WHAT’S ON TV….Given that Matt Yglesias and I agree so often, I guess it’s no surprise that we also watch the same TV shows. Or at least one of them: 24.
Now, I don’t know why Matt likes it, but my main interest is finding out what’s going to happen to Kim Bauer each week.
See, here’s the deal: Jack Bauer, a counterterrorism agent, is the star of the show, and his daughter Kim is basically the absolute center of the universe for enormous shitstorms of bad luck. She has been kidnapped by terrorists, lost her memory, been beaten up, shot at, imprisoned, and watched her mother get murdered, all the while demonstrating mind-bogglingly bad judgment in practically every situation she’s ever found herself in. Dad’s tough good sense definitely does not run in the family.
So what happened this week? Well, see, she got arrested after a police car pulled her over and the officer found a dead body in the trunk of her car (don’t ask), and last week she was being driven back to central booking in Los Angeles, which is bad because terrorists are planning to set off a nuke there in a few hours.
So anyway, she and her boyfriend started a fire in the police car (again, don’t ask) and Kim made her getaway when the police officer panicked and drove his car off the road. This is good, except ? there’s a mountain lion in the hills! And it looks hungry!
But wait! There’s more. As Kim is running away from the lion, she steps into a snare and gets stuck! And it’s wire cable too, so she can’t just twist it off. But that lion is obviously eyeing her…..
What’s next? A flock of flying monkeys, perhaps? Or maybe her little section of California will fall into the sea.
You see why I like this show?
UPDATE: Also typically, I suppose, we learn this fact about Matt’s TV-watching habits in the middle of some mind bendingly complex philosophical argument about the nature of disagreement vs. subjectivity, or some such thing. Crikey, analytical philosophers are a pain.
UPDATE II: A couple of readers have pointed out that I wasn’t paying very close attention last season: Kim Bauer didn’t lose her memory, her mother did, nor did she see her mother murdered, she saw her get raped. On the other hand, she did get caught in a drug bust and then waded into a prison fight.
This correction, by the way, comes from a reader who says “Personally, we were yelling encouragement to the cougar.” Tough crowd….
