Wait, you think it’s ridiculous to imagine a president to deliberately funnelling illegal arms to terrorists?
Um, I’m not sure I should shatter your illusions here . . .
What are you talking about? Logan didn’t intend for any nerve gas to be used on U.S. soil. It was obvious all along that he didn’t intend for anything bad to happen on U.S. soil (including Palmer’s death). And if you think it’s inconceivable that a president might be involved in a scheme like this, you must have slept through the end of the term in your American history class in high school.
Okaaaaaaay. I’m not so invested in my opinion of a TV show that I’m going to start taking petty snipes at someone else’s education, so you go right ahead and pat yourself on the back there, sport. Good lord, what are you like in conversations about things that actually matter?
My problem, if such it is, is that I find insulting people’s education in the course of a discussion about a TV show of all things to be unnecessarily rude. This doesn’t feel like one of my more controversial opinions, to be honest; those mostly involve wetsuits or cricket, or both.
Anyway. I just don’t think anything really comparable has ever happened, and I don’t think it makes me an uneducated bozo to say so*. We’re talking about a secret Illuminati-esque cabal directing a puppet President to let terrorists hijack an airport on US soil to steal weapons of mass destruction; not some covert CIA project funnelling relatively small arms to militants in another country. Certainly, the whole show is overblown and exaggerated, and sure, some Presidents have done some dubious things (albeit never, I trust, at the behest of Emil from Robocop), but I just felt this was a whole new scale of what-the-fuck. This is just where my willing suspension of disbelief broke. If it didn’t for you, that’s fine. I just feel that this is a Clancy-esque escalation that will lead us inexorably to Jack Ryan–oops, I mean Bauer–being made President of the United States, yet still kicking terrorist butt while handcuffed upside down in a vat of irritable leeches or something. And the terrorists will have to be martians because we’ll have run out of other ones to use.
Actually, that sounds kinda cool.
Though an English high school education might be forgiven for perhaps not entirely concentrating on recent US history…
Frankly, if you found my comment that upsetting, you’re probably too thin-skinned to discuss anything with.
President Logan secretly sold nerve gas to foreign group on 24. President Reagan secretly sold arms to an enemy of the United States - Iran - to finance operations in Central America. It’s not exactly the same, but the differences are style and degree; a president secretly and treasonously selling weapons to a foreign power is not unprecedented. I simply don’t see how you can find it ridiculous when it’s just not all that different from something that happened 20 years ago. If you don’t believe there are secret groups high up in the government plotting things they don’t want out in the open, then you’re a lot more trusting than I am.
Oh, absolutely. Why, the way I attempted a return to levity positively screams of my inner torment. It’s quite possible I will go out tonight and lightly mutilate a kitten. And every time I kill a kitten, God masturbates; there’s gonna be God-spooge all over the shop, and it will all be your fault.
You ever meet a cheerful leech? That’s pure textual verisimilitude right there.
No, dear heart; the one after that, with the wetsuits and leeches and wotnot. Those were clues, see? Maybe if the leeches had been cheerful after all. Oh well.
It does. It’s up there in the first paragraph, under 11:00 A.M.-12:00 A.M. (They have the hourly blocks listed in reverse order, final hour at the top).
David Palmer is a bit of a tragic hero, isn’t he? His flaw is trusting Sherry - his own personal Iago - again and again. It’s sort of hard to imagine him calling on Sherry again in season 3, after what she did in seasons 1 and (especially) 2.
Logan wasn’t a terrorist. He didn’t want the terrorists to succeed, and he didn’t want the nerve gas to be used on U.S. soil.
He was in on a government plan to get the nerve gas into the hands of a terrorist cell, in an attempt to double-cross them and use it against them once it got to Russian soil. (i.e. use it against the terrorist cell).
This actually isn’t so different (except in scale) from the plot at the start of season 3 that Jack, Tony, and Gael hatched – to break Salazar out of prison in order to re-establish Jack undercover with the Salazar clan, make them think he was really going rogue and betraying CTU. That plan ended up causing the deaths of some innocents in the process, like the prison guard made to play Russian roulette with Jack. The main difference between the two plans was that Jack’s plan worked. Logan’s didn’t. (And the nerve gas plan inherently had more dangerous ramifications if it failed).
I agree with Excalibre’s assessment that Logan is essentially weak, indecisive, and manipulable. He’s also (like many politicians) largely concerned about his image and especially his “legacy”. I disagree that his taking part in the plot was out of “evil”, though – but he’s definitely less than moral. He’s pretty spineless – he allows himself to be manipulated into taking part in coverups and ruthless actions, thinking that maybe by allowing this one “evil” to take place, the whole situation will resolve itself and we’ll all be better off for it.
I think he was convinced by others that the “use the nerve gas to destroy the terrorist cell” plan was a good one, and a sound one that could succeed. He was probably easy to manipulate into going along with the plan, and even believing in it. (I’m sure he was not the “mastermind” of that plot). Unfortunately, there were other more evil and ruthless men in on the plot – especially Henderson, who is always willing to do anything and everything to futher his goals, even if it means killing anybody who crosses his path – and those influences caused the situation to go farther than Logan ever imagined it would. And after that point, Logan’s actions (after the “reveal”, especially) seem to be that of a man desperate to get himself out of the corner he has painted himself into. And too bad he doesn’t have the balls to draw the line and come forth with the truth when his fellow plotters cross the line and kill Palmer. Sure, he would take a hit politically, but he’d be a better person for it.
Yep – spineless, weak, manipulable.
As for Palmer – he was certainly shown to have a higher caliber character, but I think they let that slide a bit with season 3. When he gave in to his brother’s advice and kept his mouth shut about what he knew (about Sherry’s involvement in that guy’s death). He just allowed himself to be talked into participating in a cover-up. Had a little less respect for him that season…
He didn’t want to – but he knew he needed somebody conniving. Too bad for him that she went further than he ever thought she’d go. Yep – putting any trust in her was never too smart.
On the subject of the OP… I think the show has been careful to not be too liberal or too conservative. Although there have been plenty of things that each side might agree with, and plenty of things that each side might feel is poking at them.
I didn’t think that Jack’s “This country has no honor” statement was specifically a swipe at Bush. I saw that as simply a statement against the administration with Logan in charge.
One thing I find interesting (even somewhat amusing) about the show – in season 2, they explored the whole question of torture, especially as sanctioned by the government. Presented it as a moral dilemma – Palmer deciding whether or not to secretly torture Roger Stanton to extract information. (Torture by Jack is expected, and he gets a “Free Bad-ass Torture Pass” wherever he is). Also, I don’t recall automatic torture being part of CTU’s standard protocol in the first season (perhaps also in the second). You know, bring somebody in for questioning, then just put them in the room and send in the guy with the needles… Even when they brought in Reza and Bob, they just put them in a holding room and detained them for a long time.
Of course now, CTU just sends every perp in there straightaway – no moral dilemma at all. It’s now standard operating procedure. Suspicious of one of your CTU co-workers? Send them in for a torture session! Innocent bystander near the scene of the crime? Better pump some of those pain drugs into them, just to be sure! Nobody bats an eye. Not even us – now we cheer it on… (and then when the show’s over, we read about the latest in Iraqi prison protocols and yell, “Due process!”)
It didn’t really affect my view of him - perhaps because I’m morally weak enough that I would have done the same thing. In both seasons 1 and 3, he showed a brief willingness to cover the truth: in season 1, when he essentially said, “Damn it all, I’m going to win” - implying that he would do what it took to shut the reporter up. He was conflicted about it, but he was willing to play the game if he had to. It was only when he saw real evil happening - the murder of his son’s psychiatrist - that he decided to take the truly noble path. Same goes in season 3 - he was willing to cover up what happened up to a point. He wasn’t willing to try to cover up Sherry and Julia’s deaths, but he was willing to cover up Alan Milliken’s. Not because he wanted to protect Sherry from what she deserved, but because the news would inevitably have tanked his campaign, even when what happened wasn’t his fault. In the end, he decided to drop out of the race when it became too dirty.
At any rate, I guess I have a hard time calling him evil for that. He made the right decision in the end, even though it meant a supreme act of self-sacrifice. But in both cases, the evil he was tempted to do was in the name of a greater good - there’s no doubt that he decided to run for president out of a desire to do good things. And his initial dirty engagement with Milliken was out of a desire not to have his presidency be beholden to powerful donors. He was tempted both times to do evil in the name of doing good - and even if he did try to cover up Sherry’s role in Milliken’s death, it seems to me that allowing his presidency to end (and let those douchebags Keeler and Logan into office!) isn’t exactly right in itself.
Obviously he’s not morally perfect. Covering up what Sherry did was immoral. But it’s hard for me to imagine that I - or most people - wouldn’t have done the same thing. It wasn’t right for his sociopathic wife to destroy his presidency. And he obviously could do some real good for the country by staying in office. It’s not a morally easy decision - nor, I think, would it have worked to have Palmer be unerringly morally perfect. That doesn’t work from a narrative perspective, and it doesn’t really create a man of character to hide the real moral ambiguity of his situation by making him always prissily correct. I guess to me it shows the difficulty of a moral person operating in an immoral world, which simply makes for compelling drama.
It’s sad how much I’ve thought about this. In my defense, I only saw seasons 1 and 3 in the last couple weeks. I’m not always like this.
Right. But Logan and Bush have certain obvious similarities; season 5 could in many ways be taken as a clear polemic against neoconservatism.
Definitely a blow against the idea of 24 as a liberal manifesto.
Nope. Having watched most of the other seasons, I kept expecting them to bring in a Torture Guru in season 1, but they never did.
Do they have “torture drugs” like that in real life? I’m aware that torture is used by governments, but I find something particularly creepy about the injecting of pain drugs. Is that what it’s supposed to be? I think they call it “chemical interrogation”. Sometimes it seems clear that they’re torturing people, but other times I wondered if they were using sodium pentothol or something (probably alongside psychological interrogation techniques.)
Oh, I certainly didn’t see Palmer as evil. I did see him as a politician, which meant that sometimes he played the politics game, which seldom allows you to remain squeaky clean. But I’d say his bad moves in season 3 were too often a result of listening to his brother, allowing himself to be swayed by bad advice from Wayne.
I’ll agree that Logan is a douchebag, but I didn’t see Keeler that way. In fact, from season 4, I had an impression of Keeler as a decent president. And dammit, I still want to find out what happened to him! He was in the hospital, but still alive, last we heard in season 4. So why the hell was Logan still prez in season 5?! – unless Keeler did die, in surgery or something…
I think that they were careful to not identify Palmer with any specific political party in the first couple seasons – so he could have ended up being a Democrat or Republican, or even a member of the Monstre party (which will come to prevalence with my run for president in 2008)… Unless I misremembered, I think the first time they specified his political party (Dem) was in season 3?
“Yet Julia kills Shery.”
The post said Sherry was stabbed. How did Julia kill her? Did she shoot her? Stab her? Poison her? Did she drown her in the kitchen sink? Turns out she indeed shot her.
Palmer’s brother has been found, and will return for season 6, following in big bro’s political footsteps, according to a short blurb in today’s newspaper.
What are you talking about? Logan didn’t intend for any nerve gas to be used on U.S. soil. It was obvious all along that he didn’t intend for anything bad to happen on U.S. soil (including Palmer’s death). And if you think it’s inconceivable that a president might be involved in a scheme like this, you must have slept through the end of the term in your American history class in high school.