It’s time for another installment of my alternate column to Best Episode Ever, featuring the Worst Episode Ever of the beloved series “24.” This is all in good fun. Even the best shows have missteps, and “24” was perhaps more susceptible to missteps than other shows because of its very ambitious premise.
“24” made a big promise in its very pilot: an entire day’s worth of hour long shows, each representing an hour of real time to tell a complete 24 hour story. The fact that they made it to the end of a first season was a miracle, let alone eight. Of course, getting there sometimes required some creative logic, and some leaps were more egregious than others. We’ll always have seasons four and five though to prove that “24” did indeed work.
Season two, “6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.” contains the most egregious leap and is the Worst Episode Ever because of it. Yes, it’s the one with the mountain lion. In order to create some danger for Kim Bauer (Elisha Cuthbert) and put her story on hold long enough for other things to happen, “24” had to face a mountain lion. While Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) pursued Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, Kim was caught in an animal trap in the woods.
Poor Kim Bauer. “24” really never figured out what to do with her, and even having her join CTU in the third season didn’t work. She would leave the show, only to return as a guest star occasionally to provide Jack some emotional turmoil. This episode epitomized Kim at her most useless, but it’s not Kim’s fault. She was trying to be part of the story.
We laugh now, because falling into a booby trap in the woods is essentially a sub-Saturday Morning Serial (chapter plays as Annie Wilkes calls them) level gimmick. They just need something to get us to next week, so how about random trap? When the mountain lion shows up, you can virtually hear the cheesy Saturday morning announcer narrate, “Will Kim escape the clutches of the evil mountain lion? Tune in next week, same time, same channel!”
“24” actually was our generation’s movie serial, and I loved it for that. We no longer have episodic adventures showing in movie theaters. The box office is controlled by major blockbusters, so it’s only on television where we can get a continuing story week to week, each week ending in a cliffhanger, the next week getting out of it only to fall into another cliffhanger. The mountain lion wasn’t even worthy of a cliffhanger though. It happened in the middle of the show.
In the previous hour, Kim had been in the backseat of a police car, but didn’t know she was being taken into CTU custody, so her boyfriend started a fire and crashed the police car. Kim spends this episode running from the crash into the woods. She spots the mountain lion at 35 minutes in, and falls into the cougar trap. In the rest of the episode she’s just a square in the split screen looking at the mountain lion.
I think the heart was in the right place. “24” could be about all the daily nuisances that can becomes stresses. Not every single one had to be directly related to terrorism. However, straying too far away from political territory made it feel like a different show, a lesser show. Notice they never really played up a traffic jam as one of Jack’s obstacles. On the contrary, real world traffic never delayed the story from going where it needed to go.
This detour also infects Jack’s story for the episode, as he has to spend considerable time on the phone with George Mason (Xander Berkeley) demanding that he find Kim. Kim’s story would get perhaps arguably worse when she spends a few episodes with a woodsman who pretends the bomb has gone off to keep her with him, but I think most would agree the mountain lion was the low point. The woodsman is just digging Kim’s way back out.
The rest of the hour is no worse than any other placeholder episode. It’s banal, but not cringe-worthy, although it doesn’t do anything noteworthy to redeem the episode. Jack sends Kate Warner (Sarah Wynter) undercover inside a mosque to locate the season’s big bad Syed Ali. It’s a suspenseful idea, but it lasts less than one act so they really don’t play up the Hitchcockian potential of it.
Sherry Palmer (Penny Jarold Johnson) continues to be the most unconvincing manipulator ever. Is there ever a line of dialogue from her that doesn’t sound blatantly evil? In this episode, President Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) arrests NSA head Roger Stanton so we’ve got two standard mole stories a la Nina Meyers going on, Roger and Sherry. President Palmer hires Ted Simmons (Steven Culp) to interrogate Stanton, so enhanced interrogation was already the lazy go-to plot device in season two.
Marie Warner (Laura Harris), who has just killed Reza Naiyeer (season two’s red herring), sleeps with his boss over a single commercial break to get into his locker. Marie and Kate’s father is still in CTU custody freaking out and Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) has to break the news to him that his daughter may be a terrorist and a murderer. There are hints at addressing Tony and Michelle (Reiko Aylesworth)’s relationship too, but again only a placeholder.
The mountain lion became such memorable “24” lore, it makes this the episode we love to hate. “24” would possibly get more redundant and repetitive in more problematic later seasons, but those episodes would just coast on unmemorable mediocrity. By those points, “24” would be coasting on the highs of seasons four and five so perhaps we’d be more forgiving. The mountain lion is the Worst Episode Ever.
