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 11: 10 a.m. – 11 a.m.

I thought I was worn down last week after the Super Bowl, but this Oscars thing is killing me. We'll see what happens, but I may be in high-veg mode. We might set a new minimum word length.

These beginning-of-the-show recaps really are pretty good at getting a 24 newbie prepped to comprehend what's going on. It's amazing how quickly we can piece together narrative. With audiences well-trained by TVs and commercials, it's really no big thang to receive 30 seconds of information and extrapolate all that came between. This is deeply fascinating, but I'm not feeling much as far as deep is concerned right now, so I'll let it slide.

There's something about Jack's all-black ensemble this episode — maybe it's the sunglasses. But for whatever reason, his outfit's giving off a kind of secondhand griminess … yeah, it must be the sunglasses; we're finally getting a visible signifier for his exhaustion. A good, low-down kind of energy.

We never saw the scene where Kimberly explained to Teri that Rick was on their side, which I would think would be an important moment. I keep waiting for it, in case there's been some reason for the delay, but that last scene clearly indicates that Teri knows Rick's OK. Am I off in thinking that such a conversation between the mom and daughter would have been in order? And I don't know if I quite like this burgeoning affection between Kim and Rick; he's saved her life a few times, sure, but … well, I suppose another compressed time period issue. Relationships have to form quickly.

This is really the only time we've seen Dark Jack. Up until now, he's been too exactly controlled to have a moment like this, and he was even warm with the woman he kidnapped two hours ago. But now, when intimidation is the order of the day, he slips into the role perfectly.

And so now we see the scene between Gaines and the next guy higher-up, and Gaines, who we've always known to be the center of calm, cool collection, is left slavering, nervous, desperate. And now we cut to a scene between Palmer and Carl; it's Carl's second scene in a richly appointed office surrounded by white men, and this time, he's smoking. These are the conspiracy-theory trappings we'd earlier missed' they come on the heels of the Next Guy Higher-Up talking about his contingency plan, and it's a plan that ensnares both Jack and Palmer and also apparently permits the murder of Jack's family. Again, we could be talking credulity buster; this is a better plan than Gaines', as it is almost certainly less complicated. It's troubling, they're taking out a line of credit with the audience that I'm almost sure they can't pay back.

Those lo-fi, sparsely animated Red Bull ads are not only narratively wacko, but the totally wrong tone for an energy drink. "Eve? May I tempt you with a Red Bull? It'll give us wings with which we can fly out of paradise to my van." What?

That was interesting, with the kidnappee getting the box cutter. If it were the hero in that situation, he would have had a much more difficult time getting it; but since the hero is the one ostensibly in charge of this situation, the difficult act is not retrieving the weapon but seeing whether the bad guy retrieved it.

And now it all comes together/falls apart. Palmer's aide to Palmer: "You asked me to find out about Jack Bauer. There are a lot of classified gaps in his history." "Was one of those gaps in the summer about two years ago?" "Yeah, how'd you know?" And then it turns out "Ted" the kidnapee is a Serbian who insists that Jack deserves everything that's going to happen to him and then commits suicide. Snap, crackle, pop. I can't help thinking of "24" producer Joel Surnow's "Nowhere Man," about a photojournalist whose life falls apart because of a picture he'd taken of a death squad. … Oh, and here we go again. Operation: Nightfall. Nina digging around in Jack's classified files.

Anyway, back to "Nowhere Man": If "24" ends badly/unsatisfyingly, it'll certainly numb the pain about never finding out how "Nowhere Man" resolved. And, in a sense, that would improve "Nowhere Man," turning into something near-Lynchian — a supreme mystery that can't the universe won't let you solve.

Funny that I thought "Ted" was getting a box cutter, when it was in fact a tricked-up switchblade. I don't think I would have presumed it was a box cutter six months ago, and yet I've often thought that I have done well to keep Those Events out of my subconscious. But I doubt that anyone has, really.

What a superb scene between Jack and "Alan." Earlier, I hedged on the quality of "24's" action relative to good action-movie action. But the average action movie has a lot of poorly conceived action (it's just executed in a high-shrill fashion so you're impressed by the overload); "24" distinguishes itself with a lot of well-thought-out action.

Then again, are there really any empty parking garages at 10:30 a.m. in L.A.?

It's bad for them to promote the "24" website, because it's really content-lite unless you need an episode recap. The bulk of the content has been fixed since the show premiered; the only recurring feature besides the episode recap is a weekly writeup they call a "Research File": "The Secret Service: Who are they?" If there's anything remotely revelatory about the unfolding story there, or if the site even poses a single interesting, leading question, I've yet to see it. Also, they don't have nearly enough graphics, and I'm running out of new things to stick at the top of these pages.

And so the episode's last brush stroke on the idea of the über-conspiracy: Carl telling Palmer that those two have always worked for "Them."

Is "Alan" really taking Jack to see his family? That would be a great finesse — to bring everybody together to one place only to have it all somehow fall apart. And by having that moment occur in hour 12 — a moment that would occur at the end of most conspiracy stories, the moment that would define those stories' bleak endings — the makers of "24" would still have 12 hours to put everything back together in typical TV happy-ending fashion. We'll see.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)