News > TW RECAP (Sorta): Twenty-Four, 5/21/07

May 22, 2007

Written by Anthony Burch 

Alright, look. You're a fan of 24. Enough of a fan to know that the season finales are generally the most important part of every season. So, that being said, you won't find a detailed TW summary of the events of the two-part finale. To read a summary would defeat the entire point of watching the finale, and therefore defeat the entire point of 24 in general. Instead, let's move straight on to the reaction, with some obvious spoilerage.

WHAT THE SHIT.

Never in the history of 24 have we been forced to bear witness to such a criminally underwhelming and wholly uneventful finale as tonight's. After all the talk from the producers about an "explosive" ending that was unlike "anything we'd ever seen before," what did we get? A short gunfight, a few explosions, and thirty minutes of denouement that ultimately went nowhere. The producers, once again, outright lied: they said this finale would set the next season up as a wholly different series, going in a totally new direction.

Given that the (literal) cliffhanger of this series presents a completely ridiculous dilemma (Will Jack kill himself? Will he not? Of course he fucking won't, he's Jack Bauer.) that, unless Jack plans on spending the entirety of the next season cutting himself and posting to his MySpace, doesn't even set up a new direction for the series. 

Overall, I wish I'd spent my time watching the last episode of Heroes.

UPDATE:

Firstly, I received some angry email due to my reaction to the season finale. For the sake of further explaining my views, here is the email that was sent to me and my response to it. 

Secondly, I just watched the last episode of Heroes, and I wish I'd spent my time doing something that didn't involve me watching the last episode of Heroes.

"Dear Anthony Burch,

You are an absent minded fool and your views are pointless and shit. the
24 season finale was one of the best and nothing we had ever seen. Yes
we know he won't jump however the fact that he is considering it is
something that will make you feel sorry for him and that fact even
though he is Jack Bauer, he is still human. What we have witnessed in
this season finale is 6 days all bottled up inside of jack that has
finally come open. It leaves the viewer wondering what will happen to
Jack next season and what sort of person he will be.


It would take someone with sense to realise this and your journalistic
integrity has been tarnished. Stick to reporting TV news and keep the
opinion pieces to people who know what they are doing.

Your Sincerely,
(Name removed, for privacy reasons)"
 
My response:
Dear (name removed),
To put it bluntly, you're wrong-- we have seen many of these things before. The "Jack is still human" scene? Did it in season three, when he cried in the final moments of the finale. The "what will Jack do now" scene? Season four, after Jack is officially dead and must walk into the sunset, leaving everyone he loves behind.
 
The problem with the finale is that the producers promised it would set up another season unlike anything we'd ever seen before: as it stands, this definitely won't be the case. Day six was pretty hard for Jack, but he's most assuredly dealt with worse, and we've seen the character handled with more grace in the seasons mentioned above. Jack's bottled feelings have come open multiple times, and, though I do like the image of Jack contemplating the future on that cliff, it's nothing we haven't seen before and it doesn't fulfill the promise of setting up a new, totally different season.
 
The producers seem to repeatedly promise that Jack will change as a character, but he invariably always comes back to the tough-talking torturer we all know and love: they toyed with the idea that he might be unable to torture after what he went through in China this season, but that character point disappeared almost instantly.
As much as you might like to think that Jack really will change for good, based on what we've seen over the past six years, he more than likely won't -- and if he was really going to, it certainly wouldn't have hurt if the writers had showed us how he might change, instead of giving us a cliffhanger with familiar implications we've faced over and over throughout the years.
 
 
 

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