Primitive Culture 113: Doing the Unthinkable / by Trek fm

Jack Bauer and Jonathan Archer.

Running Time: 1 hour 29 minutes 32 seconds
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Premiering just after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Enterprise took another two seasons to fully engage with the radically changed real world in its storytelling. When the show did reveal its own 9/11 story in the third season, it followed in the wake of another intensely serialized, monster-hit TV show: 24. Jack Bauer might seem an unlikely model for a Starfleet captain, but throughout the course of the Xindi arch Jonathan Archer found himself repeating many of Bauer’s signature moves—including torture and cold-blooded killing

In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by 24 aficionado Lee Hutchison to compare and contrast the two shows’ approaches to dramatizing the momentous events of the time. We discuss how Manny Coto and Brannon Braga went on to breathe new life into 24 once Star Trek: Enterprise was canceled, whether the problematic aspects of both series are, to some extent, explained by the hawkish mood of the time, and whether Archer and Bauer are actually more similar than they first appear.

Chapters

Intro (00:00:00)
Jack and Jon (00:10:30)
Agent Coto to the Rescue (00:18:45)
No-Choice Scenarios (00:25:30)
Unpardonable Crimes (00:43:00)
Serial Killing (00:51:00)
Torture Tropes (01:09:40)

Host

Duncan Barrett

Guest

Lee Hutchison

Production

Duncan Barrett (Editor and Producer) C Bryan Jones (Executive Producer) Matthew Rushing (Executive Producer) Tony Black (Associate Producer) Clara Cook (Associate Producer)

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