Greetings, reader!
It is 09:12 P.M. as I am writing this - during one of many 'commercial breaks' in the latest instalment of the ongoing 24 marathon I'm doing with my best friend Atte. We're up to season 4 now, and as is tradition, I'm using a select few of these short breaks to write down my thoughts about this point in the marathon tradition. Here is Volume IV of my insights into our larger-than-life nerd escapade!
10. A recap on how it works, for anyone interested
Let's start with the basics: 24 is a legendary TV series, with the groundbreaking premise that it takes place in real time. Each season consists of 24 episodes, following a 24-hour span of events, with each episode taking up the span of exactly an hour. Now, the episodes aren't 60 minutes long, but about 42 - because when it aired on TV, there had to be spaces for commercial breaks. Therefore, when you watch the show via streaming or DVD, a standard episode will feature 3 (sometimes 2 or 4) moments where the old commercial break clearly used to be, as the clock jumps a few minutes ahead between scenes. This is important, because it's what keeps the marathon doable.
I originally watched the series as a teenager, with my Dad, in the regular way. But I always fantasized about marathoning one of the show's seasons, keeping with the show's real-time frame. Eventually, my best friend and I arranged to do just that for the show's first season - and it was a blast. Soon after the marathon was over, we realized that there was a way to make the experience about a hundred times more epic (and ridiculously nerdy): instead of leaving it at one season, we should continue and do the whole series in real time. You see, there's always a time jump between seasons, and they always tell how long the time jump is (and not with a day-specific accuracy but a month-specific one, which has made this a lot more merciful to plan).
So, I sat down and mapped out when we're supposed to watch each season (and all of the in-between stuff like movie sequels, spin-off seasons and DVD extra scenes), so that we keep with the show's original timeline relative to when we watched the first season. And that's what we've been up to since the summer of 2020 (and will be continuing until the Lord's year 2042). Oh, and when I mentioned earlier that the 'commercial breaks' are important - that's because we treat them the old-school way, pausing for the right amount of minutes every time one appears. That makes the experience more doable (a 4-minute break is perfect for going to the bathroom, warming up some food or making a batch of strong, black coffee), and it makes it more epic as well, as we keep completely in sync with the events of the series (the transition from one episode's end to the next one's beginning is always a rush).
9. Season 4 was, just as I remembered, a decent one
My recollection before this re-watch was that the show's fourth season is firmly placed in the middle section of my ranking of 24's seasons, and that it took a while for me to warm up to with its uneven first half but then became absolute fire in the endgame. Well, as it turns out, my recollections were right on the money!
The opening act of the fourth season isn't bad, but it's far from the series at its best. However, it gets SO. FUCKING. GOOD. after the halfway mark, and particularly for the last 9 episodes. The Air Force One sequence, the Paul Raines moral dilemma, the emotionally charged season finale - that's peak television right there, especially for its era.
8. Morning-to-morning is DEFINITELY the least painful option
Season 1 takes place from midnight to midnight, so that's how we watched it in our initial marathon. Following the exact timing of the series, we then watched the second season as it takes place from 08:00 A.M. to 08:00 A.M., and the third from 01:00 P.M. to 01:00 P.M.!
From those three wildly different types of 24-hour-marathons, my big takeaway was that based on one of each, I found the morning-to-morning variety of season 2 to be the easiest. Now that we got to do that again, for season 4 takes place between 07:00 A.M. and 07:00 A.M., it confirmed my initial take - this is, by far, the easiest version. Midnight-to-midnight is tought because you've been awake for a whole-ass day when you begin, and you have to stay up all night and then the following day. And afternoon-to-afternoon was tough, because of how long one has to struggle to stay up after the all-nighter.
But morning-to-morning is nice - you have a 'regular' day, you stay up all night, and then you get to go to sleep. Here in the midst of summer vacation it was extra sweet - I got to sleep from 7 in the morning to noon, which isn't all that different from a regular night's sleep during the summer, so it didn't throw me off my rhythm all that bad. Thankfully, most of the later seasons follow this pattern - that is, until season 8 throws a major curveball with its 04:00 P.M. - 04:00 P.M. bullshit.
7. Refined caffeine strategies
It is 02:39 A.M., as I continue to write this. This is our fourth 24 marathon - well, technically it's still the first and only, because this whole project can be seen as one massive 22-year-marathon, and the long time jumps between intensive periods are just longer pauses. But in any case, this is the fourth season that we're watching in this manner, and as you can imagine, we've gotten better at some of this stuff.
The skill of caffeinating oneself in just the right amount for this sort of ordeal is a real form of art. You'll want to have plenty, but not too much, as that'll have all sorts of side effects. With the experience of the previous 24 marathons, I'm really starting to have this down to a science - I had one extra-strong coffee right after breakfast, another regular coffee after lunch, then two energy drinks spaced out over the afternoon and early evening, and a third cup of coffee a while after dinner going into the night. That hit the spot!
6. The prequel was cool
As I briefly mentioned earlier, it's not just the eight seasons of the core series that we're including in the marathon - it's everything canon. Among other things, this includes the 'Prequels' - seasons 4, 5 and 6 all have one, originally released with the season's DVD as a bonus feature to flesh the story out and nowadays found on YouTube for anyone to watch.
There is no extra stuff like that between seasons 1&2 or 2&3, so the Season 4 Prequel was our first brush with this niche stuff between seasons. Thankfully, there was intel to be found on how the prequels fit into the timeline when I made our timeline plan. The 10-minute-long mini-episode is divided into three scenes; the first one takes place three months after season 3, the second one a year later from that, and the third and final one three months later - and just 6 hours before Day 4 begins. This fleshed the marathon out in a nice way, and boy, was it easier to find the time to watch a 3-minute scene together during a certain month than it was to make way for a whole 24-hour-sitting!
5. I care - like, a weird amount - about Tony Almeida
Obviously, me getting invested in fictional stories and caring about characters isn't anything new - yet sometimes the sheer amount of emotion startles me. I already felt this way when watching the series for the first time, but it has only gotten more and more pronounced upon re-watch - from Jack Bauer to Chloe O'Brian, there are many characters that I care deeply about in the show's mythos, but one that has a particularly special place in my heart is the complex antihero Tony Almeida.
I don't know whether it's Carlos Bernard's understated performance, the character's loyalty to Jack, the heartbreaking trajectory of the Tony-Michelle relationship or the overall tragic backstory and character arch - hell, it's probably a combination of all those things. In any case, I know that I had a tear in my eye at the very moment when Almeida made his dramatic comeback in the seventh episode of season 4, and many of his moments from thereon out hit me right in the feels. Poor guy.
4. Thank goodness for my weirdly good TV memory
When a TV series is A) good enough, B) entertaining enough and C) memorable enough, the plot events stay with me in an odd manner - years and years later, I'll be able to tell you what happened in each episode, down to what the episode was titled (and possibly what rating it had on IMDB). Atte and I have both seen the series once before, separately from each other but around the same time, about a decade ago - and with each marathon it becomes clearer that he remembers the events less and less clearly (it has been brought to my attention that this is how normal humans function) while my recollections remain strangely vivid.
Now, a part of me is envious of Atte, who gets to experience many of the plot twists and dramatic moments all over, whereas I sort of know what's coming. But a bigger part of me is grateful for this gift of mine - first of all, it's all sorts of fun to re-watch a show like 24 when knowing all the secret loyalties and double-crosses before the reveals take place, and second of all, anticipating and following my fellow viewer's reactions makes for an endless treasure trove. Season 4 has so many iconic moments that I was looking forward to revisiting, only to find that Atte didn't remember them up to the moment of their happening, and following his reactions was so much fun - (SPOILER ALERT) the payoff of Tony rescuing Jack, the shock of Air Force One being shot down, the whole Chinese Consulate break-in debacle, the ultra-tragic moral dilemma that results in Jack letting Paul die, you name it.
3. A look back...
We've been doing this for six years now, and what a time it has been! The season 1 marathon in July of 2020 was an unforgettable experience, meant to be a one-time-thing until we got to thinking that it could be expanded upon. Following the 18-month time-jump in the show's timeline, we picked up with season 2 in January 2022, after which there was a whopping three-year-break before going into season 3 in January 2025. One prequel interspersed across three sessions and a full 24-hour season 4 marathon later - here we are.
The lore-accurate time jumps make the experience so fun - the same amount of time goes by for us as it does for the characters, which really puts things into perspective. The lives of me and Atte, just like those of Jack, Chloe and company, have undergone all sorts of changes in between these intensive periods, and this makes the role of the marathon as a constant in our lives all the more special.
2. ...And a look into the future
And where do we go from here?
Well, the season 5 prequel is all one scene, and it takes place one year after Day 4. While we ended up doing this part of the marathon in August, it was originally meant to be in July (find out why by reading today's #1), so we'll probably course-correct to the original plan by watching the Prequel in July of 2027 (but late July, so that the "1 year later" still works when you round to the closest amount of months).And the rest goes like this:
- Season 5 in January 2028
- The Season 6 Prequel in August 2028
- Season 6 in September 2029
- Whatever the f**k "Day 6 Debrief" is, divided into five parts in the few hours after the season 6 marathon has ended
- 24: Redemption (the movie (yes, that exists)) in May 2033
- Season 7 in July 2033
- Season 8 in January 2035
- Something called 24: Chloe's Arrest on the morning after the season 8 marathon
- The reboot season 24: Live Another Day in January 2039
- The short videos 24: Solitary and 24: The Raid in July 2041
- And finally: spin-off series 24: Legacy in January 2042
And if they keep making new shit, we act accordingly.
1. A slight deviation - for the BEST of reasons
Okay, so technically, our season 4 marathon should've been in July of this year, not August. This deviation by a few days would be a big deal to my completist-nerd brain under pretty much any other circumstances - but the reason for it is something so once-in-a-lifetime that I'm more than willing to let it slide.
You see, as far as I was concerned, we had arranged to have the marathon on a certain weekend in July, and I was all set for it. Only, the thing is - I'm getting married this year, and Atte is my best man, so it turned out that the weekend we had booked for the 24 marathon was just his perfect cover to make sure that I had the weekend booked...for what turned out to be my bachelor party. The crazy bastard even incorporated a bunch of motifs from 24 into the weekend - the reveal of the weekend's actual agenda was in the form of a mysterious phone call where I was asked to perform a series of tasks in the next 24 hours in order to prevent a cataclysmic event, and many of the weekend's activities (the helicopter ride and shooting range in particular) were action-packed enough to fit the 24 vibe.
There are very, very, very few reasons that I can think of that I'd count as acceptable reasons for not having our traditional 24 marathon at the planned time - but yes, this was the greatest possible one. I love that the bachelor party weekend was a total surprise to me, and I love that I got to spend that time with my closest friends, celebrating the fact that I'm about to get married.
Also, I did the math, and technically this wasn't a deviation! You see, we're going by a monthly accuracy in the time jumps because that's the most accurate timeframe given by the series - and the previous item we watched (the second scene of the Season 4 Prequel) was marked for April, and we happened to watch it in the latter half of the month. And the best information out there for the timing of the fourth season is "Three months later" - so, the first few days of August can absolutely be rounded down to be accepted as "Three months later" from late April.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week for yet another tradition of mine - I mark the beginning Premier League season by sharing my predictions for the 2026/27 Premier League.
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