As I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to hold interest in “Designated Survivor” but there are plot elements rubbing me the wrong way. The “winter finale”, which included a woman walking away from a serious car crash and being well enough to run/drive/shoot a gun not long thereafter was clearly “24”-esque, and I accepted the nature of that show’s universe, but it didn’t work for me here.
While trying to be grounded in reality, the show keeps taking shortcuts and, for a political thriller, appeared to be completely lost on how vacancies in the two houses of Congress are filled.
Then I saw the flags. Not the ones the audience is waving, or the ones that feel like overcompensation because the show is filmed in Canada, but the ones on the partially ruined Capitol.
This is a screen capture from the last episode, when the vice president is to be sworn in. The set designers/CGI artists obviously modeled the whole thing after Barack Obama’s inauguration. But two of those flags have meaning. The second and fourth flags represent the president’s home state. Those flags have 21 stars, representing Illinois. We were given no indication of where Bauer’s character is from — although it’s likely New York (the Cornell sweatshirt), Maryland, or Virginia (being a Cabinet secretary) — and all of those would get a 13-star flag. But this ceremony isn’t for the president, it’s for the vice president, and it’s been made clear he is from Oregon. (And that’s another thing — a character with MacLeish’s background can only be from one district in that state, and it’s not any of those near Portland.)
It’s just a teeny tiny thing, I know. But man, it’s attention to detail that makes things work and allows viewers to accept the universe of the show. For all the detail paid to making a replica of the Oval Office (in the link above), this seems like something someone should have caught.
(This counts as my inauguration-related post.)