Five minutes in, and we’ve got an exotic (but familiar) urban setting (London); we’ve got suspicious men heading down an urban ally; and we have split screen! It’s like those four intervening years never happened.
Except, there has been some evolution within the secrecy industry. Twenty-four hour urban surveillance is pretty much a given. Those men are agents, and they deploy little robots to search for and provide intel on their prey, sleeping rough in a flop house (exploring a flop house is how we got Sub-Mariner back, it’s always the best way to start a story!). Their prey, of course, is Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland).
We’ve also got a CTU equivalent, in the London office of the American CIA, which also supervises to some extent another American operation, a drone deployment base providing services to the Middle East. Drone bombing, robot cameras, there’s a lot of things Jack has to stay current with if he wants to keep off the grid as he has done for the intervening years. But as one shamed agent makes note of on her final day (her husband turned out to be a mole, compromising the entire department), that’s not what he wants at all. He wants in, and not just to the main facility, but into their Special Activities wing, where the hardcore miscreants are kept.
Now just who could he want to bust out of there?
On other fronts, President Heller (William Devane) and his daughter Audrey (Kim Raver) are in London for diplomatic reasons relating to the stealth aircraft, and that’s not going so hot because the President has a degenerative mental condition and Audrey has gotten herself married to Tate Donovan, which never goes well. I mean, that guy’s whole existence is about keeping Ross away from Rachel, or Sandra Bullock away from Dennis Quaid or in this case Audrey away from Jack, another inevitable destiny. Basically, I’m counting the weeks until Jack has to torture the hell out of him for any reason at all.
That brings up my enjoyment of this show, which many friends (who perceive the show as a Bush-era relic) find unlikely. I’ve never been one to see Jack as standing for any one political agenda over another; his ruthlessness serves the ends of protecting the President (usually) and catching the criminals. Sutherland is an actor I’ve identified with since Lost Boys, vicariously, and Jack, let’s face it, is a vigilante. A super-vigilante, compared to normal folks. It’s like watching a Bourne movie, except with more soap opera.
At one point, surrounded by several men with guns (drug dealers in a London council flat) he gives them a chance to just flee before he messes their shit up, which they scoff at until he wipes the floor with them with ease. It’s the same reason I own a copy of Taken, except 24 has always made the stakes higher than “not without my daughter!”
Thankfully, Kim is only mentioned in passing in the debut. He’s not looking for family in the CIA. Or at least he doesn’t think he is. No, he’s looking for Chloe Obrien (Mary Lynn Rajskub)! Basically, due to her own scars from their careers, she’s turned her considerable computer skills to the services of Wiki-Leaks, and she even leads Jack back to her version of Julian Assange when he of course frees her.
Everybody thinks Jack is there to go after Heller, but he’s really resurfaced in order to (as always) protect American interests. His years outside the law have made him paranoid and expressionless, to the extent that he manipulates Chloe to get her help rather than just, as she points out to him, asking her. She clearly would have said yes, as she does anyway, not allowing him to enter the drug den without technical support. You can cover the hacker in the punk rock London Look all you want, but you’ll never take the hacker out of the girl!
The questions that remain involve an evil mother figure who used one of Chloe’s associates to take over a drone as a test of further sabotage, ruining the life of an American soldier and authentic drone operator at the strategic English base. If there’s anything I’ve ever objected about with the politics of 24, it’s the number of femme fatales the show revels in. Usually there’s a counter-balance of some sort, a Michelle Dressler for every Nina Meyers, an Audrey Raines for every Dina Araz. Yep, that still leaves us with the virgin/whore dynamic, I realize.
It remains to be seen whether Kate Morgan (Yvonne Strahovski) is more of a Michelle or instead a disaster in training like Renee Walker. Let’s just hope she’s not another Dana Walsh. We’ve already got a literal femme fatale in our evil mother’s daughter, who was keeping her eye on the drone genius while masquerading as a Russian floozy. Yeah, tricky masquerades, wonder how many of those they’ll fit into this half-length season? But there’s good news. The English Prime Minister is Stephen Fry. Personally I don’t know how I’ve lived this long without some Fry/Devane face-offs!