24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY Finale Post-Mortem: Manny Coto on the Most Emotional Scene

[Warning: This post contains massive spoilers for the finale of 24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY. If you have not watched the finale, please don’t read this post until after you’ve viewed the hour.]

There have been no shortage of traumatic deaths on 24, and fittingly, 24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY’s final hour included the biggest (real) death of the season: after Kate saved Audrey from Cheng’s sniper, a second shooter attacked the team and fatally shot Audrey.

While Jack’s grief was brutal to watch — aside from the despair that was evident on his face, in the moments after finding out Audrey was dead, he killed everyone in his path in a brutal manner, and once he was able to get facial recognition on Cheng so President Heller could prove to the Chinese government that he was alive, Jack decapitated Cheng — Heller’s was a whole other level of pain.

All season, viewers had witnessed (and been told), about Heller’s Alzheimer’s disease. And while the disease on its own is difficult enough to come to terms with, in Heller’s final scene of the series (as part of the 12-hour jump in the episode), he reflected over the fact that because of the illness, not only would he forget about his daughter’s tragic death, but he’d forget he even had a daughter at all.

For 24 executive producer Manny Coto, the decision to play out that moment of grief and reflection in Heller came from his own experiences.

“Just on a personal level, myself, having come from a family that has lost a sibling and having seen how my parents reacted to such a tragedy, there really is almost no tragedy worse than to lose one of your children,” Coto told reporters on a conference call. “We knew that [William] Devane (Heller) was in this position of having this disease that was going to take him over, and it just felt like that his mind would have to go there. This is not a kind of pain that is going to be solved, this is not a pain that’s going to go away.”

“Devane, his character takes comfort in the fact that he won’t remember, and that’s really the only way that this kind of tragedy ever gets resolved,” he continued. “The pain of something like that is never going to fade. He goes to this place, and it’s a very dark place: it’s a thought that’s tinged with even a greater layer of tragedy, the fact that he’s actually going to forget his daughter, but he’s going to forget the fact that she also died in this horrible way. It felt like an honorable way to touch upon his situation for the season. Devane played it beautifully, it’s one of his best moments in the season and we were very, very, very happy with the way it came out.”

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What did you think of Heller’s final scene? And were you shocked that Audrey died? (Or that Jack beheaded Cheng?!)

Related:

24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY Finale Photos
24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY: Manny Coto on the Time Jump, the Finale, and More
24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY: Howard Gordon and Robert Cochran on Reaching Episode 200, Whether Jack Can Be Happy, and More

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