^{24 Hours, More Torture Than You Can Count}

While 24 garners many critical kudos for regaining its edge this season, nobody has talked about the enormous amount of torture we're getting in CTU-land. Torture has become 24's signature. It is to 24 what microscopes are to CSI.

This has been obvious for weeks. When I make jokes during the show, which I do a lot because 24 is best viewed as a comedy, the punchlines almost always revolve around the variety or threat of torture. A few weeks ago, I thought the show hit a high point - or low point, depending - when our good guy Jack was torturing Paul, the ex-husband of his girlfriend, to get information on the bad guys who were at that moment torturing CTU agent Curtis. They actually had simultaneous tortures going so we could cut back and forth between them.

A recent episode topped it all before it even started by showing clips of Paul undergoing his second torture - kidney punches and finger smashing - in the "Previously on 24" segment. Now we're getting torture before the opening credits. If they took the torture out of 24 they'd have to call it 15.

Paul's torture was notable also because he's a two-timer. During the first torture, Jack jury-rigged a table lamp. We've always known about Jack's nobility and determination. Well, he's also handy. On 24, the good guys embrace torture without losing their morality. In fact, sometimes it is their willingness to embrace torture that makes 24's good guys good. How much do you want to bet that Attorney General Gonzales Tivos this show?

A blackout meant that Paul's second torture had to be low tech. While his fingers were getting slammed in the drawer of a file cabinet, I used my villainous Arab accent to say things like, "What I wouldn't give for a working table lamp!" After proving himself to the audience by refusing to talk, Paul was soon rescued by Jack. Such was Paul's gratitude that an hour later he took a bullet for Jack, who of course had been torturing him just three hours earlier. You've gotta admit, that's pretty big of him.

In the right wing freak world of 24, a character's response to torture is a measure of their morality and bravery. By accepting his first torture as necessary, Paul proved his worth. Contrast that with Sarah, the CTU agent who had some nasty exposure to a taser and some kind of pain drug when Erin Driscoll got hoodwinked into thinking she was a traitor. After being cleared, Sarah went back to work, which demonstrated her resilience and toughness, but also demanded a pay raise as compensation, which in the world of 24 is kind of pissy. So your boss subjected you to extremes of pain and humiliation. Get over it! What are you, some kind of leftist?

The other great - and by great I mean silly and terrible - part of Sarah's torture was the summoning of Eric. Eric's the guy with the stainless steel suitcase, pain drugs and glum expression. Eric doesn't talk. When he's summoned the interrogation subjects all get nervous. Everybody knows what he does, but my question is what else does he do? He seems to sit in the room next to the interrogation chamber with his suitcase and wait for the call. Does he just sit at his desk the rest of the time, sipping coffee and playing minesweeper? Does he get really bored and offer to torture agents just to keep them in shape? Does the conversation completely stop when he enters the break room? Does CTU really torture enough people to justify his full-time employment or does he double as the Human Resources guy?

Possibly the oddest torture technique shown is the sensory depravation helmet. Early in the season, CTU questioned the son of Secretary of Defense Heller about the Secretary's kidnapping (and subsequent psychological torture). Believing the kid was withholding something, Curtis of CTU forced him into the sensory depravation helmet, which looked like a cheesy prototype of a virtual reality game. Apparently, it's incredibly effective because the kid was sobbing and whimpering in about fifteen minutes. He thought he'd been under for hours.

This lead to one of the greatest scenes in 24's history, that great awkward pause when the CTU people had to tell a rescued Heller that they had his son and were torturing him in the basement. ("Yep, we have your son. Um, would you say you have a close relationship with him?") Heller proved himself to be a stand-up 24 kind of guy by not only forgiving CTU for torturing his son, but endorsing continued torture. Curtis put the helmet back on the kid and, as far as my memory goes, it's never come off. Hours and hours later everyone - including the writers - appears to have forgotten about the kid, which is the torturer's equivalent of "Did I leave the iron on?" So the simultaneous torture I mentioned earlier? It was actually the trifecta. Jack was torturing Paul while the bad guys where torturing Curtis while Curtis himself was remotely torturing young Heller.

24 never seems to show a sense of humor about this. When they had Curtis tied to a chair, I thought maybe the head bad guy could say, "Are you familiar with ... sensory depravation?" and brandish a helmet even cheesier than CTU's. And Curtis could make fun of their technology the way that Asian guy in the Cingular commercials makes fun of my cell phone.

Torture is even part of the backstory. Tony has been brought back into the game, but he was down on his luck because last season he helped a bad guy who kidnapped and threatened to torture his then girlfriend and current mid-season surprise Michelle (X-acto knife to the eye).

All this torture has started to blend into itself. I've lost track of the number of people simply beaten for information. In addition to Paul and Curtis, we had Chloe's friend who found out too much at his Internet company and the random bad guy Curtis grabbed after he escaped from his torture. A CTU agent grabbed Dinah Aruz's bullet wound during her questioning. How many people have had their families threatened? The Secretary of Defense was threatened with the death of his daughter, Dinah Aruz cooperated to spare her son the death penalty and Mr. Military Squarejaw smuggled his double onto a military base because the bad guys were threatening his wife and kids, who were all killed anyway.

None of this even mentions the torture inflected on Erin Driscoll by the writers of 24 when they saddled her with the schizophrenic-daughter-shows-up-at-work storyline.

When Jack was kidnapped by Marwan, anyone who has seen at least ten minutes of 24 knew what to expect. However in a startling twist, Jack was never really tortured. (Okay, he was mock executed and beaten senseless, but that hardly counts anymore, does it?) While the entire audience expected Jack's torture in an empty warehouse, we got Beruz's torture back at CTU. Marwan offered to trade Jack for Beruz and CTU wanted to know why. (I don't even remember how they tortured him. Like I said, it's all starting to blur. CTU did it and since he didn't have a bullet wound to grab, it must have involved either a taser, pain drugs, sensory deprivation or a table lamp.)

In a recent episode, the writers presented us with a little morality play on torture. Camping lovers recovered the nuclear football from the wreckage of Air Force One and were pursued by terrorists. The man got captured. The woman, hearing his torture (bullet wound stepped on), gave herself up. The terrorists took everything and left. Seconds later Jack showed up. If she had been able to withstand the torture of hearing his torture, the entire plot would have crumbled. Jack said, "It's okay. You did great," but you know he's being generous. Not everyone can be Jack, who in a previous season allowed himself to be tortured to death. This segment gave us the message of 24 in a nutshell: to defeat the terrorists, we have to accept torture. Mine, yours, theirs, anybody's.

This message has been so hammered into the audience, (wait, has anyone used a hammer?), that the last episode actually revolved around the assumption that people who don't accept torture are a bunch of pussies at best or terrorist pawns at worst. With Random Arab Bad Guy in CTU custody, Marwan (Main Arab Bad Guy) had his buddies at "Global Amnesty" intervene not ten minutes after the arrest with a lawyer, a court order and a U.S. Marshal to prevent Random Arab Bad Guy's torture. The CTU crew was horrified. Hell, they torture their own employees so they have a hard time accepting someone not being tortured. They phoned the new President, who lost a vast wealth of CTU cred by not condoning the torture. The Global Amnesty lawyer, who looked so much like Jeff Gannon/Gluckert I could barely look at him, got his way.

But wait, Jack's the hero. He believes in torture so much he sacrificed his career, once again, to torture Random Arab Bad Guy (breaking his thumbs) as a private citizen.

This brings me to the terrorists' plot. They have hidden in America for years in order to kidnap the Secretary of Defense so they could broadcast his execution on the Internet so the flood of viewer traffic would hide the cyber-assault on nuclear power plants using a device stolen from a sabotaged train, which will bring about massive nuclear meltdowns and force the President to stay in Air Force One so that a disgraced former pilot can impersonate the pilot of a stealth fighter, steal the craft and shoot down Air Force One, scattering debris across the desert where squads of terrorists wait in Jeeps in order to recover the nuclear football and control a soon-to-be-stolen warhead. And if anybody gets in their way, the incredibly powerful human rights pansies will push around the entire American law enforcement apparatus.

I guess if all that is in the realm of possibility, we might as well consider that torture and morality can go hand in hand.