24 Episode 6.10 - "3:00 PM - 4:00 PM"
Airdate: Monday, February 19th, 2007

"Everything is going to be fine," Jack Bauer screams to his dead brother's widow as he dashes up a stairwell to save his nephew from his EVIL DAD.

I'm not sure I can envision a scenario in which everything can ever truly be "fine" again, if that is your life. Even if you make it past the phase in which your son has been used as a hostage by your father-in-law in a plot that has already seen the detonation of a dirty nuke in Valencia, California, you've got a fairly messy couple of hours to recover from.

That's right--couple of HOURS. This sort of nonsense would be stressy as all get-out if it happened over the course of days; imagine what it must be like to live through it between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

How do you bounce back from that? Maybe you don't, and maybe you spend the next several years weeping in a fetal position while your former-hostage son falls in with the wrong crowd on MySpace. Or maybe it takes the tender lovin' of the aforementioned Jack Bauer to set things right.

Regardless, this is some FREAKY STUFF we're dealing with here, people. Top-level FREAKY. High end. Big time.

This week's episode really underlined all that for me, for whatever reason. It's all fake and ultimately relatively silly, but it's fun and it's thrilling and a little bit scary. Because while every illogic of the 24 world may not be shared by our own, surely a few of the vulnerabilities that have allowed things to get THIS bad may actually exist? Or even a few weak spots that the 24 producers haven't even dreamed of yet?

Take, for example, the most ludicrous plot hole yet on this season of 24--Chad Lowe's attempt to sneak a security operative into the President's super-secret disaster bunker, so that this security operative can KILL THE PRESIDENT.

Okay, so they did us the favor of pointing out that this security operative has some level of clearance. Fine. But do you honestly think that when there's a guy running around with three dirty nukes, that ANYONE except the most trusted and high-level staff are spending any time with the President???

Hell, they probably don't even clean the bathrooms until the all-clear is sounded. Yep, it's that serious--President Palmer's living with that grimy ring in his toilet bowl until he's resolved the terrorist threat. That'll light a fire under his ass. Literally.

So that's silly, but what if it were true? Or what if, instead, that scary report I heard on NPR this morning about just how unprotected our sea ports are became the point of exploitation? What if it were that chink where the real-life Fayed decided to strike, and the next thing I know, I'm climbing up the side of a house to save a couple guys trapped in a news chopper before I hop in a car and race off to save the country AGAIN???

Everything will NEVER be fine, Jack Bauer. Your television show depends on it, and sometimes that's a little creepy to me. There is a fundamental element of exploitation inherent in the threats you depict and the reality you convey on your little program. We are drawn in for the excitement, and the action, and the wacky madcap momentum of it all, but deep down, we are compelled to watch because we are SCARED. We are terrified of what could REALLY happen in our REAL world, and how much it may or may not resemble what we have already seen transpire in your FAKE world.

That's why 24 has way more going on inside of it than maybe anyone gives it credit for--and hell, who knows if even the writers and producers realize what they're really giving us? I've said it before, but I think it's worth saying again: This is the worst-case scenario nightmare vision of what America could very well be. And it's interesting to watch because we are terrified it will really happen, and it relieves us greatly to imagine there is a REAL Jack Bauer out there.

iTunes Links

24 - Series
24 - Season 6
"3:00 P.M. - 4:00 P.M."