Monday's "Washington Post" took the TV series '24' to task for its inventions of locales in the Washington D.C. area, including a Port of Alexandria, a container shipping facility on the Potomac River. And they had terrorist go scuba diving right up underneath the White House and then tunnel their way in.Howard Gordon, "24's" executive producer, admitted that he and his writers weren't that knowledgeable about the cartographic details for our nation's capital, but he also argued that they only have to be plausible, not literally accurate.
Linda Stasi of the "New York Post" had a similar complaint a few years ago about the fictional subway lines mentioned in the baseball series 'Clubhouse'.
But I have to argue against the need for an exact recreation of the geography - these shows are taking place in an alternate universe (and from there in separate TV dimensions. 'Clubhouse' is in Earth Prime-Time, the main Toobworld, and '24' has its own dimension - let's say... "Earth Prime-Time/24".)
I even have a splainin as to why the White House is sitting on top of a body of water. In an old episode of 'The Wild, Wild West' in which Edward Andrews played a villain named The Brain, there were caverns underneath the White House from which he plotted to replace President Grant with a look-alike. At least in that alternate world of '24', I'd argue that those caverns were flooded in order to prevent any other madman from ever trying to attack the Commander-In-Chief from that direction. (Just because '24' and 'The Wild, Wild West' don't share the same dimension, that doesn't mean the world of Jack Bauer and the CTU didn't have Secret Service agents Jim West and Artemus Gordon in its past.....)
In that article, Gordon went on to say that "The only people who really care about this are people with too much time on their hands."
And that would be me.....
BCnU!
Toby O'B
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