Tuesday, February 22, 2005

24 - 4x10 "4:00 P.M.-5:00 P.M."

I've been keeping an eye out for the ideology that I noticed a few episodes back about how non-principal characters are treated as mere instruments used by principal characters like Jack to reach a certain objective. Bad guys are the most obvious example: Powell, the guy who was working with the terrorists, was seen by CTU as help against the terrorists; of course, the guy gets popped, but even dead he has his uses. His corpse was used to persuade Marianne to talk, and the denial of her rights ("You get to live -- that's your deal," as though being a bad guy automatically forfeits your rights) indicated her new toolishness. (See also: season 2's reporter who was held in custody without charges brought against him.) Things were sort of brought to a head with Audrey more or less being used by Jack to delay Paul Raines, whom, by the way, can never be referred to as anything besides his full name, and whom she was using as well (e.g. saying that she wanted to talk about their marriage in order to set him up for CTU interrogation).

What's interesting about this season/episode is that the show is acknowledging how it blatantly treats its characters as simple vehicles to advance the plot with Sarah calling Driscoll on her conveniently buddying up with her after the fruitless torture session. 24 mostly doesn't try to pass its characters off as more than two-dimensional, and now that it's embracing this sort of psychological flatness, the series isn't floundering in its own indulgent wank like some other shows on which I'm writing a thesis (before you ask, I'll just say that it's "going" and leave it at that); as a result, 24 is able to succeed on the level of pure entertainment.

Indie rating: Le Tigre - "Deceptacon"

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

depends on how many people she's killed as a bad guy. if she's killed a lot, then, yeah, she's forfeited her right to live. eye for an eye, baby!