Well, maybe not the most awesomest show ever, but at least it's the most awesomest one that's on right now. Especially since they cancelled Arrested Development.

 

Here's why it's so great.

 

But He's Not Afraid To Torture & Kill You

Goddammit.

He's like John Wayne and Rambo and Batman and Chuck Norris all rolled into one. And it doesn't even matter how painful that would be, rolling four people into one, because he can take it.

People take all the jokes that they used to make about Chuck Norris and make them Jack Bauer jokes, now. Like, "You can lead a horse to water, but only Jack Bauer can make him drink". Because he's a total badass super ninja killer spy, which is awesome, but I wonder if the people making those jokes notice other things about Jack Bauer that, to me, are not only immediately apparent but also clearly make Jack Bauer unique.

See, Jack Bauer is like John Wayne and Rambo and Batman and Chuck Norris all rolled into one. He is. And it doesn't take away from any of that to say that he also has a little bit of Alan Alda and Dr. Phil in him, too. Because even though he'll kill you or torture you with electricity and hot irons and Barry Manilow to get what he needs in the line of duty, you can rest assured that if you're his girlfriend or his daughter or even just some low-level techie doofus, if he says or does something that hurts your feelings in even the slightest way and then has to rush out the door to save the world from blowing up without having a chance to fully explain himself, he will call you on his cell phone while he's barreling through LA traffic to make sure you know he loves you. And he'll mean it. And you'll know it, sincerely, in your heart. Because he's Jack Bauer.

Now, I have to admit, I've never seen Jack Bauer do karate, or jump out an airplane, or rush into a burning building to save blind orphaned puppies with cancer. And I'm not sure it's virtuous that he can shoot his best friend in the back of the head even if it is to save a billion other lives. But still, he's Jack Bauer. So, you know, screw it.

Jack Bauer always knows what to do, and he's never afraid to do it. More than that, he always know what everyone else should be doing, and he's never afraid to tell them. Or tell them to go to hell if they don't do it.

 

I know that on TV, no one ever eats, sleeps, or goes to the bathroom. Because, first of all, all three of those things are boring and two of them are gross and no one wants to see it anyway, but mostly because on every other TV show ever made, there's enough time between scenes for characters to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom.

Not on this show.

On this show, everything is in "real time". Every minute on the screen is a minute in their lives. Sometimes I can accept that the folks back at CTU go to the bathroom when we're watching Jack doing whatever he does out in the real world, or watching the President deal with all his personal crises, but Jack is constantly running and going and doing stuff all the time, and I don't see how he can do all that and just be on the go all the time for 24 hours without going to the bathroom.

Or eat. No one on this show eats. Anything. Ever. And as weird as that is, no one ever even talks about eating, or says "I'm hungry" or "Can this wait til I get back from lunch?" or even orders out Chinese food and eats it at their desk like they always seem to be doing on Law & Order. At least in the early days.

The worst thing about it is the lack of sleep.

I can accept that every once in a while some terrorist douche bag is going to threaten to blow up the world, and when that happens everyone is probably going to have to put in extra hours. That's perfectly logical and reasonable.

What's not logical or reasonable is that no one ever complains about it. No one ever says "Why does this happen now when I have a date tonight?" or "Dammit I was just about to go home!" or "I haven't slept in 20 hours!" No one works in shifts. There's no room with cots set up in it like there is on ER. You'd think people as creepy and insane as those CTU techie dorks would, after about 18 hours, throw up their hands and go "Screw this! I'm going home!"

No one even acts like it's unusual to work 24 hours straight in a row without eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom. No one ever walks through the office and says "You folks mind working a little late tonight?" No one ever stands up at the end of the season finale and says "Damn, I'm tired!" And most of all you never read spoilers from the entertainment pages showing previews from the end of the season where people go insane from lack of sleep and have kidney failure and pass out from hunger.

 

Everyone has personal problems, and sometimes the problems we have at home can leak over into our professional lives. No one knows this better than me. Just ask that hot Indian chick who used to be my boss.

 

At CTU, though, personal problems always leak over into the office. On the one hand, I can kind of understand it because everyone at CTU is always there all the time, 24 hours a day non-stop, and so when a personal crisis erupts, naturally, it's going to happen when they're at work, because they're never anywhere else. On the other hand, however, since no one ever leaves, I don't get how any of them have any time to even have personal lives at all.

 

I suppose if I'm to understand the show at all, it's perfectly logical and reasonable to suppose that every day in the lives of these characters is not like the ones they make shows out of. What I mean is, say, season one is about Jack's wife and daughter getting kidnapped and then season one ends, and then say there's a year and a half of relative normalcy where nothing much happens and Jack only fights terrorists eight to ten hours a day and everyone goes home at night. Then season two starts and it's another one of "those days".

 

But if that's true, then it seems a monumental coincidence that on the one day that terrorists try to blow up the world and everyone is going flat-out at full speed, that it also just happens to be the day that your babysitter quits and dumps your secret love-child off at the office, or your boss's schizophrenic suicidal daughter picks that very day to slit her wrists at the office clinic.

 

There really is no chain of command. Well, technically, there is, but not if you're Jack Bauer.

 

Jack Bauer is his own chain of command, the end-all, be-all, the alpha and the omega, and while I'm sure there have been endless government beaureaucrats and  talking heads that have wondered if CTU couldn't function more effeciently without a wild card like Jack Bauer screwing up their highly-structured organization, I'm mostly left wondering if Jack Bauer couldn't function more effeciently without CTU holding him back.

 

Jack Bauer is proper and calls the President "sir" but his respect for the chain of command ends exactly there.

 

But it's not just him. People at CTU routinely disregard the chain of command, put their own interests first, waffle on perplexing moral dilemmas, and anything short of outright treason goes unpunished.

 

Tony committed treason, and he was washed out of the program and lost his wife and career. Until Jack Bauer brought him back in.

 

Chloe committed treason, and she was fired. Until Jack Bauer needed her expertise.

 

Jack Bauer rules.

 

Something I've noticed on this show that's even worse on Alias, is that someone like Chloe or the dwarf-guy on Alias can talk to people in the field using invisible walkie-talkies that no one else can see or hear. I mean, Jack will be standing in a room full of people and Chloe will say "Jack, you've got to get out of there, the missles are armed!" And Jack will hear her but no one else will, and I don't know how that works because there's nothing in his ear or on his body, and why is it that no one else can hear her?

 

The only thing I can think is that there's something physically inside his brain that lets him receive secret messages from Chloe or whoever else happens to be sitting in her chair. But wouldn't that mean that anyone at CTU could reach him anywhere at any time? And couldn't they spy on him and always know where he is and hear everything he says? That would seem extraordinarily inconvenient for Jack Bauer, who at least half the time is plotting against whatever random government douche bag has taken command of CTU. And why would he need a cell phone at all? Because you know when he leaves that room to disarm that missle, he's going to call Chloe on  the cell phone.

 

See that's what I don't get, because Jack is always asking Chloe to download schematics into his PDA, but with technology like this I don't know why she can't download it directly into his brain. If it's not something that's actually inside his head, it seems like other people would be able to hear it; if it is something inside his head, it seems like they could track him anywhere, and that's clearly not the case.

 

Maybe it's one of those things that just is the way it is and we're not supposed to question it.

 

 

Batman has a utility belt, Wonder Woman has a magic lasso and an invisible jet, and Jack Bauer has a cell phone. Jack knows all the functions and instinctively how to use them. Jack Bauer's cell phone never runs out of minutes and no matter who he's conspiring against or hiding from, no one ever uses his cell phone to locate him, the way they do everyone else on this show. Jack's magic cell phone has the schematics for every building in Los Angeles and the number for every government official in the world and links to every satellite in space.

 

I guess the President still pays Jack's cell phone bill, though we've never actually seen him do it. I bet it pisses him off, too. I bet Jack even taunts him by calling him up and humming that Vonage commercial that goes "Whoo Hoo, Whoo Hoo Hoo"

 

Come to think of it, I'm surprised that no cellular company has asked Jack Bauer to be their spokesperson.

 

 

When you get to be on Star Trek, you can have a great acting career. But you will always be the character that you were on Star Trek, no matter what else you do. Imagine what would happen if Leonard Nimoy cured cancer: The headline would read

 

 

I always love it, then, when I see former Trek stars getting work, because evn though I generally find creative types annoying, I've come to regard anyone who was ever on any incarnation of Star Trek as my close personal friend.

 

As awesome as it is, when it comes to finding work for Star Trek actors, 24 is no Battlestar Galactica or The 4400, both of which I think have employed invisible ninjas to track down old Trek cast and guest stars. Still, in six seasons, I've counted eight guest stars from Star Trek on 24. Three of them in pretty big roles:

 

Penny Johnson Gerald (Kasidy Yates on DS9) as First Lady Sherry Palmer

 

James Cromwell (Zephram Cochrane on Enterprise and the movie First Contact) as Phllip Bauer

 

Michelle Forbes (Ensign Ro on TNG) as Agent Lynne Kresge

 

Daniel Dae Kim (Corporal Chang on Enterprise) as Agent Tom Baker

 

Peter Weller (Paxton on ENterprise) as Christopher Henderson

 

Alexander Siddig (Dr. Bashir on DS9) as Hamri Al-Assad

 

Megan Gallagher (Dr. Jeren on Voyager, Nurse Garland and Mareel on DS9) as Jillian Wallace

 

Robert Duncan McNeill (Ensign Paris on Voyager) as random FBI guy, season 6

Friendship Never Gets In The Way of A Good Kick In The Nuts

 

And let's say your boss, or one of your many bosses, comes to you one day and takes you to the side and says in an urgent, breathless whisper that the OTHER friendless technie dickwad who's been working at the desk right next to you, twenty-four hours a day non-stop for the last 8 years, is an extremist terrorist collaborator who's been feeding confidential classified secrets to mass-murdering foreign despots since as long as you've known him.

 

Of course you don't believe him, out of loyalty to your friend of course, but also because logically you acknowledge that no one in the room with you even has time to develop any personal relationships, let alone any worth sacrificing his life and career for.

 

But the arguments are persuasive and in the end you're convinced to spy on your co-worker or provide some bit of evidence from his 15-kajillion googlebyte hard drive that justifies nameless agents dragging him into a back-room, pumping him full of psychotropic drugs and kicking him in the nuts repeatedly until he either confesses or some random bit of unrelated evidence proves that he was innocent the whole time.

 

But you can rest easy, because odds are alarmingly good that at some point in the next 6 hours, your co-worker will be asked to spy on you. Sooner or later, everyone at CTU gets dragged into a backroom and kicked in the nuts.