24 is too paranoid now, thank you2 min read

okay so i admit it. i watch 24.
scary stuff! super paranoid! US american propaganda!

today i’ll watch the last episode of season 4, that aired, i believe, last monday or so.
in season 4 24 is still very well done televison. it still totally hooks you into the story line. keeps your pulse racing. and when one is done it still makes you long for the next episode. and: great gadgets!

but man, politically it has gotten sooo out of hand. i try, of course, to take the political stuff with a healthy dose of detachment and objectivity.
but the messages can be relatively subtle. what if i only catch the most obvious ones?

with season 4 it has finally gotten 100% clear that this tv series does not mainly aim to entertain, but its agenda is to participate in the political debate. fox and its openly right wing political agenda coming through.

attention: [spoilers] for instance, in a time when torture gets discussed very controversially in the US there are a surprisingly high number of torture-like scenes to be seen. the torture does not get questioned, on the contrary, it get covered up. this is strongly suggesting what the right wing claims, that torture should be an accepted means in certain cirumstances. for instance, the defense minister orders “torture” to be used on his own son, his son an environmental activist who also turns out to be gay; it is suggested that all of this he has become, because he hates his father and not so much his politics. in one particularly gruesome scene jack bauer barges into the CTU in-house medical facility with an injured suspect and orders the surgery in progress – on his girlfriends ex-husband, mind you – to be suspended so the suspect can be saved, because he might have some information to solve the case. the ex dies, the suspect as well. but he does spit out the info with his last breath. jack was right. again. [/spoilers]
somehow less surprising: when someone switches on the news on TV it’s of course fox news they tune into. and it goes without saying that everybody is still out to bring the US to its knees.

i recently read about this group of men in zureich, who watch 24 together, enthusiastically, claiming 24 is for them what sex and the city was for women, a way to bond over a TV series. they openly adore jack bauer, see him as a role model. a true hero. scary, huh? the sonntagszeitung ran an article about these guys and there was not one mention of the politics of the show, not even that it gets produced by the fox network. i wonder how much of the underlying politics these guys catch or if they are mostly engrossed with the gadgets?

so me, i won’t be watching season 5! but then again, i said that after season 2 and 3 already…

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