Bradley and Joel discuss some of the over-arching themes throughout Season 6 – what worked and what didn’t. We also discuss 24: Redemption, the 2-hour TV movie that sets up the scene for Season 7.
Key plot points
Racial politics
- Clear picture of the season inside the opening four minutes: Middle Eastern man eyeballed with suspicion on his way to work and denied access to a bus, only for an East Asian man to blow it up; cut to the Oval Office crew arguing over Tom’s detention facilities and the restrictions of freedoms
- The Walid facility stuff highlights their pointlessness and leads to Wayne rejecting the proposals – fine – but then the show just kind of forgets its stance? Nadia’s denied access and it’s just like *shrugs* – until Bill leaves, then he sorts the issue with no fuss
- “And yeah, she is a Muslim. That’s enough to go on. Everyone here is thinking it, even if they won’t say it.”
- But then Doyle is also a reader of anything religious??!??!?!?!?!?!?
- Assad being framed for Palmer’s assassination attempt is again abysmal; presumably Daniels looks at America as being almost all white and just a handful of other ethnicities
- 2007: about 65% of USA was white (non-hispanic)
- Yet attempts to rally what I’ll loosely define as “his people” against what I’ll loosely define as “them” by pinning the murder on Assad (not to mention threatening Tom to get him to support this)
Nukes don’t matter, apparently
- 24 created a seismic moment when detonating a bomb to kill 12,000 people but it also meant it played all its cards four episodes in
- You can’t explode another bomb because a) as everyone says, it would ruin the country forever; b) 24 isn’t interested in fallout and cleanup and recovery – it’s only interested in the drama of the here and now (this isn’t a bad thing per se)
- None of the other bombs ever feel like a threat:
- The one Jack disarms, who cares?
- Five minutes pass and Jack doesn’t even remove his shotgun until the act returns
- The metal plates move twice in 11 seconds but I guess they hadn’t moved in the five minutes before? These also seem to move more quickly the closer to the potential blast we get
- The tension is completely false because Jack isn’t going to die in a nuclear explosion
- If this bomb goes off, Fayed’s chopper absolutely doesn’t survive it
- There are 5 nukes that pose a grave threat to the US: this is one, and it doesn’t even get mentioned in the previously in 2-3pm
- We spend 4-7pm with no danger from the bombs because they’re getting the parts for and assembling the drones, then the drone one is stopped fairly easily (again no tension)
- The last two obviously never get used but Fayed’s line ““We’re going to take out Downtown Los Angeles” is so bad, so empty
Marilyn Bauer
- The romantic tension between them begins the moment they first share a frame, and never ends
- Jack finds out about Audrey from Marilyn because there’s a hint they could hook up now Graem’s gone, *six hours* after his death
- This is just… so horrible? Every single moment
- Rena Sofer is incredibly wooden (The Bold and the Beautiful)
Season 6 overall
- BAD
Redemption
- This is really good?
- The real time concept is broken with the pre-title sequence, although they then throw back in “Events occur in real time” afterwards
- This is a really slick set-up for season 7, laying all of the groundwork for everything but Tony
- More crucially: it feels like they have a good handle on how they want to tell the story, there’s legitimate tension and it’s interesting – unlike season 6
- Daniels is the worst but it’s nice to see instantly that Taylor will be much more like David than Daniels
- Jack sacrificing his freedom to save the kids is arguably his best moment