Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Second Season of 24

Day 2 of 24 ends and what’s changed? How about money and sanity? Everything became bigger for season 2. The threats, the action, the consequences, all were ramped up in the first attempt to play can you top this. Since Day 2 will contain many firsts, it does not suffer from the repetitiveness that will come later on. There are 2 main problems with Day 2; just like the first season the second half of the day does not feel as tight as the first half and we were still stuck with a separate and solo Kim storyline. Even with those faults, the second day is one of the strongest in 24’s history.

I made a bunch of comments during season 1 that Jack Bauer did not resemble the Jack Bauer that I remember. That is no longer an issue once his second day from hell begins. Jack the Super Soldier came into full effect this time around. He survives a plane crash without a scratch, he is tortured until he flatlines, and then kills half a dozen of Kingsley’s men while having a string of heart attacks. We also get to see the screaming, threatening, terrifying Jack in action. The standards were created here. Jack kills a man in cold blood to get to Wald. He steps up his interrogation game with Nina and later Ali. And there is the body count. He nearly doubles the amount of bodies he drops this time around. Now that is the Jack Bauer I wholeheartedly support.

Day 2 also decided that it was time to up the ante well past political assassination. You would think they would have moved slower than nuclear bomb. They could have eased into that over a few seasons but they let the nuclear weapon out of the box and then proceeded to use it over and over again. But beyond that they blew up CTU, crashed a plane with Jack it in, got Jack into multiple gun fights in public, killed and resurrected Jack, and of course detonated a nuclear bomb on American soil. Sadly going bigger wasn’t better on the political side. The Palmer plot in the first season was a family story. He just happened to be a politician. That was not the case this time around. Palmer is President and he needs bigger shit to happen to him. How about half the American government turns on him and removes him from office? And that is the grounds for how all political plotlines for the rest of the series will be built. Being a President in the 24 universe sucks. Everyone around you is trying to undermine you and someone is always about to succeed in destroying a section of the United States. Then after you get past all of that, there is a near 100% chance that you will be physically harmed and or killed. Where do I sign up?

In the end, the only significant character introduced during the second day was Michelle Dessler. No one else would come back for more than a cameo in future seasons. Michelle was brought in as the new CTU analyst to replace the evil evil Nina. By the end of the day we learned 2 things about Michelle, she loves Tony and she hates Carrie. That is about it. Well Nina did leave some big shoes to fill. The other new characters worth mentioning were the Warners, Lynne, Ali, Yusuf, and Kingsley. The Warner plotline became the trend of introducing something outside of CTU and the government that would eventually tie into the main threat. It was still jarring and very annoying in the early hours. The Marie twist worked for shock value and Laura Harris’ dead eyed performance. Kate took the first swing as the new female in Jack’s life and Bob Warner will always be Christian Shepard to me. I can’t see him as anyone else. Michelle Forbes is always solid when she pops up but she had little more to do than look annoyed then be seriously injured. The build up to Syed Ali was fantastic and it made Jack’s interrogation scene work but it would have been nice if Ali had more time on screen when he was in control. And then there is Yusuf, poor poor Yusuf. He gets the bump that everyone gets as the play wingman to Mr. Bauer. The trade off is that you only get the job for so long before you have to die or get maimed. Yusuf was beaten to death by racists. He should never have come to America.

The returning people not named Jack that I want to highlight are George Mason, David Palmer, Mike Novick, and Nina Myers. To reiterate what I wrote after the first season, the loss of Xander Berkeley was never fully replaced. He had the ability to be supportive of Jack and an asshole at the same time. No one else brought that after he was gone. Plus once Mason became irradiated, Berkeley just went to town as the man trying to do something important with his last hours on earth. Bring back George for the movie! They could be doing some wacky cloning shit in Europe. Dennis Haysbert always stepped up the plate when the material was right. The second day gave him all the little moments of indecisiveness over going to war, the sanctioning of Jack’s death, and the final dressing down of the Vice President and the cabinet. The flip side to that was Jude Ciccolella who is always great as Mike Novick. The heel turn is completely unacceptable and I hope it burns in hell, but Jude worked his ass off in those scenes. And in the end he made it work by the devastation he feels over betraying David. And there is Nina, evil Nina. Sarah Clarke came back and flipped the switch to a whole new persona. If Nina was going to be evil enough to betray everyone and everything, Sarah made sure it was believable. And it was always great when Jack wiped the smirk off her face.

And that leaves Kim Bauer. Her plot was so atrocious this season that they removed this part of 24 going forward. Starting her off as a babysitter seems reasonable for her skill level but from there it just went out of control. I love that her plan never got past kidnapping Megan. She never made an attempt to stop Gary just take his daughter and run and hope that works. Then you get the whole cougar moment which will always be mentioned in any epitaph of 24. No words can truly describe the audacity of that idea. But they must have saw that as a challenge because it was immediately followed up by all the nonsense in the cabin. And that is only the halfway point of the day. There is still the liquor store and the killing of Gary. Half of the Kim problem was solved by the awfulness of this season. The other half will be fixed after next season.

The second day definitely medals when all things 24 are done. Even with the jarring change after the bomb went off, this was some of the best Jack moments that you will get in one season. In the end, that is all the matters. This is Jack's show and if I start ranking seasons based on Kim or the political bullshit it would be pointless since I would have stopped watching years ago. Day 3, you're up.

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