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 3: 2 a.m. – 3 a.m.

I had a few moments of clarity since last week. The interesting thing about these reviews is that they are, essentially, noncontemplative, which I guess precludes thinking about them between writing them. But I had more to say last week than I was able to squeeze in with the time constraints, and … well, I'm wasting time writing this. The last-episode synopsis is almost over.

I taped and rewatched last week's episode, as it can be slightly distracting to write while watching and I wanted to pay closer attention to a couple of scenes. Looking at some of the action sequences closer, I was a little more underwhelmed by Stephen Hopkins's direction. The scene where Jack and Robert were in the middle of the office shoot-out was really clumsily done — the space was so improperly built that it looked like Jack and Robert were shooting at each other half the time. Building the space so that the action is coherent is crucial for the tension to make sense, much less have sufficient weight.

And a last word about split screen, at least for a couple of weeks. What works worst is using the technique as a clunky dissolve to segue between scenes. What works best is showing a scene from two angles, or — oh, there went one — a scene like a telephone conversation in two locations. The example I just interjected with was showing the fingerprint shooting up to the satellite; the plot relies a lot on telephone conversations, and cutting up the screen to show it all – that's good split screen. And when they come in from a commercial break and show you four windows before making it clear which one they're going to focus on — that's good, too, to establish the complexity, or at least layers, of the narrative. The great example from last time was showing four boxes, one of which was an empty stairwell … and as Jack stepped into frame, gun drawn, his quarter of the screen became the whole screen. That's a new kind of match-on-action.

And, sigh. Here's the scene I was worried about from what I saw in the previews: the one that establishes the collusion between the kidnappers of Jack's daughter and the terrorists. The scene came and went with little fanfare, interestingly; maybe they expect you to have had the surprise of it spoiled by the previews, or, like me, they expect you to have already put it together from the way this subplot went last week.

I can't. Believe. They just used heroin. As a painkiller.

OK; here's another aside, but one that's warranted (and semi-canonical) since watching commercials is an inescapable part of watching "24": Who doesn't want to watch Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman in a war/action movie?

There was an interesting thread picked up among other TV writers over the course of the past week. A reader complained to one critic that the commercial breaks were ruining "24" by destroying tension and flow; another writer said that the breaks were necessary because the show moves at such a breakneck pace that the release of, well, Carrot Top commercials are welcome respite. TV critics (well, other TV critics) get to watch shows pre-broadcast on tape, and thus with no commercials, causing the writer to speculate on what kind of difference it makes. It makes a huge difference for any show, I'd say, and the creators of "24" are canny in how they use commercials to excerpt unnecessary action (since the real time continues to elapse during breaks), as well as, as the writer suggested, a pressure release.

And now here we are with Nina, the suspected mole. (Good split screen there with Jack and Nina talking while Jamie taps her computer — I do hate to harp on this, but it's a non-trivial technique; narrative television tends not to give you so much information to download.) Weaving 24 discrete episodes with their own story arcs into one narrative thread — one real-time narrative thread — is a lot to ask, and I expect a lot of double, triple and quadruple feints, conspiracies collapsing into themselves or being disproven. And so it makes sense to suspect/reveal Nina as the mole in episode 3, as it would be a lot to ask to have to wait to uncover the mole until episode 21 … but don't expect this "discovery" to be anything like the last word on the topic.

Wow; heroin and lesbian kissing. Those perhaps aren't the subversive elements they used to be on TV, but it's interesting that "24" is hurtling them at us with this speed.

I haven't written much about the terrorist cell yet, but that's as well established as any of the other scenarios. They don't want to reveal too much by way of their motivations, I guess, so that level of character development is absent, but it crackles as well as anything else on the show.

They cut away from the daughters before I had time to really delve into the unfortunateness of that development. I bemoaned in the first review how it would be unbelievable to tie the girls-running-around-with-boys thread into the conspiracy thread, and that's just what they're doing. I mean, I do like that it re-commits the narrative to matters strictly pertinent to the conspiracy, and it even establishes a new magnitude to the conspiracy — conspirators so thorough that they've made plans to kidnap the daughter of the man most likely to be assigned the task of stopping them. But that cuts both ways; now they're going to have to convince us that the conspirators are really this diabolical, which, in a lot of ways, is a taller order than convincing us that it made sense for them to blow up an airplane when all they (apparently) got out it was one murder that, from a plot perspective, could have been executed equally well in a hotel room. It's not impressive to pull off a real-time narrative if unrealistic, unbelievable things happen within it.

Heroin, lesbian kissing and gay prostitutes. I dunno; those probably aren't unusual elements for your average episode of "ER" anymore. I shouldn't make it out to be a thing.

And so, in keeping with the idea of tying everything into the conspiracy, there's now a subplot of Palmer's son about to be accused of murder by a reporter. No doubt it's another set-up intended to tie into the larger conspiracy, but it's not a bad one; another step-back-from-the-maze, how-deep-does-it-go moment.

Forty-five minutes in and we haven't seen Teri and Alan (the parents looking for the daughters) at all episode except in one scene, because they have nothing to do. It's good that the filmmakers don't force matters when they don't have to.

This has definitely been the best episode for the daughters; not because the actors have done anything exceptional, and not because this storyline has been revealed to be part of the central plot, but because it's shown the filmmakers' willingness to keep expanding the universe. It would be easy, three episodes in, to close ranks and not bring in more characters, but the prostitute character is, like last episode's snitch, another nice example of gracing a throwaway character with good dialogue and an interesting actor, even if the character itself is strictly clichés. If you're only going to give someone four minutes onscreen, well, you need clichés. Nothing shameful about that.

And there's the obligatory death for the episode. This is the kind of overstuffedness that makes some movies such bears to slog through, but expanded over this much time, where it's actually necessary to have 24 separate climaxes and an attendant set of sub-climaxes, it's appropriate.

Hm. Interesting developments (toldja about the mole, although it wasn't really enough of a surprise to take credit for second-guessing it), but I'm outta time. More in a week.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)