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Adventures in TV Land

Editor's note: this week we hired a new writer, who has not seen a television in fifteen years. How that came about is a long, sad story, and not relevant to our important business here. We asked him to watch the hit show "24" and write a review for us.

A clock starts ticking.

This is a clever say to establish dramatic tension. Two federal agents (a man, the hero, resembling a bulldog and a female red-haired hottie) attempt to interrogate a suspect in his spacious high-ceilinged loft. The suspect is either an artist or a writer because, as everyone knows, they are the only people disreputable enough to live in a loft.

In the first of many ironic twists, the woman is wearing a handsome tailored suit (sans tie) while the man is dressed like a hardware store clerk. The hero, dissatisfied with the suspect's reticence to talk, threatens to jam a pen in the suspect's ear. Woah, hold on there pardner -- when did Americans start torturing people to get information? Huge plot hole here.

Just as the suspect is getting ready to spill the beans, he is shot by a sniper.

The clock ticks on, not unlike a bomb. (Am I giving away the plot by saying that? Or am I merely making an analogy? See, it is a clever technique.)

Cut to a dark, dimly lit room full of attractive young people in front of computers. This, we discover, is an air traffic control center, the only one in the world without windows. Apparently, "eyes on" is no longer necessary in controlling air traffic. It's a screwy world.

The scene jumps to a well-lighted industrial setting where several ruggedly handsome, unshaven men are standing gravely before machines of villainy. You can tell these machines are lethal because they are sleek and portable. The air traffic controllers, meanwhile, sit before huge prelapsarian contrivances, and the traffic on their screens resembles a video game from the 1980s.

The scruffy guys contact a plane on landing approach and change its "vector," which lets the audience know that shabby clothes and poor hygiene are not synonymous with ignorance. Very effective. What is going on here is that the shabby guys have hijacked the air traffic guys gig, see? They lock them out of their own system.

Tick tick.

They achieve this via a mainstay of fictional villainy – they abduct and hold hostage a "genius." This genius built the geegaw that allowed the bad guys to control the planes. You can tell he's a genius because 1. he wears glasses and a sweater vest, 2. he looks, as do most geniuses, like a German clock-maker, and 3. geniuses are notoriously absent minded, ergo, the look of vague distraction on his bloodied face.

The good guys can't figure out what's going on. They call the FBI, and a serious dude answers. He, at least, is wearing a suit, that's how you know he's in charge. He is grave, unsmiling, face lined with gravitas, although he uses product in his hair, so he's also a little vain.

He can't figure out what's going on either, these shabby dudes have everyone flummoxed. I mean who would have thought that a few hirsute dudes sitting in a remote location could hijack a few planes and cause mayhem? Not me.

So the shabbies have complete control of the air traffic system and because the real controllers don't have windows, they can't see that two planes have been "revectored" to crash into one another. At the last second, the bad guys call off the collision. The FBI guy is shitting bricks by this point.

Tick tick.

Cut to our original two agents, the man and the hottie wearing men's clothes. The hottie is in charge (!) and has ordered the building where the sniper is located sealed off, trapping him inside.

The male agent, (his name is Jack Bower) isn't FBI (maybe that explains his sartorial choices). You can tell the woman is attracted to Bower because she treats him shabbily (a metaphor for marriage, methinks), and takes his gun away (clearly a metaphor for controlling his penis), leaving him emotionally and physically dependent on her.

But, Bower is a heavy dude, as we learn when another agent expresses his outrage that Congress is giving Bower a raw deal by making him testify about some former op. Heroically, Bower says the American people should know everything so that they can make up their own mind about what he's done.

Plot hole!

I mean come on, letting the American people know what's going on – do the writers think us stupid? And anyway, everyone knows that Congress doesn't ask hard questions about anything involving hijacked planes, or anything else related to national security.

Meanwhile, cut to the president, a tough looking woman showing some leg in a conservative skirt. The president wants to know how the hell they are locked out of the air traffic control system. No mention is made of adding windows to the air traffic control booth, tragically enough.

Tick tick.

Back at the crime scene a corrupt FBI agent helps the sniper escape the scene. But lo, Bower is on to him. How, you might ask, does he notice the sniper, now wearing a cheesy FBI jacket like everyone else? He obviously knows that FBI regs require all agents to wear clunky, esthetically abhorrent black shoes, shoes that scream "I am all business, no sexiness." The sniper is wearing … tan desert sniper's boots.

Here let me mention another plot hole. Now, everyone knows that having a woman in charge, and I mean in charge of anything where lives are at stake, is a bad, even a dangerous, idea.

Women are easily swayed, they are infirm of conviction, fickle, fickle, their minds can be easily changed, especially when worked upon by a roguishly handsome man with a gruff voice and a history of breaking eggs, so to speak.

You guessed it, the cad Bower, obviously a ladies man, knows all the right buttons to push and he convinces the red-haired hottie to go off the reservation, lie to her boss and break bureau protocols.

He gets his gun back.

Bower's got some moves, man, powerful stuff, no wonder those Senators want to question him.

Tick tick.

Bower and red-haired hottie follow the sniper through the streets of Washington, DC.

Plot hole bigger than the Grand freaking Canyon – following someone in DC traffic?

The sniper leads them back to the lair of the baddies. Red and Bower expertly slay several gunmen, in all ways displaying professional demeanor and no remorse – these two have killed before, no doubt about it.

The main baddy attempts to flee but Bower cracks him a couple times, roughs him up good while yelling questions in his face. You can see that Bower isn't constrained by legal niceties, which fact the writers would do well to exploit in future episodes. In any case, Bower got his man, and to make matters more interesting, he knows the bad guy from previous adventures.       

I'm a little confused, however, as to how the bad guys are smart enough to hijack air traffic, make calls that can't be traced, kill witnesses at will, and infiltrate the FBI and yet their escape plan is the same one used by petty thieves holding up a liquor store – namely, run like hell for the door.

Perhaps the writers realized the clock had run out, and that was the quickest way to tie it all up.

So to sum up, Bower corrupts the FBI hottie, who clearly wants him in a very unfederal way, and saves the day even though everyone looks down their nose at him.

Tick tick.