I Feel Like I've Been Jacked Around

Two ground breaking TV shows ended this week. Lost and 24. Many positive things have already been written about these shows but I am not going to be another gushing fanboy. What I am concerned with here are the messages these two shows left with us. And why I disagree.

I'll bet Jack Bauer wishes he had ten more minutes in his most recent 24 hour day... so that he could wake up in Bobby Ewing's shower (Dallas)... or wake up with Susanne Pleshette (Newhart)... or find out he was a part of an autistic child's snow globe daydream (Saint Elsewhere).

Is it possible for an entire season to jump the shark (Happy Days)?

The season painfully ground to a halt in pursuit of an ephemeral and mis-guided peace treaty that never caught any traction with the viewers. Who cares if a liberal president is disgraced through their own corrupt machinations? We can get that on the 20 minute news cycle.

Nor does it matter if the president did the right thing in the end. In her position as the leader of the free world she should have been doing the right thing step by step. Her only reason for coming to her senses was that she got caught... and that Jack shamed her into it.

Then we were able to witness the First Bitch of an imaginary mid-east country transform herself from an unreasonable shrew into an Arab Mother Theresa while her daughter goes from selling out her father and country in order to sleep with a guy to becoming a super-patriot of her country.

Apparently, these three women prove that it doesn't matter how venal or corrupt they are if they think the means justifies the end.

Then we were supposed to believe that Chloe, Jack's biggest cheer leader, started the day out as a temp brought in to help CTU and was made Director of the agency before the end of the day.

I wrote a blog several years ago that was called "The Women of 24". I still stand by my premise that, if you eliminated all the time wasted in the sub-plots involving all of the wrong thinking women in the show, it would have been called 3 or maybe 4 at tops.

In the end of 24, Jack found a kind of redemption or vindication and we were left with another blurring of the lines between the good guys and the bad guys. The president ordered Jack freed but sent him on the run, out of the country, for his life. Meanwhile, all of the bad guys kept getting full presidential pardons. She couldn't have done that for Jack? At the end of the day, apparently, the message we're supposed to take from the show was that the "good guys" can kill, maim and lie as long as they are better than the really bad "bad guys".

If, in the real world, our American president and hierarchy were this corrupt and self-serving then there is no hope for... O, never mind. We already have one of thOse.




Which brings me to Lost.

It turns out that all 6 seasons were about the other Jack working out his personal redemption before he died shortly after the plane crash in the first episode. We know this because the final scenes, after Jack stumbles out of the bamboo and dies, were of the wreckage strewn beach devoid of people when, at that point in the pilot, the survivors were wandering all over the beach.

Which is what the writers denied was going on for six years. But I guess if they had admitted to it in the beginning nobody would have tuned in nor would they have been able to waste all of that (our) time building up to the cheesy Twilight Zone ending.

(This might explain, however, how Hurley never lost any weight stranded on a desert Island.)

I know everyone got all gushy at the final episode's hopeful message of personal redemption. The problem with this premise is that, like all other liberal, feel-good theologies, it is nonsense.

If we don't, through our faith, good deeds and relationships, work out our redemption throughout the course of our lives - it is too late after the plane crashes.

The flaw in religions that deny a specific God, offer easy gimmicks for salvation and that do not teach a punishment for evil, is that the seekers gain a false sense of hope and security that will not serve them well in the end. Mankind is not well served by TV shows and a culture that denies these things.

We need to be taught, and believe, that there is a very specific God who requires our faith and commitment to Him and that there is good and evil in this world that demands of us to choose. This is the true test of righteousness. When we choose. People who deny this are unwilling to face up to the responsibility and consequences of their own actions and choices. Unfortunately, they are making their choice in their denial.

That would have been a better message... and ending.

So much for ground breaking TV.

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