Jack Bauer's run on the TV series '24' has reached an end, but rest assured, fans may reunite with him (played by Kiefer Sutherland) in an upcoming movie.
Jack Bauer isn't going to live happily ever after.
Fans of Fox's "24" probably weren't expecting that anyway, given the torture and death that Kiefer Sutherland's Bauer has witnessed and dealt in the show's explosive eight-year run, which wraps with a two-hour finale on May 24.
But Howard Gordon, executive producer, made it official in a conference call during which he also defended this season's unpopular Dana Walsh character and the even more unpopular decision to kill off Annie Wersching's Renee Walker, the woman with whom Jack finally seemed to have a shot at putting his demons to rest.
Instead, her death shook the demons awake and sent them into adrenalin overdrive, which Gordon says was precisely the point.
"Renee's death motivated Jack to the final confrontation," said Gordon. "It took him to a place he's never been before."
Gordon naturally isn't specifying exactly where else there might be, beyond saying the final showdown will involve Jack's longtime loyal friend Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and President Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones), who right up until a few weeks ago had been a chief executive whose moral center Jack could finally respect.
Whatever happens, we can expect Jack to survive, since a script for a "24" movie is already circulating. Gordon said he'd love for it to happen "in the next year or two," though at this point "it's very much a work-in-progress."
Meanwhile, Gordon said the potential movie won't affect where the TV series ends.
"We considered several very different endings," he said. "We tried 'happily ever after' and it didn't work. This show is a tragedy. To give Jack a happy ending wouldn't have felt authentic."
Two of the show's key premises all along, Gordon said, are that "it must always move forward" and "we've never hit 'reset' with Jack. He feels the accumulated weight of all his actions over eight years."
That need to keep moving forward, which means finding new levels for a character who has already stretched every legal and moral boundary, is one reason Gordon said he's okay with ending the show after this season.
"We'd talked about" continuing, he said, but "Jack's story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and I think we felt we'd reached it."
Gordon acknowledged that Renee Walker's death was a particularly harsh blow to fans, and he also acknowledged that Katee Sackhoff's Dana Walsh character this season had a "convoluted" storyline. But he defended the character, saying he hoped that by the time Walsh departed last week, "people understood what we were doing with her."
And hey, he said, it got people talking.
"As long as people are yelling at the TV, we're happy," he said. "Indifference would have been more hurtful than outrage."
No comments:
Post a Comment