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 20: 7 p.m. – 8 p.m.

So, somewhat hubristically, I tried to incorporate a Unifed Theory of Film and Television into these pieces about midway through, doling out small thought nuggets that were to build on top of one another while I simultaneously kept up with criticism of the sturm und drang of the show. Clearly, that's not going to happen, particularly with fewer than five hours remaining. As such, I'm just going to cut to the chase.

OK, wait: So the doctor guy didn't die? The fatalities were his bodyguard and the assassin? That's who we were supposed to be surprised by the deaths of? Gadzooks.

So: The chase. Alfred Hitchcock used to talk about the Plausibles, that group of people whose taste in stories were everything that name implied. He viewed the Plausibles as that segment of the audience who insisted that a story strictly adhere to the internal rules it asked you to buy into at the onset. For instance, he was surprised that the Plausibles didn't jump all over the improbability that a woman's body washed ashore on the same night that Rebecca disappeared in Rebecca. The Plausibles' enjoyment of a film is wired straight into the plot; no matter what thrills Hitchcock might deliver, he knew their bad faith would deprive them of the joy of those sequences if they thought the causal chain of the film's story faltered.

Now, Alfred Hitchcock made some of the roller-coasteriest movies in the history of movies, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that he himself was a Plausible at heart — after all, there's nothing the Plausible loves like a murder mystery. But Hitchcock knew that movies were much more than plots; he knew they were intravenous subconscious machines.

And here we have Lou Diamond Phillips. So Bauer has found a hidden prison facility that Drazen wants into. Or wants someone out of. What do you want to bet that it takes until almost 7:55 on the nose for this to resolve itself?

It's no surprise what's happening: Drazen, for whatever reason, wants Dennis Hopper, whose name has been splashed all over the Fox network and entertainment press in anticipation of his arrival on "24." Are there any surprises anymore? Particularly in a world governed by marketers dead-set on selling you every last thing, even if the selling ruins the thing?

I like how we're seeing the anxiety on both sides of this prison/terrorist battle, since we know that a show of bravado is going to be one of the most important tactics for both.

Isn't there some distress signal that the prison facility can issue that tells the helicopter not to land there? That seems like a much safer plan than giving the janitor a gun, even if the CTU has the surprise surprise advantage of the lights not going off. Having that shut-off scheduled for a precise time is another good example of how the show benefits from its strict unity of time.

All in all, a really good scene. They took care of it smartly, cleanly, tightly and non-extravagantly. Bully for them; I wasn't sure they still had such finesse in them.

So Hitchcock wasn't all about the plot. He surely appreciated that more successful confluences of plot and artistry were going to be more successful at the box office, but he loved the art more, and almost any of his movies makes that clear. (Spellbound tries too hard to generate a literal rationalization of its brilliant Salvador Dali dream sequence — the film's opening title makes too big a deal about how wonderfully psychoanalysis can explain away the corners of the mind, the end result being that looking at parallel lines drives Gregory Peck crazy because they remind him of ski tracks — but, at the same time, no other filmmaker besides Buñuel was inspired enough to get Dali to design a sequence for a movie.) Hitchcock's disdain for his MacGuffins — those things that motivates the action in his stories but means nothing in and of itself — is well-known.

Why are they playing up the Kim-being-interrogated stuff? Where is this going?

This would be a good place for a Young Guns reference — some famous exchange between Kiefer and Lou's characters in that film — but I've never seen those movies.

Not to slip on the Plausibles' mantle, but: The voters responded to Palmer's announcement positively? They decided they'd be more likely to vote for him because he's honest? That's why they call it escapism, I guess.

Duh, duh, duh. Dennis Hopper is Victor Drazen, who Jack was supposed to have killed two years ago. (To the day! And, coincidentally, he's being transferred from one prison to another on that anniversary!) My apologies for not calling that obvious one weeks ago, as I should have.

Dennis Haysbert is really exceptionally good in this glassy-eyed, "If I can't trust you, how can I love you?" scene. And Penny Johnson matches him tit for tat. I love these smoky MacBeth overtones, and the simple, but not really simple at all, conflict these two act out every week. It's good TV.

The Plausibles hated my favorite movies of 2001: Mulholland Drive and A.I. And if you saw those movies, you understand why. But those two films are just plain cinematic in a way that most of their peers aren't. That they were so good, and that they were so counter to the Plausible sensibility, is telling.

Film, at its best, transcends the plausible. But TV embodies it; plausibility has always been one of the central joys of televison. There's a square pleasure in being able to fully comprehend a plainly told story, to be able to watch a one-hour drama you've never seen before and, an hour later, experience closure — the much-mocked way in which, say, "Seventh Heaven" dispenses with its two moral lessons in exactly an hour of storytelling. This predilection has a lot to do with the medium itself; television is piped directly into your family room, and you're bigger than it. Whereas film still draws us out to it, and the size of a movie screen is a little amazing every time you settle in front of one.

But the dollars aren't at the box office anymore. They're in video; the last I checked, video generated three times the revenue of film, and I'm sure that factor is still increasing. And so one of the chief goods of a film, in the eyes of the money men, is that it plays well on video; the effects of this start at an external level, like films always being shot in small-screen-friendly close-up, but it burrows into the heart of it, too. Plausibilty has come to rule film (and film audiences' expectations) to the point where a film columnist can makes claims like these about E.T. and expect to be taken seriously when he calls them detractions that take away from the magic of the movie.

The direct tie-in between "24" and the Plausibles will come in a future week; I'm out of time.

The counterpoint to the quality of the David/Sherry scene was Jack having something like 15 seconds to deliver his soliloquy about the ugliness of losing every man in his squadron in a puppet mission to provide the world with the illusion of Victor Drazen's death.

The sparks between Sutherland and Hopper are nice and meaty, even if Hopper is luxuriating in that accent a little much. And here's some nice split-screen, where we're legitimately interested in both the evacuation of Drazen and the faux happiness of David and Sherry. We've even got a solid cliffhanger for the first time in awhile. I had predicted the show wouldn't get its act back together for another two hours; it's nice to be pleasantly surprised.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)