Friday, January 12, 2007

24: right wing propaganda?

Chloe and I have been getting caught up with 24 (the TV series). I only
really liked the first season, and even that one was so full of
ludicrous situations, gratuitous interpersonal problems, nonsense
"computer speak" and inexplicably dumb behavior that my fast forward
button got a lot of action. But hey, its no worse than most Hollywood
movies, and it's on TV/Netflix. The season that we are watching right now (Season 4), however seems to be a departure from the already pretty pro-government-propaganda heavy earlier seasons. Season 4 has the Counter Terrorism Unit confronted by the by now usual "quandaries" of how much force to use when extracting information from witnesses. After the second questioning, most of the dramatic tension is lost though, because everyone always ends up getting injected,tazered or brutalized anyway. It always made me vaguely uncomfortable that the storyline frequently makes you *want* CTU to use any means necessary. Those moments weren't very frequent in older episodes, and more disturbingly, this season introduced the
remarkable subplot in which the terrorist, who has run out of options,
calls "Amnesty Worldwide" who dispatch a sleazy BMW driving lawyer toCTU
who prevents the use of torture to interrogate of the suspect. This
causes valuable time to be lost in the pursuit of the crazy nuclear
terrorist. Hmmm.

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