TV Review: 24 "Day 5" Season Finale

Jack Bauer has the coolest job in the known universe. Okay, it's a little stressful, but what a perk — save the world as we know it in 24 hours and take off the rest of the year. How cool is that? Sign me up right now!

For five seasons now, 24 has led us down a serpentine path strewn with corruption at the highest levels, deception at every corner, gunplay 'round every bend and enough general mayhem to make Quentin Tarantino come off like an altar boy. And we've gleefully followed every second of those 24-hour timelines, no matter how implausible. After all, plausibility has never been a prerequisite for the action adventure genre. Nobody ever paused to think about Indiana Jones' transatlantic trip perched on the periscope of a Nazi U-Boat in Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example.

It's all about pacing, and in that area, perhaps no other series in the history of network television does it better than 24. It invariably hits the ground running, and moves at such a breakneck pace that we don't even think about how no way could that happen in that timeframe. We want to believe that it could, maybe just maybe could, and we become willing participants in the milieu. And that, friends, is genius.

Then there is the character of Jack Bauer himself. As portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland, Bauer serves as a metaphor for American frustration — tense, sweaty, set adrift in events larger than his self with seemingly no hope for survival. Yet he prevails, teeth clenched against all odds. We see in Jack Bauer what we want America to be — a steadfast figure bowing to no evil in whatever form it takes, but never flinching from a fundamental ethic of justice, determined to save our way of life, even if it means taking on the President himself. In other words, Jack is us. The only difference is he knows who the bad guys are. We have only our vague suspicions.

From the start, the fifth season (or "Day 5" to use the jargon) of 24 played to our national paranoia, beginning with assassination of former President Palmer, threading into a Chechnian nerve gas terrorism threat that involved an assassination attempt on the Russian President which in turn was engineered by the US President working on behalf of oil interests with the misguided intention of rescuing America from foreign energy dependency.

Article Author: Ray Ellis

Ray Ellis is a freelance writer who has been dissecting pop culture and its effect on how we view ourselves for over twenty years, ruffling feathers and dragging unsuspecting pedestrians along for the ride whenever possible.

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