As readers of David Medsker’s weekly blog are already well aware, “24” is back on Fox in a big way, and the show was back at the January TCA Tour in similar fashion, earning its own panel this time around. (The decision in July to relegate the series to a half-hearted “24”-sponsored luncheon, with critics being forced to fight from scrum to scrum in order to get their questions answered, earned my ire in this entry.) From the questions being posed, it was clear that, after a less-than-stellar sixth season, many in the audience have found themselves becoming fans of the show again in Season 7. In particular, it seems that the little moments are what’s doing it for them, such as the scene in the car with Jack and the cop, where Jack acknowledges that maybe they were right in questioning him.
“I think Jack Bauer is certainly in a position where he’s questioning a lot of the things that he has had to do either by his own choice or by orders,” said our man Kiefer Sutherland, “and certainly at the beginning of the season, you see him in Africa, very disconnected from the United States. And so he is wrestling with his own history, about what he actually believes was right and fair and whether or not he was, in fact, the kind of person that should have been put in the position to do these things. It’s a through-line that really travels all 24 episodes this year. And so there’s this constant balance of defending, for instance, in the Senate investigation, his own actions. On a much cleaner level and a much more personal moral level, he questions those things greatly, so this inner struggle is something that carries him through all 24 episodes.”
Of course, if you’ve been watching this season, then you’ve probably already noticed how many times Jack has been standing up for his actions after being condemned by others. This might…just maybe…be a case of the show’s writers lashing out at their critics.
“I would be lying if I said there wasn’t some of that in there,” said producer Howard Gordon, with a laugh. “Obviously, there was the conundrum of how do we do a show that had taken quite a bit of heat for allegedly advocating this way of law enforcement and this way of countering terrorism. It was a nuance and it is an evolving question that plays, as Kiefer said, throughout the entire season. So I counsel patience, and I hope people have the patience and the appetite and the desire to watch through the whole season, because I think the answer to these questions will not be known until the very last episode.”
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