Comments on: A Final word on Torture

By: Lainey

Lainey — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:41:14 +0000

The writers have become incredibly lazy, I agree. They use torture to fill time while they try to figure out where the story is going next and they don’t have a grip on that at all. The show is now just a series of stupid scenes with hollow characters intermingled with the torture scenes which just seem gratuitous, as if there’s a quota the writers have to fill. Torture for torture’s sake is repetitive and boring. And if the character being tortured is some one-dimentional new addition that nobody cares about, big deal. They’ve gone way overboard wih the torture and meaningless deaths. They don’t develop characters or advance the story and none of it is entertaining.

I think the writers could learn a lot from Hitchcock. It wasn’t what was shown in his movies that scared you it was what was suggested and unseen. He really knew how to create tension and suspense. There was no gratuitous killing, no gore, nothing was overdone. He put the thought of what could happen next into your head, that put you on the edge of your seat and then when you least expected it he hit you with the big shocker which you never saw coming. The 24 writers are so heavy-handed, they keep pounding at you with constant torture and death until it just wears you out and bores you to death instead of exciting you.

I totally agree with you about season one, it was refreshingly free of torture; even s2 and s3 used it relatively sparingly compared to the later seasons. It’s now completely out of hand and absurd. I guess that’s what writers do when they’ve forgotten how to write interesting dialog. I can picture them sitting around like a bunch of junior-high kids trying to come up with some new torture ideas (that was really cool when we had that guy tortured with the drill, next time let’s use a chain saw, that will be even cooler!). They would have probably used a dentist’s drill if that wouldn’t mean stealing from “Mathathon Man”. At this point it wouldn’t matter if they tortured the whole cast for an entire episode, it’s become old and stale. Please enough already.

By: someone

someone — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:33:51 +0000

I agree that torture has been used too much in series 6 and it is getting boring. The only time I thought it was good was at the end of the first episode because it fit in nicely and because it made Jacks escape seem all the more miraculous.

Also not only do they include torture alot but over long periods of time which loses the tension and drama that the series has. For example when Jack was torturing Grahem.

By: andie atho

andie atho — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:16:59 +0000

I think torture is realistic in some storylines, to get strong informations from “bad guys” that could save lifes…
This kind of story is maniqueistic (the good x the bad), so, inside these circunstances, the “good guy” reacts against the bad.
But, in this case, with this license, good guy is a hero. And heros must be human heros… thus, I’m a little tired with Season 6 excess of hero suffering or something that… Jack Bauer character must be more human, must receive more care. And in this argument I miss the story with Audrey to humanize the hero.
If authors do a beatiful heart story they must complete it and I really hope lightening and also a happy end ’cause the hero character Jack Bauer surely is a human hero.
I’ll only buy dvd season 5 and (next) 6 if they do it fine !!

By: hardy24

hardy24 — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:32:49 +0000

yes, I have defended the show against even you. Although I would class series five as one of the better series of the show - while i’m pretty sure you wouldn’t.

I’d argue that the show has always been a mixture of drama and thriller.

Yeah, I guess you could say the drazens beating Jack in S1 was torture, though i’d say that there is a distinction there in that they weren’t actually doing it to gain information, it was purely for revenge and payback - and as twisted as this may sound, that they wanted to beat Jack added to the development of there characters.

By: J_A

J_A — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:47:01 +0000

thank you for being honest.

you have indeed defended the series against me too - but now do you see why I miss “the good old days”, aka “before they killed tony”?

you put it perfectly: they knew how to build tension properly and the show worked because of the interactions btw ppl, great storylines, those long lingering looks saying anyone could be good or bad etc. isn’t it more a thriller than a drama now?…… my opinion only

(although, you could argue that jack getting beaten up by the drazens in s1 was torture too.)

bottom line, torture - at least as a way of stalling for time - is really getting old.