Defective DVDs

My wife knew that I was a bit of a fan of 24--at least, the re-runs on cable--so she bought me the first two seasons of it on DVD. I have seen bits and pieces of seasons 3 and 4, so I had some idea what to expect. Still, the contrast between the first season, especially, and the seasons produced after 9/11, is quite dramatic.

24 is a very intense show. Two hours at a stretch is as much adrenalin rush as my wife and I can handle. I hope that it won awards for its editing and score, because it is extremely effective--especially the split-screen, real-time idea.

Part of what I like about it, even though it leans towards bizarre conspiracy theories occasionally, with incredibly evil people within the government (at least in the first season), is that it does suggest the kind of really unpleasant situations that people working in counterterrorism probably deal with, at least occasionally. What do you do if there are many lives at stake, and you need to get a capture terrorist to give you information that you need? How far are you prepared to go? What level of brutality is acceptable to prevent (in season two) millions of lives at stake?

Another nice aspect of the show is that it gives you some hint of how as intelligence flows upward, even if no one is trying to slant it, fine details and uncertainties tend to be crushed out. I don't know how much of season two's treatment of this was driven by the actual situation involving the WMD intelligence in Iraq, and how much is just realism about how bureaucracies work, but it is quite interesting, especially in retrospect.

I am also pleased that it doesn't sugarcoat what kind of people the U.S. is fighting. The bad guys are human. They have human emotions, and they aren't just evil for its own sake; they have a cause that they believe in--and they are prepared to torture people to death for their cause. Within the limits of what can be shown on television (both because of broadcast standards and what people are prepared to watch), they manage to get across the evil that we are fighting. While the first season (written and filmed before 9/11) has Serbian bad guys, season two pulls no punches: the bad guys are Muslim terrorists, and justify the evil that they do in terms that Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill would applaud.

The technology in the show is, in places, almost real, and in other places, technodoubletalk that sounds good to people that don't know anything about computers or networks.

But there's one technology that isn't right: part-way through season two, we noticed that the discs were getting a bit glitchy--and now, it won't get past one part. When I put the disc in the DVD player on my notebook--it has the same problem. There's no obvious scratches, dirt, or damage. Tomorrow, I am going to call up Fox Home Entertainment and ask them to replace at least this utterly useless disc--and how that none of the rest of the season are similarly suffering.