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 7: 6 a.m. – 7 a.m.

The last episode was really the most significant turning point of the series to date: There aren't any more screws they can put to Jack, since they have both his wife and his daughter. The end of the last episode would be, in traditional screenwriting parlance, the end of the first act — the hero is fully committed. I don't want to get all Syd Field on you, except to say that, from Jack's point of view, this is the point of no return. It's the event that signals to you that, no matter what, he can't walk away. Not strictly for plot reasons (i.e. he can't walk away because it would endanger his family's life), but rather that preventing the assassination and rescuing his family won't be enough. He has to defeat the terrorist in a save-his-own-soul kind of way. Or, to use hackneyed parlance, "This time, it's personal."

The writers are always putting in these time qualifiers — you will do this in an hour; he's expecting you in an hour, this had be be done in two hours. It's a unique and remarkably good way to finesse suspense — because of the show's strict adherence to the unity of time, it forecasts in which episode you can expect events to happen. The writer/producers have a bag of tricks that continue to impress with their savviness.

Wow, the picture looks really gray this episode. Hope it's just an evocation of L.A. smog and not my TV.

And so here's the bind: The terrorists are playing Jack against his anti-terrorist unit. This is really rich, and Jack's unlikely to be able to get out of it on his own terms. Then again, the assassin is going to meet with the target in an hour, and we know that the show has 16 additional hours to go, so that can't go exactly as planned — they've established the whole Palmer family conflict too thoroughly to dispense with its main character. That's a level of suspense that's necessarily lost in exchange for the aforementioned bag of tricks — but, again, it raises the specter of hope that Jack might be able to avoid destroying evidence.

The terrorists' manipulation of Jack is, of course, necessary for a conspiracy plot: Beyond just ruining his future, they have to neutralize him in the present — he would have the power to stop the plot only if they didn't have the power to stop him. Something like a kidnapped wife or child is supposed to prompt a hero to action, not inaction … on a grand scale, this is why conspiracy stories can't have happy endings. But then, that's antithetical to what TV is. There's no chance of an unhappy ending here, although it's not unreasonable to think that maybe the wife or maybe the daughter will die. I'll put the odds of both of them surviving it at 3:1. And I certainly don't think they have anything like a martyr kick going; Jack's definitely walking away from this.

How is there a camera in the office? Might it have been Mason's crew when they did the lockdown? That would throw any warm sentiment toward him into disarray.

And so, there you go; the action that shows Jack choosing his family over his work, their lives for another's. Now, that action's not irreversible yet, but its repercussions can't be easily sidestepped. To use earlier language: Jack's committed.

The question re-emerges of what they really want Jack to do, however, because they can't have known that the keycard would have been released to the good guys. … Ah. There you go. So what role is Jack going to play at the breakfast? — they're already going to have the assassin there. There must be some door that needs to be unlocked or guard that has to be distracted, but, again, that only points up the ridiculous level of planning/ overplanning on the part of the terrorists, a level of mechanical organization that not even Rube Goldberg could have orchestrated. It's true that these miracle situations are rote in conspiracy stories, but you don't usually hang out with the conspirators to see it put together — it's more believable when it's not explained, because no explanation is sufficient.

On the other hand, you could just argue that the conspirators only have to be as smart as screenwriters.

On the other other hand: Have the conspirators ever said that they intended to kill Palmer? I can't be sure. Leaking that there's going to be an attempt on Palmer's life causes the CTU to become involved, which in turn gives the terrorists Jack as a resource; but maybe they have another use for the assassin and for Jack at this breakfast than to kill Palmer. Who else is going to be there, I wonder? It's a valid question: We have no explanation as to why or, really, who wants Palmer dead. There's the kneejerk reaction that it's because he's black, but maybe the race card is a big McGuffin. That would be … interesting indeed, and probably the most contemplation-worthy aspect of the whole series if it turns out to be true. But more on that only if it happens.

The most difficult part of episodic television, I would think, is generating reasonable motivations/keeping track of all these characters. Palmer's wife is the character that makes me think of this most frequently — she's well realized and always comes up with suggestions that run against the grain of the plot (i.e. she's just not a wife ex machina) but are true to her.

It happened too quickly for me to type in my prediction, but I totally called those guys not being from CTU.

… Although implicating Jamey wasn't expected. So the mole is revealed, and without the double/triple feint I had predicted. But it would be uncommon for Jamey to be able to keep that secret for more than an episode or two; once the audience knows something, it never stays a secret among the characters for very long.

The patterns here are getting a little more predictable: It looks like the wife's going to be the one that gets away, but it turns out the daughter is more likely to escape. You're given the red herring of be-goateed Tony as the mole, and it turns out to be Jamey. This use of red herrings — namely, that it's never the red herring and is, in fact, the person/situation you're told to have the most faith in — is hardly unique, but it takes some time to gauge just what the sensibilities of the writers are going to be.

Wait. Didn't Richard (who died in episode 2) say that Jamey was the only trustworthy one? Eenteresting.

So was that just good acting on Jack and Nina's part, or did he really put the kibosh on her? That's the level of involvement, the depth to which you have to ensnare a character for the conspiracy story to have its spiritual dimension. … But, no, Nina's alive. And that's the symbol that you can put in the bank: Jack's never going to have to do anything really bad, everyone's going to get out OK except the bad guys, and we're going to have the happy ending. Contemporary conspiracy stories have never attained the magnitude, the magnificence that the genre had in its height — see Enemy of the State, which cops out in favor of a happy Bruckheimer ending, or Arlington Road, which never conjures up a believable sense of dread. (Well, The Game does it pretty well.) And it would be far too much to expect a network TV series to achieve that height.

What makes this really interesting is that now Nina and Tony know to work against Jack, which is likely to remove Jack as an asset, which sublimates the threat of the wife and daughter being kidnapped. But the conspirators' ploy looks like it would have culminated in episode 8 when the assassin gets to Palmer's breakfast — which is means that they lose possession of the game in the next round. How the story chooses to redefine itself at that point will be very interesting to see.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)