WRITERS: Shauna McGarry & Geoff Aull (8.23) & Howard Gordon (8.24)[SPOILERS] It wrapped up Day 8's story in a largely unimaginative way many predicted six episodes ago, and there was a strange creative decision to debilitate Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) for the majority of his last TV hour (which was a crime), but otherwise this double-bill finale worked incredibly well as a last hurrah for the long-running series. Considering this season began with a string of poor-to-middling hours, the mid-season turnaround has been remarkable, and I was mightily relieved 24 turned in a decent run to mark its passing.
DIRECTOR: Brad Turner
GUEST CAST: Gregory Itzin, Michael Madsen, Nick Jameson, John Boyd, Reed Diamond, Jennifer Westfeldt, Graham McTavish & Necar Zadegan
To briefly recap: Logan (Gregory Itzin) revealed to President Taylor (Cherry Jones) that President Suvarov (Nick Jameson) was behind Hassan's assassination (Hassanation?); Dalia (Necar Zadegan) confronted Taylor over her suspicion of Russian involvement and was astonished to have her fears confirmed and threatened into keeping quiet and signing the treaty; Jack infiltrated the UN Building's perimeter to setup a sniper pointed at Logan's suite, intending to kill Suvarov when he arrived there; and Chloe (Mary Lyn Rajskub) found a way to disseminate the audio evidence of Suvarov's part in Hassan's death via CTU's servers to expose the truth to the world's media, so had to stop Jack from igniting a US/Russian war with his more bloodthirsty plan.The first hour (written by long-time script coordinators Shauna McGarry and Geoff Aull, rewarded for their hard work with an episode to themselves) was a lots of fun, and contained great material for Cherry Jones to chew on. In fact, Jones' turn as President Taylor has been one of Day 8's better elements ever since the plot gave her character something juicy to play as a diplomatic idealist pressured into making a deal with the devilish Logan that goes against her principles. Jones was especially great in these last two episodes: her confrontation with Dalia was magnificent (particularly when she was pushed into a corner and responded by threatening Dalia's country with military retaliation), and I loved the moment Taylor couldn't go through with signing her beloved treaty and rushed to instead salvage the situation with Jack at the eleventh hour. Fantastic.
Jack's role was more interesting the first half, setting up a sniper to kill Suvarov by manipulating him into position using Logan, only for Chloe to arrive to talk him out of it. I also appreciated how the story didn't whitewash the fact Jack's spent the last batch of episodes running around New York injuring and killing people like "judge, jury and executioner", as Pillar (Reed Diamond) sagely put it. It's certainly been morally difficult to justify Jack's actions at times this season, leaving us with something of a bitter taste in the mouth. His explanations and excuses, which he recorded for posterity, were understandable in some respects, but it was still all based on grief and a misplaced sense of vigilante justice.
By the end of the final hour, Taylor had come to her senses and halted the peace treaty's signing, intending to resign and face the repercussions; this in turn prompted Logan to kill aide Pillar and shoot himself in the head (although it seems he survived and might instead be brain-damaged, perhaps for a saddening cameo in the 24 movie?); and Jack was given time to flee the country by the regretful President, by way of making amends for his treatment. The final scenes worked very well to cap the series as a whole, with Jack getting a heartfelt apology from the Commander-In-Chief, dovetailing into the touching moment when Jack thanked Chloe for the years she's spent looking out for him -- via that aerial drone, she was marked out as his heavenly "guardian angel".
It also felt fitting that Jack's final moments were captured on a CTU surveillance feed that melted into pixels, cleverly symbolizing the fact he's a TV character in a show that much benefitted from the digital era. And the signature countdown clock instead ticking down to 00:00:00? The perfect way to sign off.
It definitely felt like the end of an era watching a bloodied Jack limp off for his movie adventures. 24's kept the quality surprisingly high for a TV series with such a rigid format, kept on air three years past its prime. Except for the deplorable Day 6, the show never gave us a season of television I didn't enjoy on some level, and the early years were genuine weekly thrills that I'll always have strong memories of. Some of the events and situations 24 presented us with seem passé these days (remember when a terrorist nuke being detonated in a remote desert felt raw and shocking?), but that's a testament to how much the series changed the game and upped the ante for thrillers everywhere.
Along with the Bourne movies (which it perhaps even influenced, to a degree), 24 had a lasting effect on spy/action entertainment and managed to tap into contemporary post-9/11 fears incredibly well. It danced with controversy many times (some believing it legitimized, even "popularized" torture in the military), but at heart it was just finding shortcuts because of its real-time demands. Did it misjudge things and wander into bad taste occasionally? Certainly. Did the real-time format begin to straightjacket the show's growth? Definitely. Were the writers guilty of recycling ideas and twists every few years? Of course. But considering all the rules and storytelling grammar 24 imposed on itself, it delivered eight seasons of largely exciting and compelling TV that gave us the decade's defining action hero in Jack Bauer.Moles, dirty bombs, torture, interrogations, CTU, chirping phones, foreign villains, killer viruses, suitcase nukes, gas attacks, car chases, David Palmer, Charles Logan, George Mason, Kim Bauer, Nina Meyers, Bill Buchanan, Tony Almeida, Renee Walker, Agent Pierce, Mike Novick, Allison Taylor, Chloe O'Brian, Jack Bauer, the cougar. I'll miss you all.
24's over, damn it.
6 JUNE 2010: SKY1/HD, 9PM
