It's not that hard for me to believe that Tony would go beserk in the wake of Michelle's death... no extra dramatic reason needed for this viewer!

Actually, I thought the best moment of the episode, and one of the finer moments of the season, was Jack's talk with Renee at the end of the episode as they talked about making the right decisions and walking that fine line. I don't fault 24 for bringing up the "torture debate" throughout the season, but I think it was handled in a pretty uninspiring way most of the time, more like talking points out of a coloring book or something. And, of course, the problem with 24 having that debate is that the show is set up in such a way where we (the audience) always know that the person Jack or whoever wants to torture is a bad guy... it's pretty hard to want Jack to not beat someone up when we know for a fact that there's about to be an attack or that someone knows where a bomb is hidden. The scenario that 24 doesn't really give us is one where they capture a suspect who they believe is up to no good, torture him after everything else fails, and then discover that the guy was innocent. Because that's part of the real-life debate... not just is it wrong to beat up a terrorist to get information that could save lives, but is it wrong to beat up someone who may or may not be a terrorist to get that information? It's still an ethical question that will probably always be a source of debate, but I think most would agree it's a much different debate when it's not "to torture or not to torture" but "to torture people we know for a fact to be guilty and withholding evidence or to not." For the most part, 24 presents us with what I think is a false choice, because it already lets us (the viewer) in on the fact that a suspect is guilty, even when Jack and Co don't yet know it.

Jack made two excellent points on the subject, I think, once at the very beginning of the season and once at the end, a great bookend. At the beginning of the season, I think he's being taken from his hearing to the FBI building, and the driver in the car tells Jack that he's a hero, and he shouldn't be subjected to all of this. Jack responds (I'm paraphrasing) that over the years, as the world became less safe and the enemy more unpredictable, men like Jack essentially worked outside the system to stop these threats, which allowed the system to survive.. and that the result was almost like a shadow government being formed where an entirely different set of rules applied and that it happened out of sight of the American people. Jack said that maybe the people have a right to know what's being done in their name and for their protection, everything, and then to decide whether or not that's something that should go on. It's a valid point.

His conversation with Renee I felt was more important and better executed, just better written and better acted and felt far more natural to the character and the story. This is where Jack said that he couldn't tell her what to do or not to do, but that she had to make choices she could live with. And that Jack knew, in his mind, that the rules of law have to be more important than any individual terrorist threat or disruption, that our principals have to mean more, that he knows that's right. But also that if he was on a bus and someone had a bomb, that he would do anything, literally anything, to stop an attack and save lives, because his heart couldn't allow him to let innocent people die, even though in his head he knows that the value of our law has to be worth more than the lives of a handful of passengers on a bus or the whole system comes crumbling apart.

That right there I thought was one of the best takes on the dangers our country and society faces that 24 or any other dramatic work has had in recent times, and certainly more than I expected to get from the show.

(I also liked that President Taylor was faced with a similar ethical dilemma brought on by Olivia's assassination of Hodges. On one hand, Hodges was absolutely a bad guy who certainly deserved whatever was coming to him and then some, and it didn't exactly seem like he had a treasure chest of information left to barter with, so his life probably didn't have that much value left to it for intelligence-gathering purposes. And I don't care who you are or what job you have, the bonds of family are strong, and who wouldn't be at least tempted to disregard the rules or the law to protect a loved one? On the other hand, her job, the office President Taylor holds, demands more... and knowing that it will probably cost her her marriage, and possibly even her job, she turns Olivia in anyway... there are laws to be upheld and they apply, whether you're some nobody or the president's daughter. And yet... if she had made the other choice, perhaps that would have made her a bad president, but a bad person? Harder to say.. but President Taylor understood that the rule of law and office of the presidency had to mean something more. It served as a nice mirror for Jack's situation. At the end of the day, Jack will forsake the law to protect the individual, to protect the innocent, and that's the side he's come down on, the only way he knows how to live with himself. Taylor, on the other hand, chose the law, the big picture, the principle, over a loved one because she understood that not only did that have to mean more, but as president, she was precisely the person who had to make that choice at that time.)

I don't know if this is one of the better seasons of the show, but I know it has caused more conversation and debate amongst myself and friends and family than other seasons have, and that certainly made it a little different and special for me as a viewer.

 

[Chris Atkins]

Jack has faced that exact scenario time and time again (most recently in hour 23 of season 7) and made the exact same call as Tony. And yet it would be just as hard to buy Jack as a bad guy or revenge seeker as a result, just as it hard to buy it in the case of Tony.

 

[TravisR]

It didn't work for you and many others but I don't have trouble accepting Tony's motivation for turning bad. I don't like it and I wish that they hadn't gone down that story road but I still think it makes sense. He spent most of his life serving the government and then his wife (who is now retroactively pregnant) is killed by a conspiracy. President Logan, who was a major part of the plot that killed Michelle, is given house arrest on his huge ranch and the rest of the conspiracy is left free to keep doing whatever they want with the government. Given those circumstances, I don't think it's that hard to see Tony cracking and doing whatever he could to kill the people that had a hand in killing his wife.

 

[JediFonger]

good summary josh. many of those issues have been hot buttons since season 1. real life is just catching up to 24 i liken it to this: 24 had the 1st black president in modern times, and now real life follows .

re: Tony vs. Jack. Tony just hijacked and shot the federal agent in the leg when HIS daughter was in danger. so obviously, he inches closer and closer to Tony's path than before.

the reverse side of all of these issues is that we don't like to see the "gentler side" of jack bauer, that would kind of destroy his character =P

 

[Mikah Cerucco]

Yes, but Jack is ignoring the overall principle to save "innocents". The president is adhering to the overall principle to address the guilty. It's an important difference.

My views on torture have evolved from the simplistic ("no") to the confused ("no, except in cases of emergency, but who is to say what's an emergency and what isn't and who is to say which is an acceptable target?"). Bad things tend to happen when we give people carte blanche to do bad things in secret in the name of national security.

People are human. Eventually, you end up with a cop beating a defenseless perp with his billy club, or soldiers making prisoners do things naked. The only thing simple about it to me now is that I value all human life. Inaction that costs lives isn't necessarily valuing human life. The latest is that torture doesn't give reliable information because even if you get answers, you have no way of knowing if they're factual or made up answers just to get the torture to stop. There's also the question as to whether we give our enemies bulletin board material by torturing.

One thing I can say is I'm at least glad the debate is now out in the open and America is forced to confront what our values truly are.

 

[MikeM]

I disagree. In the speech with Jack, Renee said that she needed to get the information out of him because she couldn't live with herself if there was another attack and she could have done something. At that point, Jack said, the difference between them was that she worked for the FBI and made an oath to uphold the law.

So what did they show BEFORE she went into the interrogation room? They showed Renee battling with herself as she held her FBI badge, and she ultimately put it down on the table and then walked into the room alone with the guy who was about to get a knee cap blown off or something. It was pretty obvious that she was battling with herself which direction to take (as per her talk with Jack) and she selected the road that meant she was ready to cross the line.

 

[Mikah Cerucco]

Yeah, but only this time (until next time).

 

[ScottH]

I think we're over-analyzing a show that really need not be analyzed. It's just mindless entertainment.

 

[JediFonger]

true.

but does any1 agree w/me that renee+jack bauer have this great chemistry together? i know this isn't a "chic-show" but it'd be great to have an "action-couple" so to speak. i mean audrey was no match for jack, but renee is more than formiddable

 

[BrianW]

Jack: "Terrific Two Powers ACTIVATE!"

Renee: "With the heart of a TIGER, I become MIRANDA MOLESTER!"

Jack: "With the instinct of a BADGER, I become SUBPOENA SHREDDER!"

Kim: "Daddy, when can I be an official Terrific Two?"

Jack: "Not yet, Kim. Just help me push the Terrific Two Turbo Truck out of the garage. And pull your tights out of your ass. You look ridiculous."