Over winter break, Kyle Ochs completed a marathon. He credits
pizza for his success.
“I needed food. I was drinking a Red Bull, but it
wasn’t working,” said Ochs, a fourth-year electrical
engineering student. “The key player had to be getting a
giant, 18-inch Costco pizza.”
This was obviously no ordinary marathon. This was a
“24” marathon, an event that lasts for 24 hours and
consists of watching every episode of an entire season of the Fox
TV show “24,” one after another.
This is a task undertaken only by diehard fans of the show
““ and the UCLA campus is crawling with them.
“I think it’s more intense (to watch it all at
once),” said Mira Lew, a graduate student in film directing
who took two days to complete the marathon. “It’s like
instant gratification. Once you pop a (DVD) disc in, it’s
hard to stop watching.”
The new season begins Sunday, so marathoners will have to adjust
back to enduring the agony of ill-timed commercial breaks ““
interruptions which can lead to shouting. Every Monday at 9 p.m. in
his dorm room last year, Ochs and some friends watched
“24,” and they were almost too enthusiastic about the
show.
“There’d be so much screaming. I was worried about
getting some sort of noise complaint,” Ochs said, though he
said he never got written up for “24.”
Alex Miller, a second-year physics student, also started hosting
large “24” viewing parties, though unintentionally at
first. He has watched the show since it premiered in 2001, and at
first it was just him and his roommate watching “24” on
Monday nights. But because of the show’s gripping, continuous
plotlines, friends who intended to stop by for just a few minutes
wound up coming back every week.
“By the season finale of the last season, we had about 13
people crammed into a triple,” Miller said. “Four
people per bed and then people on the floor.”
Episodes take place in real time and feature a suspense-building
clock that ticks down the minutes.
Each show covers the events of one hour of one day in the life
of terrorist-fighting government agent Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer
Sutherland.
The character of Jack Bauer is most fans’ favorite aspect
of the show.
“It’s kind of like the whole Chuck Norris thing.
He’s such a badass,” Miller said. “That’s
the funniest part about (the show). We sometimes just joke at how
inhuman he is.”
In addition to being indestructible, Bauer is a Bruin: According
to the show’s official Fox Web site, the character of Jack
Bauer was an English student at UCLA. No wonder he is so well
prepared for facing the day’s tests and trials without
sleep.
“Jack Bauer has a place in the hall of heroes,” Lew
said.
Though Bauer has remarkable strengths, what makes him so
likeable and easy to relate to is that he is a reluctant hero,
according to Howard Suber, UCLA film professor and author of
“The Power of Film,” a new book on the topic of heroes.
Bauer acts because situations force him to.
He is not a “professional hero” like Superman.
“He’s not rushing around looking for people to
rescue. He’s a guy who in fact is fed up with all of this,
but something keeps sucking him back in,” Suber said.
“The common setup for most of the episodes is that some
member of his family or some member of the team … is in jeopardy.
So he goes out to save them because he loves them. That’s the
classic situation.”
Through all the crazy plotlines, Bauer remains the central,
stabilizing figure.
The audience’s connection to him is what sustains interest
in the action and instills a reason to care about the show.
“The show is totally unpredictable, but the one thing that
is predictable is Jack’s integrity and judgment. I think
that’s the anchor of the show,” Lew said.
“There are so many double agents, but what the viewers are
guided by is Jack Bauer’s judgment and his ability to assess
who’s on the right side and who’s on the wrong
side.”
Though Bauer makes a great hero, what is sometimes most
intriguing about him is that he acts more like a villain.
“The way he talks, he almost sounds like a bad guy. (His
voice) is really deep and kind of sinister. He just says stuff that
most good guys won’t be able to say,” Ochs said.
“He crosses the line with everything he does.”
Bauer uses whatever means available to get the job done. Most
fans can attest that he is very skilled at torture, a quality
typical heroes are not known for.
“If (characters) don’t cross the line, you can kind
of expect what they are going to do,” said Ochs. “With
(Bauer), you can never know what he is going to do.”
The new sixth season premieres with a two-hour episode this
Sunday followed by another two-hour episode Monday.
UCLA film school alumnus Kahlil Joseph has a role in the opening
of the season premiere. He plays a man suspected of carrying a
bomb.
His scene was shot in August 2006, the day after
“24” won five Emmy awards, including Outstanding Drama
Series, Best Actor for Kiefer Sutherland and Best Director.
“The adrenaline (on the set) was crazy,” said
Joseph.
Joseph’s scene was shot in an L.A. neighborhood.
Shooting on location proved even Emmy award-winning shows can
have little mix-ups during filming.
“A resident who had not read the permit called the fire
department (when we blew up a bus),” Joseph said. “The
fire department came rushing in.”
Though he did not get to work directly with Sutherland, there
was compensation for Joseph.
“He was not in the scene,” said Joseph.
“But I got to sit in his chair a lot.”
The season premiere of any show is unmissable because it often
resolves the cliffhanger of the previous season, but the season
premieres of “24” are absolutely crucial to
understanding the plot.
“(Season premieres) pretty much introduce every new
threat, every new villain, every new good character, every new bad
character and every new plot that they use,” Miller said.
The tagline for this season, “Jack Bauer Must Die,”
has Lew wondering just how far the show will go.
She noted that each season seems to have more suspense, a more
dangerous villain, and more lives at stake than the one before.
“They’ve done the nuclear bomb threat, nerve gas,
missiles …” Lew said.
“They’ve consistently upped the ante, which is
impressive,” she said.
The show unabashedly deals with terrorism at a time when similar
scenes are on the news, making it not only unpredictable, but
realistic ““ a quality which impresses fans like Miller.
“They don’t sugarcoat anything, they don’t
dumb it down,” Miller said. “It’s a pretty
audacious show.”