Working in real time might hinder '24' as it enters a new political era

Like a decorated World War II veteran in the Vietnam era, or a Weather Underground holdout in the Reagan '80s, Jack Bauer soldiers on, even though the times have suddenly changed and made him an obsolescent symbol of the past.

Kiefer Sutherland returns as America's top counterterrorism agent as Fox's "24" begins its seventh season with two pairs of back-to-back episodes at 7 p.m. Sunday and Monday on WFLD Channel 32. Yet even as it begins yet another tense, 24-hour march through "real time," the series confronts a new reality: not just a new fictional presidential administration, but a new administration with heightened expectations in our real world outside. And, for all his fearless courage and derring-do, Jack seems even more nervous about dealing with that outer reality than he does in once again trying to save his own world.

As loyalists who saw the self-contained, movie-length "24: Redemption" at Thanksgiving already know, Jack is back, but facing a congressional inquiry over his previous deeds, especially the torture he routinely indulged in. His old Counter Terrorism Unit has already been disgraced and disbanded in the scandal. Even so, he neatly parries an attempt by a senator - played by Kurtwood Smith of "That '70s Show" - to stick a foot up his rear.

"Do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions I've made," Jack says, "because the truth is, I don't."

Not five minutes into his testimony, he's dragged out by Annie Wersching's auburn-haired FBI agent Renee Walker to deal with a new crisis, centered on the reappearance of - put down the morning coffee for this, Aware One - none other than Carlos Bernard's Tony Almeida.

Yes, Jack's old CTU sidekick is back from the dead, just as Jack himself once was, although apparently working on the wrong side in a new attempt to destroy the world. Jack, however, isn't so sure.

"I believe Tony is alive," he admits, but "I believe he's doing something dangerous and we need to find him."

By that time, the new season of "24" is already well under way, but it keeps obsessively circling back to torture. Jack and agent Walker happen on a suspect, but Jack insists there isn't time for the legal niceties of a subpoena.

"So what's the alternative, Jack?" Walker says. "You break in and torture the guy like you used to do?"

That he does, complete with Walker authorizing him to "do whatever it takes," which in this case involves Jack threatening a variation on the Joker's disappearing-pencil trick in "The Dark Knight."

Later, while left briefly in police custody, a cop tells Jack, "You don't deserve to be treated this way, not after what you've done for our country."

Yet maybe he doesn't, and just maybe he does. After "24" peaked surprisingly in its fifth season (centered on Gregory Itzin's beyond-Nixonian President Charles Logan), the show went soft in the head the following year, and the cultural backlash focused on Jack's use of torture, just when Americans were finally turning away in disgust from Bush-administration SOP like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and "black sites" and waterboarding. Both the show and Jack have seemed increasingly defensive about it ever since, and rightfully so.

Yet there's plenty enough to be defensive about otherwise. Over the years, Jack has gone from an unusually courageous and intrepid government agent to more of a superman in the mold of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, to ludicrous ends. (In Sunday's season premiere, he's the only one to spot that one guy wearing an FBI jacket is the only one also sporting workboots: aha, the sniper!) And, while Cherry Jones' Allison Taylor seems a capable and steely new president, especially by the standards TV has previously set for female commanders-in-chief, the global conspiracy, once again involving the fictional African nation of Sangala and Hakeem Kae-Kazim's ruthless rebel leader Ike Dubaku, strains belief.

I'm not going to reveal the major plot twist that hits early in Monday's third hour (although I think many "24" fans will be able to predict it by the end of Sunday's premiere). But I am going to make two dire predictions: Agent Walker and her boss, Jeffrey Nordling's Larry Moss, will turn out to be lovers, and the season will end with Jack and Ike Dubaku in a fistfight. If those come to pass, it will show that "24" has once and for all succumbed to clichés.

See, it's not cultural criticism "24" needs to be concerned with, so much as it's artistic decay. American viewers might forgive a little fictional torture, but not sheer stupidity. Combine the two, however, and the seventh season could mean the end of days for "24."

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