Things That Have Occurred To Us While Watching Season Five Of 24 (2 - 4)

Our headlong rush through the fifth season of 24 has been partially curtailed now shows are returning to air (CSI, The Office, 30 Rock, and Battlestar Galactica are all back), but we're still watching it and still loving it. More observations follow thusly...

2. Curtis is the black David Puddy.

With Tony out of action and Jack having to deal with the usual bureaucratic nonsense, the role of second-stringer grunt goes to Curtis Manning, played by Roger R. Cross. As far as we've seen in season five he hasn't had much to do other than run around with a nerve gas canister and arrest jerkoff hobbit/bureaucrat Lynn McGill. However, it was at the moment that he was asked to do that by Audrey Raines that we realised that his peculiar stilted line readings and intense facial expressions reminded us of David Puddy from Seinfeld. He has the same build, the same monolithic presence; he even talks in monosyllables!



You got a question...you ask the 8-ball!

3. I dread the non-existent tolling of the silent clock.

I couldn't care less about Edgar. We already have Chloe, who is one of the ten best characters on TV right now, so why have someone else as socially inept as Chloe, except not as good at his job as she is, not to mention far less entertaining? It was a total waste of a spot on the regular cast, and I couldn't understand why he was such a popular character.

In season five Edgar is killed in the middle of a nerve gas attack on CTU headquarters (which is possibly the most vulnerable place on earth, having been breached numerous times by now, not to mention employing more moles and terrorists than the International College of Terroristics and Molery at the height of its popularity). This plot development was no surprise. I knew about Edgar's death on the day after it originally aired in the US as Yahoo! News had a big feature on their front page about it. I couldn't believe there was such an outcry over a character that had never seemed that important or popular, but apparently people were really shocked by it.

Of course, when I saw it, my cynicism evaporated. His death was horrible, and I was a bit peeved about it, but the silent clock at the end got to me anyway. It did when Teri Bauer died, and when Ryan Chappelle died, and it happened again here. I totally didn't cry, though! I just got all choked up and sad, that's all. It's totally different!

That said, if Miles Papazian, backboneless hyper-bureaucrat, weaselly tattle-tale, and pencil-pushing world champion were to die heroically and get the silent clock treatment (doubtful, as he is to heroism what Jack Bauer is to risk-averse middle-management), I would use those few seconds to dance a jig in honour of his long-delayed demise. Die, you feeble unpopular geek, die!!!

4. Was the existence of Tony's soul patch a directive from former producer Joel Surnow?

One of the many many reasons for Canyon's apathy toward the magnificent he-man known as the Tonytron 5000 Heroismbot is the existence of the soul patch, which appeared on and off over the past few seasons. But why is it there at all? What was the inspiration? Maybe show creator Joel Surnow knows.

Surnow is, of course, the man responsible for creating the polar opposite of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in that it was right-wing, unfunny, mean-spirited, lifeless, desperate, and a blatant propaganda tool borne of the paranoid, ossified, humanity-hating, addled mindset of the extremist conservative anti-democratic media machine that is Fox News, whereas The Daily Show has Rob Riggle, John Hodgman and Samantha Bea and therefore wins booyah! That show, The ½ Hour News Hour, failed. Badly. Any Conservatives or Republicans who stumble across this blog will be incensed by this, and might insult us in comments and then obsessively come back over and over and over to check to see if we've taken the bait, but humour is subjective, and subjectively (in other words, in my humble opinion) this show sucked. Actually, if I'm being honest, it sucked objectively as well. There's an equation that proves it. The ½ Hour News Hour is the Platonic ideal of suckage that casts the shadow onto the wall of the cave that we recognise as the watered-down version of suckage that we use to describe things like Rob Cohen movies or Judd Winick comics.

What has this bitchery to do with 24 and the soul patch? Nothing. I just like remembering that Fox News tried to be funny and didn't even understand the concept. Don't believe me? Watch this, if you can get past the opening crawl, which screams, "IMMINENT, CATACLYSMIC ÜBER-FAIL FOR THE AGES!" so powerfully it throbs like an absess under a wisdom tooth.



Anyway, enough of the schadenfreude. I will add that Surnow has left 24 in the hands of Howard Gordon (and probably David Fury), so we don't have to think about him anymore, unless he creates another compelling action show (that features a lot less torture, please). Bye Surnow. Don't let the nerve gas canister hit you in the ass on the way out.

So, we're still making our way through, and there are more things occurring to me as we go along. This will predictably involve Robocop references. Prepare yourselves.

Things That Have Occurred To Us While Watching Season Five of 24 (1)

We're currently going through season five of 24, a show that simultaneously horrifies and thrills us. The pro-torture nonsense, dodgy politics, absurd plotting, flat dialogue, rarely adhered to real-time ground rules, etc. etc. etc. It's all hard to defend on both political and quality grounds (especially when we rail against CSI: Miami), but when it's on, it is totally on, justifying any amount of crap with total thrill delivery. Just as we have been told over and over again, season five is the best season yet, featuring some of the most entertaining action I've seen in a TV show, and though season six is supposed to be terrible, this has so far been good enough to carry us through another four seasons. The momentum, the berserk action, the sheer devil-may-care craziness of the whole thing, has been thrilling enough to forgive a multitude of sins. That said, I've been noticing a few things as it has been progressing, and I'll be coming back here to reveal them over the next couple of weeks as we barrel through the season. First things first, though. I have to get the most important thing out of the way right now. Forgive me for being blunt, but...

1. I will tolerate any amount of narrative contrivance if it brings back Tony Almeida.


I am incandescent with rage over the death of 24's secret weapon, Tony Almeida, who is basically what Jack Bauer would be like if he wasn't a psychopath. Consumed with anguish over the death of his wife Michelle in an explosion that actually had no purpose within the plot and never got adequately explained (like so much in this show), Tony is taken to CTU HQ instead of hospital (because of Reason X), regains consciousness very quickly (considering he has been blown up and heavily singed), and tries to kill Christopher Henderson, assassin, scumbag, and former cyborg law enforcer.

Of course, at the last second his conscience gets in the way (because it's Tony), which is something that would never happen to Jack; the only reason he ever stops himself from killing someone is because they have information that will save hundreds ::pant:: of thousands ::pant:: of lives, dammit! Hell, he even got his daughter and the President's brother to kill people while he wasn't around. His psychotic nature is too big for his formidable macho shell to hold, and it has to spill out onto other people from time to time.


Of course, Tony deciding against killing Henderson backfires, and he is stabbed in the chest with a syringe full of fictional drugs. He dies in Jack's arms, his friend sobbing over him even as I tried to hold back the tears and the horror myself. Of course, I knew all about it, having been spoiled well in advance, but still, I thought we'd get a bit more Tony action before that happened. It sucked, and I know that I wasn't the only one to be affected by Tony's tragic, senseless death, and definitely not the only person to think Tony is the shit. (Check out Brian Hall's impersonation in those two 24 spoofs. It's an uncanny approximation of the great man.) That said, there are some who contribute to this blog who are not fans of Tony. I'll let them announce themselves at some point.

Of course, 24 barely plays by the rules of reality, and so last year producer Howard Gordon, knowing full well that fans loved him, announced that everyone's favourite soppy hardass was coming back. However, it's no time to rejoice. I'm as worried as I can be about a fictional character who gets seriously injured whenever there is a terrorist strike in the US (broken ankle, shot in the neck, shot in the back, blown up, injected with deadly fictional drugs, run over by a garbage truck, fired out of a cannon into a wall, cut in half with a laser, etc.). This time, the writers have gone after his soul. This time, he's the bad guy.

How can this be? Until now Tony has been so damn heroic he practically poops Excaliburs out of his toned butt, though I guess seeing his wife die a few hours before getting jabbed in the chest with a syringe by the guy who killed her would make anyone a bit miffed, but going all the way around to being evil? It's David Mamet all over again. And yet, it'll be good to have the guy back even if he has bombs or gas or diseases at his beck and call. I don't care what they do to get him back. Jack's tears could be pure magic juice for all I care. He could have been injected with Mutant Growth Hormone by mistake. Exposure to radiation from the season two nuclear blast could have made him prone to hibernation every so often, coming back stronger than ever. Fuck it, make him bionical, like this.


Just hurry up and get this thing going so we can see the man back in action! Dammit!