Underpants On The Outside

It’s taken me too long to write this, but a travesty has occurred. A hero has been silenced.

I’m talking about a man who has saved Los Angeles and/or the universe from nuclear fire and chemical plagues. If the ancient Egyptians had experienced the terrors he faces in an average work day, they not only would have freed the Jews, they would have sent them on their way with gift baskets and some maps. He has been shot, stabbed, poisoned, trapped, beaten, and tasered*, and regularly goes 24 hours without taking a shit. Yet Jack Bauer has finally met the one force on Earth that can stop him. A bunch of writers.

Fox has officially postponed the next season of 24 indefinitely due to the writers’ strike. I always thought the worst thing the Writer’s Guild ever did to Jack Bauer was Audrey, and for that alone they deserved an evening in Jack Bauer’s Oubliette of Agony**. But to shut him down entirely?? Highly trained terrorists couldn’t do that. By the transitive property, that means that the Writer’s Guild is worse than terrorists. You heard it here first.

These are men whose collective upper body strength would suggest they spent their childhoods selling Thin Mints, yet they were able to incapacitate Jack Bauer by simply not going to work. Meanwhile, Jack Bauer wouldn’t miss a day of work if his life depended on it. (I don’t mean that figuratively; Jack seriously ups his chances of dying just by going in to work in the first place. Of course, it also maximizes his opportunities to inflict pain, so he takes the bad with the good.)

If the average writer is anything like myself, he noodles around on the internet for a couple hours debating who to start on his fantasy team, starts writing around 11:30, hits a snag around a quarter to one and goes out for a burrito. Compare that to Jack Bauer, who in an average work day will be incapacitated up to fourteen times and his first eighteen to twenty plans will go horribly awry. Despite all that, he doesn’t complain about five or six bullet holes, so you certainly won’t hear him whine about “unfair shares of internet revenue.” You hear that, Writer’s Guild of America?!? Thanks to you, Jack Bauer isn’t on the job! Maybe the next nuclear bomb will go off somewhere a little more close to home than VALENCIA, and then we’ll see how much your royalty checks can protect you!

Actually, the more I think about it, the more it seems like Fox had an awfully itchy trigger finger when it came to putting 24 down like Old Yeller. I don’t even think the writers had finished thinking of clever puns for their picket signs. I see it as more of an indictment of how terrible last season was. The story was like reverse-Darwinism: the best characters were killed off, and now only the weak (or not-so-pretty…CHLOE) survive. Fox just saved themselves millions of dollars on advertising a show starring Jack Bauer, Chloe, and 526 anonymous CTU agents with very short lifespans.

There is one good side to this strike issue. Since I’ve started watching the show, I’ve struggled with the fact that Jack does more than an hour than I do in a week. Well, not this year! SUCK MY PRODUCTIVITY, BAUER!

*There’s also a tremendously stupid sounding rumor about an incident with a cougar or puma or something. Maybe a Yeti, or Jawas. I don’t know, I just remember it was stupid.

**That’s my name for Jack Bauer’s basement. I imagine it filled with all sorts of four-point restraint harnesses, handcuffs (both standard and furred; Jack likes ladies who live on the edge), blood-stained tools (sets in both English units and Metric), along with a TV and a beer fridge. Then again, that’s kinda how I imagine every room in the Bauer household.