Cast of 24, season 6

Fans of FOX’s hit show 24 have been feeling antsy lately. The season that was supposed to begin in January 2008 was postponed by a full year because of the writers strike. And in this time of economic crisis, a few people have considered working at the (fictional) Counter Terrorist Unit, to bring in an income and get their 24 fix at the same time.

But before you run off to a new life of defending America from the steadily growing list of countries we’ve angered, consider these 8 reasons why working at CTU isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

1. Disaster will find you.

The CTU branch we always see is in Los Angeles. I’m not sure what’s cursed: the city itself, or Jack Bauer, who happens to be there. But in 24 world, L.A. is a disaster magnet.

If a nuclear missile is launched in Iowa and no one knows what direction it’s going in, its target will invariably be Los Angeles. If eleven vials of a deadly virus are to be released across the country, exactly one of them will be untraceable due to a broken tracking device, and it will be in Los Angeles.

I don’t know why they even bother trying to track down bad guys, when clearly they must be in Los Angeles. It’s an inescapable law of the universe.

2. Status reports every 15 minutes.

Department heads need to give status reports to the director every 15 minutes. So maybe they do 5 minutes of work, then spend 5 minutes gathering updates from their subordinates, then spend 5 minutes briefing the director.

Then the director can update the President, who also wants a status report every 15 minutes. When does anyone have time to get their work done?

3. Serious job pressure.

All CTU employees must be ready to perform superhuman feats at any moment. When Jack calls and says he needs you to shut down the power supply to the entire state of California, you have about eight seconds to get it done before you’re fired.

Don’t even think about saying that it’s your first day and you don’t know the password to the central server. If you can’t do it, they’ll find someone who can.

4. You can’t trust anyone.

On a pretty regular basis, Division will send over a new person you’ve never met. This person will be highly skilled but rude and arrogant, and you won’t like them. You’ll notice them frequently breaking protocol, for example, by making suspicious calls on a personal cell phone that can’t be monitored. If you inquire about this, they’ll threaten to report you to the director for something that wasn’t your fault.

At some point, someone will announce that security has been compromised by a mole working inside CTU, and everyone will wonder who it is. Then you’ll learn that all along, the mole was your friend who had worked with you for five years. Either that, or it was a friend or family member you hadn’t seen in a long time.

5. If you don’t die, your friends will.

While the risk to your own life is considerable, it’s an absolute certainty that you’ll lose some friends. The moles are most likely to be either the people you most suspect or the people you least suspect, so it’s best not to get too attached to these people.

Instead, try to befriend people who are well known but not interesting, as they’re usually innocent. However, these people are likely to die when CTU is attacked. Try to think of them more as goldfish than people.

6. If people come back to life, they turn evil.

The upside to your friends dying is that they might not stay dead. The downside is that if they come back, they’ll want revenge on the country that betrayed them.

Stephen Saunders, the MI6 operative who was killed in the strike against Victor Drazen, returned as a criminal mastermind for reasons he claimed we could never understand.

Former CTU director Tony Almeida was killed twice, once by a car bomb and once by lethal injection. He will return in January as one of the main terrorists, undoubtedly for reasons we could never understand.

7. CTU is chronically short on resources.

CTU is the most underfunded government agency in history. Every year or two, the fate of the world (or at least a significant part of it) all comes down to CTU, and yet they complain about being short on resources every time.

When there’s some code that needs to be broken to determine the location of the nuclear bomb about to go off, there will be at most two analysts on staff who are capable of doing such a thing. Both of them will have been working for 24 hours straight, and only one of them will really know what they’re doing. But neither of them will have time to break the code because they’ll both be busy trying to reposition satellites before they lose their only lead.

Division, Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense all seem to have an endless supply of world class consultants they can send over at a moment’s notice, but the director of CTU usually doesn’t feel like asking for help. Instead, they’d prefer to squeeze the maximum possible use out of each person and hope they last until the end of the crisis.

Nor does the director feel the need to request more funding for this agency that appears to really need it. CTU gets called in when the FBI, CIA, and Armed Forces can’t get the job done, yet they can’t even afford a receptionist. Every time Jack calls, he gets a completely random person. (The number is (310) 597-3781, a working number that usually goes to voicemail but occasionally goes through to a writer, producer, or actor.)

8. No bathroom.

CTU has a bathroom, but it has only been used three times in the entire history of the agency. This might result from the critical staff shortage, as people don’t always have time to hack into nuclear reactors to prevent meltdowns, let alone go to the bathroom.

Once, Chloe went into the men’s room and startled someone. It’s not clear whether he was startled because there was a woman in the men’s room, or because of the astronomical odds that any two people at CTU would use the bathroom at the same time.

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So before you decide that a job at CTU is full of glory, consider the consequences. Anyway, word has it that CTU has been disbanded in the new season (possibly due to lack of resources). If you want to earn an income online instead, read Why We’re Broke and How To Fix It.

Interesting tidbits relevant to today’s election: In season 2, 24 became the first TV show to portray a black U.S. president.^{[citation needed]} In season 5, John McCain made a cameo appearance as an unidentified, non-speaking bureaucrat.

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