24 Season 8 Ep 21: 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. WSJ TV Recap

‘24,’ Season 8, Episode 21: ‘Day 8: 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.’: TV Recap

By Chris Simmons MAY 11, 2010, 7:05 AM ET

©2010 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Ray Mickshaw/FOX

Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) is on a mission.

Charles Logan gets ready for a premature closeup, Chloe outmaneuvers a superior at CTU (again), and Jack proves that no one does torture quite like him on this, the 21st hour of the final day of “24.”

And speaking of Jack, he’s on the run again after killing Dana Walsh in cold blood after getting the evidence, a disk containing video of Dana brokering the parameters of Russia’s actions to sabotage the peace agreement with Pavel, the same assassin who took out Renee. Jack again takes quick refuge at Jim Ricker’s bunker, where he makes contact with Meredith Reed, the reporter (and Hassan’s ex-lover) whom he cleared of any wrongdoing earlier in the day. She agrees to be the one who will vet the video evidence.

Meanwhile, Pillar, Logan’s chief lackey, is still “in charge” at CTU, and interrogates Cole for information on Jack’s whereabouts. Cole doesn’t know where he is, and isn’t inclined to say anything to Pillar even if he did know something. But then, Pillar catches a break when his team intercepts the call between Jack and Meredith Reed, in which Jack arranges a meet between them at a nearby department store. Feeling victorious, Pillar calls his boss, who practically pees in his pants with happiness over the lucky break. In fact, Logan’s feeling so cocky, he has President Taylor’s negotiations with Dalia Hassan interrupted for the umpteenth time in order to exact his “payment” for services rendered: an official Presidential acknowledgement of his role in brokering the peace treaty with Kamistan. After seemingly choking on bile, President Taylor tacitly agrees to the deal.

At CTU, Chloe smells a rat when she realizes that Pillar is in on the cover-up after he passes on an opportunity to alert the proper authorities on Jack’s whereabouts. She enlists Arlo’s aid in creating a false security loop, allowing her to talk to Cole without Pillar knowing it. Cole is nice and bitter over Jack’s actions in killing Dana, and is disinclined to help until Chloe guilts him. He figures that Jack has used some operative with access to weaponry. Chloe runs with his information.

At the same time, Meredith and then Jack arrive at the department store, where Pavel and his team of Russian assassins are in place, ready to take them both out. But it becomes apparent that Jack has outmaneuvered them, using Jim Ricker to get the drop on Pavel. Jack then swiftly metes out his vigilante “justice”, killing all the Russians and escaping with Meredith.

Later, vainglorious Logan is literally trying to choose the right tie to wear at his redemption press conference when Pillar shatters his dreams, telling him their plans have gone awry. Logan refuses to even consider pulling away from the mess at this late juncture, instead ordering Pillar to clean up the mess as best he can before it stains the ex-President.

Speaking of messes, Jack is about to get all kinds of messy with Pavel, intending to torture the assassin in order to get him to reveal the identity of the man who ordered Renee’s assassination. But even Jack knows that Pavel will be a tough one to crack. I mean, Jack tries everything (knife cuts, acid baths, even burning the dude’s flesh with a blowtorch!), but not only won’t Pavel talk, he still manages to cruelly taunt Jack about his killing Renee. Meredith, in the other room with Jim, is appalled by Jack’s actions, and even Jim takes note of how unhinged Jack is.

Just when it’s clear that Pavel will die before giving up what he knows, Jack notices that the man’s cell phone’s SIM card is missing. Putting two and two together, Jack realizes that Pavel swallowed it. Jack proceeds to gut the assassin like a deer, but darned if he doesn’t retrieve that card. And once he puts the card back in the phone, he discovers that it was Logan who was behind Pavel’s actions. With that, the hour is up, but it won’t be long before one of Jack’s greatest enemies will face his wrath once more.

Three more to go until the end of the line for Jack Bauer’s TV adventures. But just how much lower will he go? We’ll find out in seven more days, won’t we?

Source: WSJ

‘24′ Cancelled: Kiefer Sutherland Reflects on the Controversial Show

Fox

Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer.

“Can you imagine the horror when you’ve sat down to create, out of your imagination, the absolutely worst of fears to test a hero to the ultimate — and that fear and much worse becomes a reality this country was having to face?”

It was not a question. Kiefer Sutherland is recalling the signal moment in the history of “24” that seared itself on the minds of everyone involved in the show, not least its long-time writer and executive producer Howard Gordon. Both honed in on the memory in separate conversations Friday.

The writers had shot at least half of the first year of “24” before the terrible events of September 11, including the episode in which hijackers use an American airliner as their instrument of destruction, Sutherland recalled.

The show’s schedule meant airing that episode just six or seven weeks after the attacks.

They had to pare it back considerably, Gordon notes. “Even so, we felt when that calamity struck it may just have meant the end of the show — others did too, even at the network. There was a sense that people now just wanted blue skies stuff and music, after all this — I think they were using a Depression era metric.”

Things did not, of course, work out that way. What huge numbers of Americans wanted, and got in “24,” was that heroic guardian of our national security, Jack Bauer, who could undo the most horrific of terror plots ever conceived, however brilliantly designed — the impossibly complex nuclear device that would kill millions in New York or Chicago, the lethal gas to emanate from the labrynths of a cooling system — and, along the way, visit mayhem on the plotters as he extracted necessary information from them. That audience would doubless have relished Jack Bauer and those story lines even before the hijackers drove those fuel-laden planes and their passengers into the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon.

Afterwards was another matter. It was a new world — with a new, reality-scarred grasp of a malignant enemy plotting acts of destruction against us in far off places and also some much nearer, as we were to learn. It could have surprised no one that in such a time Jack Bauer and “24” vaulted to a special place in the American psyche.

It was a fact entirely clear to the show’s star — he knows what Jack Bauer meant to people and why. Even so, he’s impelled to stress a point clearly important to him.

Sutherland’s flow of argument is agile, swift, to a remarkable degree uninterrupted by ums, ahs, or any of the other innumerable verbal tics that afflict people talking to interviewers. His command of language is evident and it’s striking. That’s not just because it comes from the actor who created so memorably monosyllabic and tight-lipped a hero as Jack Bauer, but because it’s a capacity that stands out like neon in the era of “you-know”s.

“I’m a television actor, dealing with great drama,” Sutherland said of the accusations that the show exalted brutal interrogations.” We were being politicized by both sides of the aisle. You had Bill Clinton calling it his favorite TV show and Dick Cheney saying the same thing. In no way did we intend to justify any behavior in the real world.

For showrunner Gordon, the crucial turn in the accusations came with the events at Abu Ghraib and then, charges by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer that “24” stood as encouragement to the brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists in the real world. Human rights groups made similar complaints.

“Up to then we’d stayed clear of political controversy — Barbra Streisand loved the show as much as Rush Limbaugh did.” He added: “Jane Mayer had an agenda. I fear she used the show’s popularity to advance her point of view — she was piggy backing on the show. We did, in the end, find a way to get her into the show. We named that character after her — Senator Mayer.”

He had some regrets about reacting to those attacks, and yielding to the pressures, making significant changes in the show. Season Six, for instance, finds Jack Bauer examining his conscience, worrying about his life’s work. He felt more justified responding to the concerns that plot lines like the one about a Muslim American family of terrorists, could incite hatred.

“There was a big poster of that family on the Freeway—we were very proud of that plotline—but it inflamed Muslim advocacy groups who charged we were handmaidens of Islamophobia. We didn’t want to be that.”

In any case, good plotting required diverse villains, Gordon points out. “We were equal opportunity writers in that regard—there were Russians, Swedes, the Chinese, some white guy in the end, who was after the oil.”

There is much that the show’s star and its producer look forward to after the end of “24’’s eight season run, which may account for the unmistakable air of peace –- even pleasure — in their voices, as they talk about the decision to close it all down. It was the right thing, Gordon said.

And does he leave in good conscience, even after delivering a character like the addled dreamer, President Allison Taylor, clunking around the White House — one who could well undermine prospects for any actual woman candidate for the presidency?

“Keep watching,” he said, briskly.

It’s impossible to imagine not doing so. The clock ticks till May 24.

Source: WSJ by Dorothy Rabinowitz March 28, 2010