14.2.07

Sixty Seven reasons to avoid Jack Bauer and '24'


"In five seasons of "24", there have been sixty-seven torture scenes, and all of them are portrayed as effective, productive, and justified. "

Hmm, assuming that each of the five seasons has 24 episodes, thats a successful use of torture roughly every two episodes.

I see from the ads (I stopped watching 24 mid-way through the box set of season 2), that we now have Jack Bauer's dad AND brother showing up as super-spy relatives - and of course, there are suggestions that Bauer will be interrogating his loved ones as only he can.

Sounds to me like the show isn't just guilty of being a Republican's wet dream of irresponsible violence and gas guzzling SUV's, but as with Scooby Doo before him, the addition of family members to the cast (i.e. the repugnant Scrappy Doo) can only mean the show has 'jumped the shark'.

Initial quote lifted from Andrew Sullivan's post 'Torture Nation'


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you define "successful" as proving someone is innocent after you thought they were guilty, which was the reason for your torturing them for information in the first place. In Season 4, that's what happened in at least one instance. Jack tortured someone whose name was associated with some list or other, discovered the guy wasn't connected, but even more disturbing was that this guy then came around to Jack's POV and ended up saving Jack's life, and giving up his own to do so. It was preposterous. But still totally awesome! :-P