Paul Thomas: Jack bows out, but danger remains from enemy within

The cancellation this week of the long-running TV show 24 could be seen as a sign that the forces unleashed by 9/11 have run out of steam.

For the uninitiated, 24 features US counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) confronting one diabolical plot against the homeland after another. When it debuted a year after 9/11, it was hailed as a breakthrough in screen storytelling in that each 24-episode series supposedly takes place in real time over the course of a single day. What happens during the ad breaks, we will never know.

24's influence soon extended far beyond scriptwriting courses. It attracted a huge audience and won a swag of awards, while Bauer's ruthlessness - he used torture as a second or third, as opposed to last, resort - made it popular with Bush officials who were authorising similar methods in the real-life war on terror. And why not? It worked for Jack.

You don't have to watch many episodes to be troubled by the fact that some of the most powerful men in the world - Vice-President Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the power behind George W. Bush's throne, was a particular fan - could view 24 as anything but pure hokum.

Sutherland called it "fantastical". Another way of putting it would be to say it makes a Bond movie seem like something you'd find on the History Channel.

Consider: three of the last four presidents of the United States of 24 have been, respectively, assassinated, murdered by a wife, and seriously injured in an assassination attempt. The current president's son was murdered and her daughter is in jail for having arranged the assassination of a key government witness. In 24 family ties are the first casualties of war.

Bauer's wife was murdered by a traitor and his father turned out to be a truly monstrous baddy who killed his other, evil son to stop him spilling the beans. The evil son was being tortured by Jack and when Jack gets nasty, it's only a matter of time before they babble like a tui. Curiously, while torture always does the trick when Jack's dishing it out, it never works on him. But then Jack's not your average resourceful, ice-cold, righteous killer.

There are websites devoted to tracking his body count which has risen steadily since the first series when he actually went 10 hours without killing anyone. That was an off-day which he's more than made up for since: according to the corpse-counters, his tally at the beginning of the current series stood at 228.

24's cancellation is being interpreted as a reflection of its waning cultural influence, but I wonder if the pundits are looking in the right place. By placing the show and its impact purely in the context of the war against external terror, they're ignoring the other strand of the narrative: the enemy within. In 24 terror is a double-headed monster because the foreign terrorists always have inside help, whether from big business, the intelligence community, or the administration. Jack's outfit the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) is riddled with traitors and hampered by petty power struggles and crass incompetence. Indeed, if Jack had a supportive, efficient organisation behind him, the show would be called 12. The same treasonous and power-hungry behaviour characterises the executive branch right up to and, in one series, including the president.

Suspicion of government is the fundamental tenet of American conservatism. Out on the extensive right-wing lunatic fringe this suspicion long ago hardened into a conviction that the US Government is the real enemy. This is the most enduring conspiracy theory of all.

Intentionally or otherwise, 24 played to this paranoid mindset. Thus there's a certain irony that in the week it was canned, the FBI arrested nine members of a Christian militia group said to be planning acts of murder and terrorism with the aim of triggering an uprising against the US Government.

According to a recent report, the number of domestic extremist groups and armed militias advocating radical anti-government doctrines and conspiracy theories nearly tripled last year and now stands at 512. While it's tempting to dismiss these groups as trailer trash fantasists, the dumb leading the dumber, it should be remembered that the biggest act of terrorism on US soil before 9/11 was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing carried out by militia movement sympathisers that killed 168 people and injured almost 700.

24's influence might linger for a while yet, but perhaps not in the way its creators intended.