The Eerie Reality of '24' Online
Or, Why the '24' website scares me...
by Leigh Clemons

Ever been to the website for the FOX series 24? It's creepy. Really creepy. As the second season came crashing to an end (if you can call a cliffhanger an ending), I found that going out to the website to catch up on the show was more enjoyable than watching the actual program. Part of that may be because the episodes take an hour to unfold and reading the synopses, for me, takes about two minutes, even as involved as they are. Part of that may also be the inevitable mid-season slump that shows like '24' seem to have. The first season reached nadir about episode three, and for the second season, it has taken almost ten episodes, and it picked back up quickly. Most of the big plot twists, such as the nuclear bomb detonation, were revealed halfway through the season, and other strands of the story were left hanging, such as Nina's fate, leaving the viewers to puzzle over how everything is going to resolve itself, thus generating suspense. But it isn't as if I wasn't already watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the previous hour and planning on watching The Osbournes in the next, so why would a home-grown couch potato like me actually turn off the TV set and choose to get the scoop from the website 24 (pardon the pun) hours later?

Websites for TV shows have become almost as ubiquitous as the proliferation of shows themselves. Most shows have at least one "official" website and numerous fan-generated ones, not to mention prominent placement on mega-sites like www.jumptheshark.com. By the way, visitors to the aforementioned site claim that '24' never "jumped the shark," or reached an irreconcilable climax -- a rarity.

The idea of safety and security are technological buzzwords these days, as more and more people install software and patches designed to keep their computers virus and cookie-free in the wake of ever-more invasive spamming and monitoring.

Other disturbing little tidbits serve to keep the visitor to the '24' site on edge. The link to "Kimberly's Phone" blares that there are "6 messages from Dad," but they can't be accessed (because she lost her phone about episode eight). As bad as it was when you believed that Reza was the terrorist, the link to Marie and Reza's wedding web page is now down-right sinister because, not only did she turn out to be the link to the terrorists, she also shot her beloved to death, point-blank. It makes you wonder about all those other wedding websites you see online, particularly when no photos are posted from after the ceremony. It's particularly gruesome to revisit the site and see the happy home page pictures of the engaged couple and the wedding decorations after Marie's coup de grace in the season finale, where she looks every bit like a female Damien Thorne or Jim Jones as she tells her sister, "You think that you're safe out there…you aren't."

The idea of safety and security are technological buzz-words these days, as more and more people install software and patches designed to keep their computers virus and cookie-free in the wake of ever-more invasive spamming and monitoring. '24' plays on this idea masterfully, taking the latent fears of a techno-savvy, 24-hour newsinundated generation, pouring the gasoline of terrorist activity on them, and setting them ablaze in "real time." The show's creators, Joel Surnow and Michael Loceff, cut their teeth on USA Network's 'La Femme Nikita,' a techno-orgy conspiracy show that broke the ice for future cable-oriented dramas like 'The Shield' to achieve widespread popularity. Nikita's allpervasive technology was part of its charm; it introduced its viewers to the idea that nothing, and nobody, can ever ultimately escape the surveillance society.

Internet surveillance and in fact, surveillance in general, has been a topic of heated discussion for quite some time. We have lived in a surveillance society for decades since the creation of the FBI and era of the Cold War. The phrase "surveillance society" itself is over 15 years old, brought into prominence by David Lyon in his 'The Electronic Eye.' Yet the attacks on 9/11 produced a rupture in the fabric of surveillance. Just as now everyone can be a terrorist or the target of a terrorist attack, so does the surveillance mentality enter into the general population in a way previously unimagined. Before 9/11, our heroes were hackers, the people who flouted the technological infrastructure for the greater good of humanity. Now, control is the mantra. Hackers and those persons who operate outside of the mainframe (or the Matrix?) are potentially dangerous; therefore, everyone must be watched for the country to remain "secure."