24 4th season - 2005

24
Imagine Television
Reveille
Fox Television Studios

This post is not for children.
This post includes many spoilers and assumes either the reader watched "Day 4" of 24 or doesn't care about the end being ruined. If this is not true, please move on to the next post. This post also includes a spoiler from the Fox broadcast of 24 earlier this week.

Terrorists' wanton lack of respect for human life really struck me in this particular season. It's interesting how the death of a handful of characters I see on a tv screen--especially if those characters are innocent women and children--can have as strong an effect as, say, "271 die in airborne collision" from this week's episode. In one sequence, the terrorists, led by the madman Habib Marwan, planned to shoot down Air Force One in hopes of recovering the nuclear football. This, in turn, would give them the launch codes to launch a nuclear attack against an American city. The plot began with a fighter pilot assigned to a B-117A Stealth fighter sortie that evening. Finishing an encounter with his girlfriend, he receives a call on her cellphone (which he found odd) from his wife. His wife and children are being held hostage. His assignment is to smuggle an impostor, Mitch Anderson, into the Air Force base where he was to report for duty. If he does not, the terrorists would wipe out his family. He does as he was told. Then they kill his family (off-screen, obviously since there were children), and the impostor shoots him. Just awful. I wish he had thought this through. For one thing, he knew that the on-base security included biometrics. For the two of them to walk up to the door while he put his finger on the pass panel for the impostor to walk in just didn't make sense. After killing the pilot, the impostor amputated his finger and used it to enter the secure area. Someone tells Anderson the flight was to be postponed 12 hours due to a mechanical problem, so he shoots that guy, too. Anderson does succeed in shooting down Air Force One, severely wounding the president. The vice president takes over in his place. The terrorists are able to recover one page of the nuclear football and launch one missile, which the Counter Terrorist Unit and the Air Force manage to blow up midair in the show's final hour. Unfortunately CTU was too late in discovering the plot to prevent the loss of Air Force One. The Air Force did shoot down Mitch Anderson's bomber.

Another example was an extended sequence in the final episodes of the season. After the terrorists launch the missile armed with the nuclear warhead, CTU discovers a possible lead on Habib Marwan's location. They hope to reach him before the missile reached its target. The lead--a couple working for Marwan--just finished an amorous encounter and were about to leave their apartment complex for the rendezvous with Marwan when Mandy (the stunning Jewish actress Mia Kirshner) notices a helicopter landing a block away. Realizing she needs to make a clean getaway, she shoots her boyfriend. She then shoots and kills a CTU field agent before taking Tony Almeida, another CTU agent, hostage. While she has Almeida, she walks into her next-door neighbors' apartment and shoots two of them. Then somehow she forces another pair of them to leave, hoping CTU will think the pair is actually herself and Almeida.* They go to their car, which blows up as soon as they enter it. So she killed six people in the space of a couple of hours. Her attempted escape, with Almeida in tow, ultimately fails. In exchange for a full pardon, including the attempted murder of President David Palmer in an earlier season, she reveals Marwan's escape location--the helipad atop Global Center. (I cannot find that building or company in Los Angeles.) Marwan hurls himself off the side of the building rather than be captured, but CTU is able to recover data from his cellphone that reveals the missile's flight path. If the missile had hit its intended target, Los Angeles, the loss of life could have been in the millions. But I was more shocked by the pilot's family being wiped out and Mandy's shooting spree.


*Can anyone explain how she forced these innocent people to leave and enter their vehicle without going to police?