So far season five of 24 is shaping up to be one of the best ever. As we end episode seven, Russian terrorists are on the loose somewhere in Southern California with 19 canisters of weaponized nerve gas, the President is covering up the involvement of his Chief of Staff in a conspiracy that resulted in the murder of a former President, and, as usual, CTU Agent Jack Bauer is right in the middle of things. Last night’s episode, though, put forward a moral dilemma straight out of the pages of history.
By the middle of the episode, Jack was undercover posing as someone who was supposed to help the terrorists reconfigure the trigger needed to deploy the nerve gas. Instead of simply meeting his contact and following them back to the nerve gas, though, Bauer found himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. In order to test the trigger that Jack had provided them, the terrorist took him, and a canister of nerve gas to a local shopping mall, intending to deploy it and kill everyone in the mall. CTU teams were following them and ready to take down the terrorists and stop the attack, but here’s where the dilemma arose.
Do you stop this attack and save about 1,000 people, or do you allow the attack to go forward so that you can follow the terrorists back to the other 19 canisters, thereby saving potentially hundreds of thousands ?
Though the story is disputed, there are some historians who assert that Winston Churchill faced this same dilemma during World War Two. Early in the war, the British had cracked the German Ultra Code and were using to great effect in the war. At some point, messages were supposedly intercepted indicating that the German’s were planning a massive air attack on the city of Coventry. Rather than warn the residents of the city, however, Churchill allowed the attack to go forward in order to preserve the secret that Britain was, in effect, reading the German military’s mail.
Whether this story is true or not, it certainly made for great television last night. In the end, the spineless President ended up making a decision that would have allowed the attack to go forward. Jack Bauer, however, had other ideas and interrupted the plan in time to save most of the people in the mall. Unfortunately, it resulted in both terrorists dying before they could lead him to the rest of the nerve gas.
What was the “right” decision ? I’m not sure I know. Personally, I think it was gutsy for the writers to have the President sign the death warrants for almost 1000 people. I didn’t think they’d do that.
More on last night’s episode at Right Wing Nuthouse.
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