Academic

"24" and gender-biased revulsion at bad acts

By Tung Yin

Spoilers up through the 5/3/10 episode of "24" follow . . . .

With last night's episode of "24" ("Day 8, 11 am - 12 pm"), we finally have an end to the horrendously absurd Dana Walsh storyline.  I don't want to typecast her, but I think actress Katee Sackhoff was terribly miscast as a simpering, weak-willed tech analyst, and Sackhoff herself says almost as much in an Entertainment Weekly interview: ?Guys, you?ve got to give me a gun. I don?t do the whole stand here and look pretty thing very well.?

After Walsh was unmasked as a mole earlier in the season, she turned into an evil version of Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Sackhoff's character from "Battlestar Galactica") and began dealing death and mayhem around her, and while it didn't save the storyline, it at least played to Sackhoff's acting strengths.

Anyway, at the end of last night's episode, Jack Bauer caught up to Walsh after her attempt to escape from Bauer and CTU agent Cole Ortiz.  The plan had been for Walsh to get a crucial piece of evidence out of a safe deposit box that would allow Bauer to reveal to the world the hand that the Russians had in assassinating President Pompadour (played masterfully by Anil Kalpoor).  When Ortiz wondered why they were going to make a deal with Walsh, Bauer explained that she was just a small fish.  Bauer also assured her that he just wanted the evidence.

Yet, when Walsh handed the digital data over, at gunpoint, Jack pointed his gun at her chest, and when she begged, "What can I do?," he said, "Nothing" and then shot her.  For good measure, he shot her again.

It was a pretty disturbing scene, and I found myself wondering why.  We've seen Jack break his word before, even to "good" guys, as in season 4, when he promised a German intelligence agent access to the U.S.'s super-classified NOC (no-official cover) list in exchange for help in catching a terrorism accomplish; yet, after the German agent delivered on his side of the agreement, he found that Jack had rigged the data chip with the NOC list to self-destruct.  When Jack called the agent and said "I give you my word that I'll help you reconstruct your investigation," the agent's bitter response said it all: "Your word?  Now I know what your word is good for."

Jack has even killed (murdered?) helpless people before:

- at the end of season 1, after Victor Drazen, the mastermind behind the assassination plot on Senator Palmer, pulled the trigger on an empty gun, Jack shot him to death;

- near the beginning of season 2, Jack killed an informant/bad guy in custody and then growled "I'm gonna need a hacksaw"; later, he was seen toting a bag -- containing the informant's head! -- which he used to show his bona fides to the terrorist gang he needed to infiltrate;

- in season 3, Jack killed his nemesis Nina Myers after he had already rescued his daughter Kim from Myers; and later, he was forced to shoot CTU Division supervisor Ryan Chappelle so as to forestall the terrorist from releasing the weaponized Cordelia virus;

- in season 5, Jack was forced to work with Christopher Henderson, whom he gave a gun loaded with blanks; when Henderson pulled the trigger later, Jack said "I couldn't trust you" and then killed Henderson.

Now some of these killings are motivated for reasons other than retribution, like Chappelle's killing or that of the informant.  Others though were similar in that the victim posed at that moment no direct threat to Jack or anyone else, and could have been secured and taken into custody.  But for some reason, I didn't find those as troubling as I found Walsh's killing.

At first, I thought maybe it was just evidence of some sort of gender-bias on my part.  I've noted elsewhere how I think the reason that Jack never tortures female terrorists (at least, up until this season, when he did smack Walsh around quite a bit) stemmed from the producers' recognition that American audiences have vastly more tolerance for violence against men than against women, as witnessed by the objections toward letting women serve in front-line combat roles in the military.

But Jack did shoot Nina, so that can't be it.  Of course, Jack had more history with Nina; she had been his lover at one point when he separated from his wife, she was his second-in-command when he was in charge of CTU, she murdered his wife, she was involved in the nuclear bomb plot in season 2 and the Cordelia virus plot in season 3, she had tried to kill him more than once (even getting an advance pardon from the President at one point), and she had threatened his daughter.  That might explain Jack's motivation, but I'm not sure it would have made it less troubling for the viewer.

So I'm not exactly sure why Walsh's killing felt different, but it did.  Maybe it was because Walsh was begging at the end, or because Jack hasn't been quite as "ends justify the means" since the end of season 6 (thus, we've had almost two seasons of a "kinder, gentler Jack Bauer"), or because it was pointlessly stupid to kill her before verifying that the piece of plastic was actually what it was purported to be. . . .  Whatever the reason, I didn't like it.

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on May 04, 2010 (boomark / email).