Suddenly, 24 had its groove back.  First, Jack failed to stop the Russian assassination of “Islamic Republic of Kamistan” President Hassan.  In the next episode, Jack gets his first real-time sex scene–only to see love interest Renee immediately killed by a sniper.  Simultaneously, President Taylor seeks dubious advice from disgraced ex-President Logan (returning from season 5), hiding Russia’s involvement in the murders to protect an international peace accord.  As a result, Jack goes over the edge, delivering as “judge, jury, and executioner” the justice Taylor will not: he  eviscerates the sniper, impales the Russian ambassador with a fire poker, attacks Logan’s secret service convoy, and in the finale, almost kills the Russian president.  Kidnappings, graphic politicized murders, sudden attacks on woefully inept US security forces–this was vintage 24!

But with a twist.

I’ve always considered my reading of 24 to be negotiated, in that I do not interpret the series as reactionary and pro-torture as some “fans” like Rush Limbaugh and Antonin Scalia famously have.  To me, Jack Bauer is one of the most deep, fascinating characters on television because he represents the emotional and social folly of “extreme” interrogation and security policies.  Granted, 24 has always problematically suggested that torture can deliver actionable intelligence–but Jack shows us the costs of such delivery.  Jack may repeatedly stop terrorist attacks, but at the expense of his loved ones, the health of the American political institution, and ultimately, his own humanity.  Jack’s character arc is a gradual loss of character, with him becoming a more pitiable, pathetic killing machine each season.  Maybe that’s not how most viewers saw this show, but the way I read it, Jack is a cultural argument against extralegal security measures.

These final episodes, then, actually bolster my reading by reversing Jack’s position in these stock 24 plots.  Jack is no longer the protagonist, or even an anti-hero, but an antagonist who must be stopped by cooler minds like his former sidekick Chloe.  Jack effectively becomes the unstable terrorist, his actions described not as “interrogations” or “operations”, but with terms like “murderer” and “slaughterhouse.”  Though Jack had “gone rogue” before, he had never been portrayed as unhinged in taking liberties with the law; Jack loses it, however, after using a blow torch to torture the Russian sniper, exasperated that “This isn’t working!”  In the penultimate hour, Chloe confronts Jack; there’s a palpable danger that crazy Jack may actually kill her rather than calling off his attack.  Though Chloe brings him back to reason, he’s taken prisoner  and almost entirely removed from the canvas for the final hour of the series.  His only major scene is a shared admission of guilt with the President.  It’s up to Chloe’s non-violent methods and a penitent political establishment to bring the story to resolution and rescue Jack from an execution squad. Jack, ultimately, is irrelevant, expelled from the nation as an outlaw.  Of course, that’s not entirely new to 24, echoing Jack’s previous exiles after seasons 4 and 6.  But that only strengthens my reading, in that the finale reaffirms the recurring rejection of men like Jack from the social order.

I know many viewers celebrate Jack for his lack of humanity, gleefully tallying the Bauer kill count.  Maybe my read is even a little naive in that light.  But even so, I think we need to recognize the end of 24 for what it brought to the “cultural forum” of television as a lens through which viewers could imagine a decade of war, institutional ineptitude, and narrowing civil rights in multiple and rarely  cohesive ways.  It wasn’t a poetic reflection on fate and free will, to be sure, but something more contradictory and urgent.

Daisy (looking around interior of car): Why do you drive a minivan? Do you have kids that we don’t know about?
Angela: I’m an artist, Daisy, and the Sienna has plenty of room, plus I stink at parallel parking and that back-up camera thing is like the invention of the century.
Daisy nods.

…and they return to plot-related discussion.

This post could be about the seeming ubiquity of scripted product placement lately–even though that’s nothing new.  Early radio, after all, had to script their sponsor plugs (audiences couldn’t see them using Vaseline, they had to talk about it).  And shows like Alias and 24 have long irritated fans with their lingering, loving shots of Fords driven by superspies and superagents.  Televisionary has this 2006 post about when product placement goes too far, citing the presence of scripted product integration within dramas and comedies as particularly bothersome (as opposed to such integration within unscripted programming).  Jace even critiques Alias outright–in particular, an episode when the characters discuss that the “quietness” of the electric Ford Hybrid is useful for their mission.

But this post isn’t about scripted product placement, despite its prevalance and increasing audacity.  No, this post is actually about a particular moment–the one roughly scripted above.  It’s certainly the kind of thing that might irritate viewers by taking them out of the narrative through an awkward, somewhat stilted conversation related to the vehicle being driven.  But, as an audience member myself, after my initial annoyance and eye-rolling, I realized that, in fact, this particular instance of product placement was actually pretty brilliant, and a definite coup on the part of Toyota.

You see, this isn’t just placement touting the general benefits/awesomeness of the product.  No, this particular moment not only “works” (more or less) within the context of the series (Angela is, in fact, an artist and not a soccer mom)–it works within the context of Toyota’s current ad campaign for the Sienna.  The campaign focuses on redeeming the minivan and making it cool.  The key spot for the campaign, known as the “Swagger Wagon” ad, is below.  (See the entire campaign here.)

This ad, and the rest of the campaign, focus on touting the Sienna as a family vehicle, yes–but more than that, it’s depicted as much cooler and more deisrable than the stereotypical minivan, long believed to be the preferred car of “lame” soccer moms and dads.  The recurring punchline of “Daddy like” and “Mommy like” and, of course, the goofy “Swagger Wagon” concept underscore the reimagining of the minivan.

And this is why the Bones moment is so fantastic.  The Sienna appears, yes.  It is even mentioned within the script.  But even better, the treatment of the product placement underscores the larger campaign–the van is depicted as belonging to Angela, the most hip, least nerdy, childless character on the series, and she’s able to explain why she loves the van despite its “mom” reputation.

Regardless of whether Toyota arranged for this particular treatment of the Sienna within the script, or if they simply lucked out because the Bones writers decided to give the van to the character least likely (or maybe not, if we believe the campaign) to own a van, this particular moment of product placement takes scripted integration from irritating to genius.  (For the sponsor, if not for fans.)

Losing 24 at the same time as Lost, I’m struck by how different the swan songs of these two long-running, heavily serialized shows are.  (At this point, I imagine Antenna‘s die-hard Lost contingent saying, “yeah, the difference is that 24 sucks!”–but bear with me).  We’ve been anticipating  Lost s finale literally for years, since the producers announced an “end date” in 2007.  For 24, the official cancellation decision  (more for growing production costs than abysmal ratings) comes only about six weeks before the final airdate.  With only two hours reportedly left to produce, there’s scant time for producers to bring any closure or unity to the series beyond this single season.   I’m not arguing that 24 needed more–the writing on the wall certainly permitted producers to plan for this possibility, and I’d argue that the series slid into a gravity well of mediocrity from which there could be no wholly satisfying escape years ago.  Instead, I’d say this sudden finish tells us a lot about what kind of serialized show 24 was, and points to an alternative serialized aesthetic beside that which is privileged by Lost.

If the eighth season of 24 had been planned as its last, what would the producers have done differently?  Uncover the German threat hinted at in seasons one and two?  Bring back fallen Bauer BFF Tony Almeida for a shot at redemption?  Wrap up the fates of characters like Behrooz, Wayne Palmer, or Lynn Kresge who abruptly disappeared from the screen?  Hardly.  The producers of 24 repeatedly claimed to resist long term outlooks, rarely planning beyond the next four episode arc and leaving the story open for organic development.  Characters and narrative threads that didn’t pan out were dropped and retconned along the way as the producers explored other possibilities.  I’m not saying the Lost producers don’t do that too, but in their promotional discourse, the Lost producers have also promised that their complex tale will cohere in the end.  For ten years, 24 has implicitly promised the opposite.  Very little will cohere as a unified tale; instead you’ll get a bunch of wild, sudden twists that won’t stand long-term scrutiny, but stand to pack a punch in the moment of delivery.  My current criticism of 24‘s storytelling style is less that things don’t make sense, and more that the writers have deployed the same outlandish in-the-moment surprises so often that a friend-killed-resurrected-turned-enemy-then-friend-then-enemy (see Season 7) IS coherent in the context of the show’s history, and thus lacks any thrill.  Had the writers more time to plan a series finale, I’m confident they’d provide no more sense of unity–perhaps only a few more good surprises to further thwart unity.

24 will be justly remembered for serving as a forum for deliberating and reimagining citizenship, governmentality, and national policy in an age of convergence fantasy and real world terror.  But I think 24 also embodies the rise to primetime of another kind of viewing pleasure–one, perhaps more soaplike, obscured by the privilege accorded classical notions of unified closure.  Gary Morson argues that serial narratives are best considered not in terms of poetics, but “tempics”–an in-the-moment aesthetic of contingency and possibility.  By offering an ending on-the-fly, I expect that the producers will not provide unified, coherent closure, but a new set of contingent possibilities that hopefully have impact in the moment–even if they don’t make a lot of sense.