By: Brandon Wolfe
One of ‘24’s’ most harrowing moments occurred in the third season, when terrorist mastermind Stephen Saunders ordered the death of CTU higher-up Ryan Chappelle. Instructed to present Chappelle’s body by the end of the hour under the threat of further biological attacks on the public, Jack spent every second he had left hunting down any lead he could before being forced to escort Chappelle to the rendezvous point and execute him. It was raw, disturbing and powerful, and all these years later, it still stands as one of the show’s most memorable moments. So it’s not surprising that ‘24’ would try to recreate that moment. ‘24’ recreates every moment. It keeps its favored handful of tropes on a repeat cycle at all times. Really, the only surprise is that it took so long for them to pull this move out again.
It’s President Heller who finds himself in Chappelle’s shoes this time, having been ordered to surrender himself to Margot Al-Harazi by 7:00 to be executed. Heller, who is feeling useless and feeble due to his early onset of Alzheimer’s, is more than willing to capitulate to Margot’s demands and requests that Jack and Mark Boudreau assist him in getting to Wembley Stadium to meet his fate without alerting either the Secret Service or Audrey to what’s going on. Jack has strong reservations about playing a role in this. He places too much value in the Office of the Presidency, to say nothing of Heller as a man, to allow it to be throttled by the whims of a terrorist. But Jack is also very big on self-sacrifice, so he can understand Heller’s side of it and agrees to take the President to the stadium while Boudreau runs interference. It’s a frankly ridiculous plan. While the threat of drone attacks against London is extremely dire, the repercussions of allowing a terrorist to assassinate a sitting U.S. President on foreign soil would arguably have farther-reaching consequences. And though ‘24’ likes to have its characters parrot the “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” company line, that maxim is never upheld, for the show sees far more dramatic value in its heroes’ willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice than it does with them exhibiting steely resolve in the face of a threat.
While one might initially suspect that Heller has some ulterior plan to draw Margot out and use Jack to nab her, that quickly falls by the wayside as Heller’s actions and demeanor become far too elegiac for him to be up to anything other than serving himself up on a platter. And on any other show, when Heller is successfully annihilated by a missile strike, it would be a shocking moment, but this is ‘24’, a show that kills off major characters only slightly less frequently than it takes commercial breaks. We have no doubt that Heller will be killed as promised. It would have been more shocking if he’d survived. Yet it should be noted that the moment does land with an appropriate amount of gravity, in spite of how silly and contrived the circumstances that led to it had been. Much of this is a credit to William Devane, who sells the weight of Heller’s sacrifice like the old pro that he is. Devane has been an asset to ‘24’ because he is an actor who is positively brimming with personality on a show that doesn’t really have much use for the stuff. ‘24’ likes its characters to be icy exposition dispensers, but Devane couldn’t help but add some color into his character, to the show’s great benefit.
The Heller material is the meat of “6:00 PM – 7:00 PM” and the other bits of business don’t add up to a whole lot. We’re still slogging through that Steve Navarro subplot, where the CIA station head is attempting to tie up the loose end of Jordan Reed, who has been shot by the hitman dispatched to take care of him. Reed - a computer analyst, mind you - somehow manages to get the upper hand against the trained killer and survives, leaving Navarro scrambling to clean up the mess. This entire subplot is dead weight, concerning characters we barely know and don’t care about over a matter of no consequence to us, and it stands as yet more evidence that ‘24’ doesn’t really know what to do with itself when Jack isn’t around. The show always thinks it needs to include filler like this to give them something to cut to whenever Jack is commuting between places. I’d rather watch Jack’s commute.
The other plot thread this week is with Morgan’s efforts to have the doctors treating Simone Al-Harazi revive the patient for questioning, in spite of the fact that she’s in an induced coma awaiting major surgery. When verbal implorations don’t work, Morgan opts to pull the signature Bauer move of pointing a gun at the doctor and forcing him to revive Simone, regardless of the risk doing so may pose to her life (as Jack puts it in a brusque-even-for-him way, “Wake the bitch up.”). Again, this is ‘24’ playing its greatest hits. Its only slight variation is giving this old chestnut to a character other than Jack himself. The show has been grooming Morgan into becoming something of a She-Bauer (it pulled the same trick in its original run with the Renee Walker character) and providing her with such a classic bit of misuse of force helps to solidify it. Morgan is the new Jack.
“6:00 PM – 7:00 PM” is the 200th episode of ‘24’, a milestone that’s at once shocking and not at all shocking. Using basic math, it’s simply the number 24 multiplied by eight and then adding these ‘Live Another Day’ episodes to that total. Also, this is a show that debuted in 2001, which might as well be an entire lifetime ago; it’s been plugging away for a good long while. So the numbers make sense when you parse them out like that, yet it’s still a little astonishing that the show has managed to climb to such a peak. It was once almost impossible to imagine that a show with such a limiting gimmick and concept could manage to get past two or three seasons. There are some who would argue, not without good reason, that maybe it shouldn’t have exceeded that point. Yet ‘24’ endures, its formula so calcified that it’s become its own institution. Like the James Bond series, you know the beats by heart, but you hum along all the same. There was a time, back when the show was a regular yearly grind, when this grew frustrating, but ‘Live Another Day’ has proven that the old Jack Bauer song-and-dance still has its pleasures with the benefit of some distance. It’s hard to imagine ‘24’ hitting anywhere near another milestone like this, but here’s to hoping it has another day or two left to live.
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