24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY Episodes 1 & 2
Episode Title: “Day 9: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m”
Writers: Evan Katz & Manny Coto
Director: Jon Cassar
Episode Title: “Day 9: 12:00 P.M. – 1:00 p.m”
Writers: Robert Cochran & David Fury
Director: Jon Cassar
The good news about “24: Live Another Day” is that Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has survived the four year hiatus fully intact. Jack is as much of a badass as he always was and Sutherland’s performance demands attention at all times even when Jack isn’t speaking.
On the action front, “24: Live Another Day” also manages to maintain its reputation with some exciting sequences. The former creative team of “24” was largely reassembled for this miniseries and it feels very much like the ninth season of that show.
However, some of the weaker aspects of “24” have also made the transition. “Live Another Day” heavily draws upon Drone warfare, Wikilinks and Eric Snowden, but it feels like a very dumbed down version of our reality. Unfortunately, “24’s” trademarked unpredictability has also become very predictable. Who wants to take bets on which CIA agent will secretly be a mole? And when Simone Al-Harazi (Emily Berrington) turns on someone close to her at the end of episode two, it was a twist that I had already guessed earlier in the episode.
Four years after it went off the air, “24” feels a little less special than it did when it dominated the TV action landscape for close to a decade. Since then, “Strike Back” has taken over the role of the best action series on TV. Although neither Stonebridge or Scott from “Strike Back” have the same level of intensity that Sutherland brings to Jack Bauer even now. On a side note, I believe that Colin Salmon may be the first actor to have been on both “Strike Back” and “24.” He shows up in this miniseries as an American General.
From this point on, there are full spoilers ahead for “24: Live Another Day” episodes 1 and 2, so if you missed last night’s premiere then you should probably skip this review or else you’ll be transferred to those freaks at Special Activities.
For most of the first hour, Jack keeps his mouth shut after a CIA team led by Steve Navarro (Benjamin Bratt) manages to capture him… a little bit too easily. Only disgraced CIA agent Kate Morgan (Yvonne Strahovski) realizes that Jack wanted to get captured. But no one will listen to this season’s leading heroine, forcing her to go rogue in a vain attempt to stop Jack from escaping at will.
With only a handful of returning performers from the original series, “Live Another Day” has to take a lot of time to establish the new supporting cast… to varying degrees of success. Kate is tolerable, but her team up with Jack is inevitable and I’m already tired of her chasing him. But Erik Ritter (Gbenga Akinnagbe) really got on my nerves with his constant positioning for Kate’s job and his naked ambition. It’s like the writers decided that Erik could only have one characteristic and it’s driven home in scene after scene to nauseating effect. We get it, Erik is ambitious and he’s a dick. Imagine how interesting he could be if he had other facets to his personality.
Steve is another problem character in that he seems a bit stupid in his dealings with Jack and Kate. Steve is the authority figure within the CIA team on this show, which means that the writers are already placing him on the wrong side of things to build up Kate. Honestly, it’s not a very effective way to establish either Kate or Steve. I can’t help but think back to the first season of “24” when Nina, Tony and George were all interesting characters who quickly established their personalities. Now all we have is the shorthand version of characterization.
The reason that Jack allowed himself to be taken is so he could rescue Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) from the torture freaks at Special Activities. Of course, it’s glossed over how Jack even knew that Chloe was there, but whatever. For her part, Chloe has been given a ridiculous Girl With The Dragon Tattoo style makeover that just kind of makes me laugh every time I see it. No matter how tough Chloe has supposedly gotten, I can’t buy into her so-called transformation.
It turns out that Jack doesn’t trust Chloe to help him prevent a terrorist plot against President James Heller (William Devane), so he fools her into re-joining her hacker collective and her fugitive boyfriend, Adrian Cross (Michael Wincott). He’s the Julian Assange figure in this storyline, although Adrian isn’t Jack’s main target. That honor belongs to Derek Yates (Joseph Millson), a rogue hacker who managed to come up with a way to override military Drones as demonstrated by an attack that killed four soldiers in Afghanistan.
The fallguy for the Drone attacks is Chris Tanner (John Boyega), who gets his own subplot as he is charged with murder and he is essentially thrown to the wolves by the President. I don’t know if Chris is going to have a larger role in this story, but the military’s case against him seems unintentionally funny. They really think that Chris caused the Drone strike because his asshole of a commander wouldn’t give him the weekend off?!
“24” always features the President in his or her own subplots and this miniseries is no exception. So far, the weasel in the White House staff is Mark Boudreau (Tate Donovan), who attempts to keep Jack’s reappearance a secret from both the President and from Audrey Heller (Kim Raver), Jack’s former lover and Mark’s wife. For now, Mark seems misguided rather than evil. But it’s clear that Mark is a bit of a moron if he really believes everything that he said about Jack.
As much as Audrey has mentally recovered from the last time she was seen on ‘24,” President Heller seems to be mentally slipping as he suffers from a degenerative condition. This will inevitably lead to disaster at some point in this shortened season. For now, it just leads to some painfully awkward scenes of Heller messing up some details. But the scene in which Heller practiced his address to the British Parliament was far too long and even boring at times.
Throughout the second hour, we get glimpses of this year’s big bad… or one of them: Margot Al-Harazi (Michelle Fairley). She hasn’t been mentioned by name yet, but it’s hard not to picture her as an evil Catelyn Stark. The reveal that Simone was her daughter was also one of the biggest eye-rolling moments of the night.
That said, I did enjoy the first two episodes of “Live Another Day.” So far, it’s much better than the last few seasons of “24.” But “24” is always a marathon instead of a sprint. The way the story plays out will determine whether it was a good idea to resurrect “24.” For now, I’m just glad that Jack is back.
