24: Redux

Full disclosure: I stopped watching 24 after season 2.  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the Kim-gets-caught-in-a-cougar-trap storyline, and it wasn’t that the glorification of appalling human rights abuses turned me off so much.  The real problem was, the guy who used to live in the apartment next to mine had insomnia and he’d watch the show DVDs for hours and hours every night, so I’d be lying in bed trying to fall asleep and I’d keep hearing the deet-deet-deet-deetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeet of the 24 opening theme song all. Night. Long.  And there’s only so much a girl can take, you know?

But he’s moved away since then, so I was safe to check out 24: Redemption this week.

Due to the writers’ strike, 24 has been off the air for quite a while, so in a clever marketing ploy, Fox created this two-hour episode/movie/prequel/whatever to set things up for season 7.  Since I’ve missed a few seasons, I went into this episode expecting the world to be falling apart.  After all, the 24 universe has been subject to widespread terrorist attacks, assassinations, and conspiracies.  In each season, the danger has to escalate, so I figured by now the population of the U.S. would be dramatically reduced due to massive deaths and emigration.

But things look normal enough as 24: Redemption gets under way.  The only evidence of impending doom is the swearing-in of a female president. (Ba-dum-bump.)

It’s clear that we’re in for some fun times when we open in the fictional African nation of Sangala, witnessing the kidnapping and training of future child soldiers.  Our hero, Jack Bauer, is hiding out in a nearby township, helping his friend Robert Carlyle, aka Carl, run a school for disadvantaged boys. (I guess the disadvantaged girls of Sangala are just screwed.) An evil American bureaucrat shows up to serve Jack with a subpoena.  We’ll later learn that he’s being instructed to return to the U.S. to testify about the human rights abuses committed during his CTU days, which strikes me as a reasonable request, but Jack is all ‘No!  I came here to get away from you people!  I’ve already atoned for my sins!’  And so he starts to run away, and spends the next two hours failing to do so.

Because there are more fearsome villains out there than mean bureaucrats.  There’s the rebel army – the guys responsible for all that kidnapping and training of child soldiers.  They’re also undertaking a bloody coup of the democratic Sangalan government.  The rebels are led by a soon-to-be-dictator and his lackeys, including a colonel who quickly develops a hatred for Jack.  I didn’t catch the Colonel’s name, so I’ll call him Colonel Sanders.  There’s also a wussy UN guy who’s all “The United Nations remains neutral in this matter” even while the rebel militia is storming the school with machine guns flaring.  This gives Jack the opportunity to mock the concept of diplomatic resolutions to conflict, which I’m sure Jack always appreciates.

Jack, being Jack, takes down most of the militia single-handed with minimal weaponry, but then gets captured and tortured (I swear Kiefer Sutherland rolled his eyes at the camera at one point during the torture scene – even he’s getting bored with it).  He unconvincingly pretends to succumb to the torture and give away the kids’ hiding place.  Then he kills his torturer by twisting the guy’s neck between his feet, or something.  Unfortunately, the torturer turns out to be Colonel Sanders’ brother.  D’oh.  So now, instead of just trying to kidnap Jack’s students for child soldier recruitment purposes, Colonel Sanders is out to avenge his brother’s death.  You know, poor Jack really has only himself to blame for the scrapes he keeps getting in.

So, while the kindly rebel general gives Colonel Sanders leave to abandon his warmongering duties and hunt down Jack despite the fact that the rebels are busy staging their coup, like, now, Jack and Carl and their kids are on the run.  Complications abound – one of the kids has been shot, and another has a cumbersome crush on Jack, and Carl steps on a landmine (well, it’s not like they could’ve afforded to pay Robert Carlyle for an entire season anyway) – until they finally get to the capital.  There, Jack instigates a shootout on a street full of evacuating Sangalans, which I’m sure was for the greater good and did not lead to any civilian injuries or deaths at all.

Once in the capital city, Jack and the kids proceed to where the U.S. military is evacuating Americans (because the kids have papers that make them American or whatever, I don’t know, it was confusing).  We get some disturbing imagery with Sangalans clamoring to be rescued, too – including a classy scene where a desperate woman offers to prostitute herself to the slimy bureaucrat from earlier in exchange for him evacuating her and her baby – only to be refused.

Then Jack shows up with his kids in tow right when the last helicopter is about to leave.  “Open the gate!” Jack yells.  Maybe he should take a page out of Jack Dawson’s book and try adding “Open the gate right now!“ and see if that works.

But the bureaucrat is there, and he refuses to evacuate the kids unless Jack surrenders to his subpoena.  It’s supposed to emphasize the bureaucrat’s unfeeling bastard qualities, but it doesn’t exactly present Jack in the best light, either, since he’s initially resistant, even though every second he wastes is putting the kids’ lives in jeopardy.  In the end, though, Jack gives in, and as we watch him and the kids soaring off into the sky, we realize that this whole two hours was just a plot device to get Jack back to America after his meandering moodiness from the season 6 finale.

Which is okay, actually.  This was a pretty good two hours of TV.  Even if it did make me get all depressed for a while.

There were also some stateside subplots, but they were short on action and long on setup for season 7.  The same day all this drama is happening in Sangala, the U.S. is swearing in its next president, one Allison Taylor.  The outgoing president, who Wikipedia tells me did some bad stuff in season 6, has been asked to provide military assistance to the Sangalan government, but has refused.  President-Elect Taylor disagrees with his stance – being a wimpy girl and all, she’s opposed to genocide – but is powerless to do anything until she’s sworn in.

So we’re stuck watching a bunch of D.C. yuppies do things instead.  Roger, the overly-groomed son of Madam President, has a bitchy girlfriend and a pill-popping friend who keep cramping his style.  The friend, Chris, works for an evil investment firm, and has caught whiff of some activity that he suspects is illicit – even, dare he say it, terrorism-related.  Turns out, one of his firm’s clients is some old guy named Hodges, who’s secretly funding the Sangalese rebel army.  Chris wants to reveal his secrets and “cut a deal” with Madam President, but Roger is like, ‘Uh, No,’ so some bad guys sneak into Chris’ mansion.

When Chris first heard the intruder in his house, I assumed he was about to get killed, and I was all “Goody!” because Chris was annoying.  But instead the terrorist lackeys just swatted at him with a newspaper, which was really, really funny.  And then, of course, they tortured him, which was less so.  Although at least the show got the opportunity to demonstrate the differences between popular torture techniques in first-world versus third-world countries in the space of a single episode.  I’m sure Jack would’ve appreciated that, too.

In some added fun, we got to watch Roger and co. navigate their way through D.C. on inauguration day – speeding through the traffic-free streets, wearing pantyhose and pumps against that January chill, remarking on the massive crowd of 20 onlookers outside the Capitol, and otherwise heartily entertaining the real D.C.ers in the viewing audience.

Production-values wise, “Redemption” is better than a typical 24 episode, and the acting is, as always, stellar (except for the yuppies).  The real-time concept is stretched by the fact that the American presidential inauguration, which in reality always takes place at noon Eastern, begins about 15 minutes before the end of the episode.  But whatever.  The real time thing was always just a gimmick to sell the pilot (although I’m guessing Kiefer Sutherland helped with that too) so I’m not going to be too picky about it.

Coming up: The real season will begin in January, and apparently it’ll be set mostly in D.C.  From the season previews, it looks like Jack will join the FBI, we’ll be meeting more child soldiers, and terrorists will take over air traffic control. (Lord.  There’s no way I’ll be watching those scenes.  I still have flashbacks to the pilot episode of Lost whenever I get on a plane.)

Season 7 Prequel: Redemption (originally aired November 23, 2008)

24 returns January 11, 2009 on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro