24: Legacy ordered to pilot by FOX

Oh, you hit a topic sweet spot with me and now you’re getting practically an essay, apologies in advance ;)

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying but I also don’t think I’d quite go so far as to call Jack the ultimate bad guy on Day 1. I totally agree, though, that Jack isn’t this infallible hero who always is correct in everything he says or does. The show argues that Jack is very, very human and has him make *a ton* of mistakes but agreed with you that sometimes it doesn’t feel that the audience always recognizes that he’s not a perfect saint of a character.

The ultimate bad guy on Day 1 for me is Victor Drazen because the guy was a genocidal wacko responsible for the torture and deaths of thousands of people. But look at how relative this is– 24 never exactly argues that Jack is a hero on Day 1. The story argues (on Day 1 and really for the whole run of the show) that Jack is *just like the antagonists and everyone else on 24* because he believes that what he is doing is right and what someone else is doing is not right. Where Jack crosses lines is when he imposes those beliefs on others, just like the antagonists on the show do.

One of the big themes of the show is how the definition of a “bad guy” is relative to the characters. The audience quickly determines who is a hero and who is a “bad guy” based on what actions they’re taking and how those actions will affect other people. Margot Al-Harazi is a perfect example of this. She’s our “bad guy” on Day 9 because she is threatening to harm/kill a ton of people if she doesn’t get what she wants and what she wants is to kill our favorite salty old dog, President Heller. But what makes Margot interesting is that she’s principled about her approach. She’s sitting on a device that could do a lot more harm than she actually does with it– and she doesn’t do that harm. She doesn’t actually want to harm the people of London, if she can avoid it. The best and biggest twist on Day 9 is that the one who keeps their word is *Margot*– the bad guy is actually the more honorable than Jack and Heller, our apparent “heroes”.

Jack is every bit as much of an extremist as any antagonist on 24. Just as much as Dina Araz believed that attacking America would benefit the greater good based on her ideas of the world, Jack believed that stopping Marwan from doing that would benefit the greater good based on his ideas of the world. Jack is our kinda-sorta hero for that because of how he values human life and works to stop those who don’t. But it doesn’t mean he’s not complex, as you pointed out. But it gets back to intent– Jack didn’t mean to kill Mrs. Drazen and Martina. He didn’t mean to kill civilians, so the idea of the eye-for-an-eye plot on Day 1 is ironic because it wasn’t like that had been Jack’s goal. Jack’s goal had been to assassinate Victor Drazen. Is it murder? Yes. Is murder wrong? Yes. Is murdering a man who has murdered many other people, in order to save more lives of innocent people, wrong? Now, the questions are getting complicated.

And that’s Jack Bauer– he’s our complicated guy, who does terrible terrible TERRIBLE things like murder and torture and deception in order to protect innocent people and uphold the greater good. Only it’s *his* version of the greater good and that’s Jack’s biggest flaw– that, sometimes, he decides he’s the law. He decides that his law is above the actual, legal law of the very country whose laws and principles he’s working to uphold. Day 1 Jack especially is a self-righteous SOB at times, lecturing others about moral corruption when he’s a man who had an affair, who cheats on his wife and only sometimes in the name of upholding that greater good. You root for Day 1 Jack, though, because of the impossibleness of his situation and because he’s agreed to take it all on– he’s that guy who is going through hell to keep people like you safe and look at the nothing it’s getting him in exchange. It’s why he’s tolerable in personality– you cut him some slack when he’s brusque and dismissive, cold and isolated– because you can empathize. But the point is that every character on 24 is, in their own minds, trying to uphold their own version of principles and are the heroes of their own stories, and that’s where the conflict lies.

Yeah, karma came back around for Day 1 Jack (as it always does in the series) but that doesn’t make him the bad guy, IMO. It just makes him complicated and something of an anti-hero. You are totally right that Jack isn’t a stereotypical military guy portrayed in literature, totally. What’s so endearing about Jack is that conflict he has where, on the one hand, he thrives on this life– he’s “comfortable in hell”, as Tony put it– and the guy wearing the suit going to the budget meetings on Day 4 is just not who he is. On the other hand, though, you feel like he always wishes he were somewhere else. He always begs antagonists to just break already, so he doesn’t have to go through this again. He’s a case study in dichotomy– he’s a growling expert in torture techniques who knows how to surf. He’s a soldier who married an artist. He grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth but shunned that life and worked his way through the ranks like anybody else. He’s a government agent who went to Berkeley. He’s a spy who majored in English literature, who only really unpacked his books ahead of Day 2. He’ll holler at someone at the top of his lungs to find out where the bomb is, yet he’s quiet and shy in his personal relationships. He’s man enough to cry over his male best friend in a parking lot full of fellow agents, despite any macho posturing he puts on at other times. That’s what makes Jack so endearing and appealing and too complex to really be a “bad guy”, IMO, no matter what totally terrible things he’s done in the course of the series. Did he always make the right decisions? Absolutely not. Is he a bad guy? IMO, no, but it’s relative. No one would call Bill Buchanan a bad guy but what about the time when he sanctioned the killing of a bunch of people, including kids, in the shopping mall? No one would call Michelle Dessler an antagonist but did she make the right call in handing a 17 year old kid over to terrorists in order to buy time that might not prove fruitful and get Jack back? Was Dina Araz a completely terrible person if, under all the murderous insanity, she would stop at nothing to protect her son? What you’re talking about is the essence of the show and what makes it engaging, I think.

re: Eric Carter– It would be really cool to have a mole as a main character. [I always wanted a Nina Myers spinoff lol.] I don’t think that necessarily describing Eric as “military” means that he’s going to be written as a brainless, war-mongering yes man. I’m sure he’ll be as complicated as Jack and maybe then some and he’ll almost definitely have a lot of the same conflicts, since those conflicts are the root of the show. I figure if these people have given us 9 seasons of compelling story, that’s a good enough track record to assume that a 10th won’t be godawful. :)

24 : LAD averaged 9.95 million viewers, according to entertainment weekly