The TV Zone

Wow.

Did that do it for you? Shock you to the core? Sow doubt and confusion in your head - about "24," America's future, and Jack's state of mind?

I'm speaking (of course) of Jack Bauer's brutal dispatch of Curtis Manning in the closing minutes of last night's two-hour rock-em-sock-em 9 a.m. (and-the-day's-just-begun) finale. That's right: Curtis gone, forever (and "forever" really is forever in "24.”) The nuke? Horrible. We'll get to that in a minute. But the killing of Manning, played by veteran Jamaican-born actor, Roger Cross, is one for the ages in "24" lore. If Jack ever had any "innocence" - a ridiculous word in the context of Jack - it is utterly abolished now. To kill Curtis Manning in pursuit of The Greater Good now officially establishes that there IS no Greater Good in the "24" universe.

Curtis joined up in Day 4, and over the last couple of seasons always seemed to be in the right place at exactly the right time. The time he saved the kidnapped Audrey Raines and her old man, Secy. of Defense James Heller (played by the one/the only William Devane), or last season when he partnered with Jack to get inside that gas refinery to find the Sentox or was it Julian Sands?... Curtis was a standup guy, and now, he stands no more.

The nuke? Astounding, and pretty much unexpected. But this was hardly "The Day After" - ABC's '83 telepic about the apocalypse - or even "Jericho." Let's assume for now that casualties were "limited" and by that I mean limited primarily to the moron who delivered the trigger. But we'll see how "24" finesses the fall-out next week ("Thank GOD, it was a remote section of Los Angeles," Bill Buchanan mumbled to Chloe O'Brian, who stared balefully at the silver-haired, dim-bulbed CTU commander...)

Meanwhile (being a dilettante up there with the best of 'em) I ruminated on Jack's Nietzschean hue in a piece in this Sunday's paper. You all know ol' Freddy "God is Dead" Nietzche, who before going completely insane wrote a vast body of philosophy and hundreds of rather brilliant if occasionally rather infuriatingly obscure aphorisms. Stuff like: "What does not destroy me, makes me stronger" (which Jack must have inscribed on his business card.)

Or this: "If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

And so it goes with Jack. After Curtis, the abyss stared back. Now it's time to gaze someplace else, Mr. Bauer.