Accidental Aesop: Pretty much every career politician in the show fits somewhere between extremely selfish and outright evil. Between that and how Kirkman himself becomes much more cynical and prone to much worse decisions over the series, the message seems to become that it is impossible to both be a politician and a good person.
Brooke Mathison, the mysterious Smug Snake woman who speaks for The Conspiracy, gets shot dead by Agent Wells and by Jason Atwood, whose captive son was murdered by her and her associates.
Momberg poisoning himself means you at least get to see him get a painful death scene after the horrid things he did. As for Detwiler and Brunton, after each one was such an insufferable Smug Snake? Seeing them both get arrested is definitely satisfying—especially with Mars getting to see the former taken down as well.
Complete Monster: Season 3: Garrett Detwiler and Wouter Momberg are a pharmaceutical CEO and South African biochemist, respectively. Detwiler and Phil Brunton hire Momberg, a war criminal, to synthesize a biotoxin specifically for the purpose of infecting minorities and creating a mass sterilization so that the white demographic will be significantly higher in future elections. Detwiler also has a drug approved for one of his companies that he knows increases dependency so he can also have another sold that stops it. They have Aryans work on the toxin, and a scientist is fatally wounded and then burned alive when infected. In order to test the biotoxin, an OBGYN clinic that takes all minorities is targeted among others. Momberg then murders the Aryans and fatally poisons now CIA Agent Hannah Wells to cover their tracks, gleefully taunting her as she lays dying, and then later murders a scientist who catches onto him. When caught, he releases instructions for creating the toxin online and threatens FBI with the toxin, claiming infection is fatal.
Kimble Hookstraten is a secondary character, but is quite popular for being a highly level-headedRepublican Speaker, when the show could have just as easily written her as being an outright jerkass like many of her colleagues in the House, the Senate, and the state-level leadership. It's a shame she didn't return for the second season.
Abe Leonard, sleazy as he is, seems to be fairly popular for being a much more three-dimensional Intrepid Reporter than any of the other media personalities shown before him.
Growing the Beard: As the show got into the middle and latter part of the first season, a number of unpopular plot points (like Leo Kirkman's drug troubles) were dropped and flat characters were written out, while newer, more well-developed characters (Senator Bowman, Cornelius Moss, Abe Leonard, etc.) were introduced and the main storyline began to expand beyond its focus on The Conspiracy to encompass more of the political realities of governing the USA in the wake of the Capitol catastrophe. This shift appears to have been gaining the series better reviews and more stable ratings.
Harsher in Hindsight: Several events that happened in this series also occurred during Trump's presidency:
Governor Rivera's refusal to take in 300 refugees strongly parallels Trump's "Muslim Ban" where travelers (including green card visa holders) and refugees from six countries note Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are detained in airports and deported back to their countries. There were also reports of travelers from countries that are not from the said banned countries and even U.S. citizens (Muhammad Ali Jr.) being detained in airports and with extreme questioning from border agents.
In the second episode, "The First Day", Michigan Governor James Royce ordered the state police to round up and arrest every Muslim. Relating to the first point, many travelers, green visa holders, and U.S. citizens who have been detained at airports happen to either be a Muslim, Arab, or African descent, highlighting the heavy Profiling under the Trump administration. In the domestic side of things, ICE agents have been targeting immigrant communities (particularly Latinos) where people are arrested without charges, even legal immigrants or immigrants without any criminal record.
The Hun Chiu arc is one for the Korean Peninsula, given that Kim Jong-Un has threatened to use nuclear missiles against the US.
Kirkman orders a massive military strike against targets in Kunami in an episode that aired scarcely more than a week before Trump ordered a cruise missile assault against several military sites in Syria following a suspected chemical attack on civilians.
The show’s third season deals with a pandemic arcnote inspired by The Apartheid Era South African biological weapons program Project Coast, according to executive producer Neal Baer in two spring 2020 interviews which parallels the later real-life COVID-19 Pandemic and its surrounding fears and conspiracies that it was bioterror-related. The show also touches upon the fictional pandemic’s disproportionate impact on people of color in much the same way as coverage of the real-life pandemic.
The show opens with the bombing of the United States Capitol, which serves as the basis of the plot. On January 6, 2021, thousands of Donald Trump's supporters unlawfully stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Five people died and explosive devices were found at the scene, though thankfully they were safely removed before they could be detonated.
In the aftermath of this storming, concerns were made about rhetoric regarding a possible follow-up bombing at the Capitol, with the intention of inflicting maximum casualties, during one of President Joe Biden's speeches to Congress, a word-for-word emulation of the very event that puts the show's events into motion. When these concerns were made public, the show actually began to trend on Twitter.
The scene in the final episode when Isabel discovers she's pregnant with Aaron's child is already ambivalent enough as it is given the dissolution of their relationship throughout the season and just became even sadder with Adan Canto's unexpected passing of appendiceal cancer in January 2024 at age 42 as well—especially with Canto leaving behind both his wife and two young children too, born in May 2020 and March 2022 respectively.
Fans said Jack Bauer would be a good President. Then this was announced with Kiefer Sutherland as President of the United States.
Less than a week after Kirkman fired his Secretary of State, the real life Secretary of State was fired.
Magnificent Bastard: Patrick Lloyd from seasons 1 and 2 leads a disbanded military firm and secretly aims to stage the takeover of the United States of America, using a powerful weapon to attack the Capitol building and killing nearly everyone inside during the State of the Union address. Having used an electronic blueprint of the bombing to prevent such an attack, Lloyd possesses blueprints for other acts of terror and has the terrorist who he paid to commit the initial bombing killed to tie up loose ends. Forcing the FBI director into compliance by kidnapping and threatening his son, Lloyd tries to have the current President Tom Kirkman killed to put his own puppet in office. While some plans fall through, Lloyd manages to steal nuclear codes from the Pentagon to gain the means to hold the US hostage and target other nations. Killing his contacts to avoid capture, Lloyd uses his final moments to threaten to release Sarin gas and kill thousands, only to actually be bluffing about it.
Memetic Mutation: Some viewers are asking where the heck is Jack Bauer when he's needed.
The conspirators cross this in the very first episode by bombing the U.S. Capitol and killing a thousand American citizens to further their own power. This is only reinforced when they get wind of Atwood's investigations, abduct his son, and blackmail him into taking the fall for Nassar's murder. And thenthe conspirators attempt to murder Agent Wells, followed by President Kirkman, in "The Oath". Taken up to eleven when they murder Atwood's son as of "The End of the Beginning", just to Kick the Dogeven further.
Arguably Majid Nassar as well, even though he wasn't behind the bombing itself, when he takes children at gunpoint as human shields and threatens to execute them in the face of a Navy S.E.A.L. team. He is not missed when he is poisoned shortly thereafter in prison.
The conspirators abducting Atwood's son in "The Traitor", complete with a Smug Snake operative taunting him about it. And later they execute his son anyways.
Langdon's car navigation system being hacked after he refused to play ball with the conspiracy.
All the myriad cyberattacks throughout the mid-to-later second season, even if Hollywood Hacking is involved.
The idea of a pandemic resulting from a deliberate bioterror attack targeted against racial minorities, something executive producer Neal Baer linked to gene editing in his intro to a Johns Hopkins publication during the real-life COVID-19 pandemic where similar fears and conspiracies cropped up.
Before being best known for playing Robby Keene, Tanner Buchanan played Tom Kirkman's son Leo in the first two seasons.
While she'd appeared in multiple things over the years even before being Phoebe Spengler, Mckenna Grace was best known for her role here as Kirkman's daughter Penny.
The Scrappy: Leo, whose extremely stock "troubled teen" story early on in the series was quite jaw-droppingly out of sync with the political and conspiracy-thriller tone of rest of the show. It had many reviewers wondering if the writing team seriously thought the "designated survivor" concept itself couldn't make for a good enough story all on its own. To the show's credit, Leo's plotline was dropped in short order, but it remains to be seen if it will return at some point.
Seasonal Rot: Some viewers thought the show underwent a severe decline in quality in Season 2, quickly wrapping up the conspiracy plot line in favor of making it a The West Wing clone. It didn’t help that it went through numerous showrunners, and characters such as Kimble Hookstraten disappeared by Season 2.
Season 3 went further, as some viewers thought that Netflix made it unrealistically partisan, other plot lines did not fit, that there were too many new characters, some of whom, like Dontae Evans, were too polarizing.
Jason Atwood gets a really rough treatment in the series; he starts off as the new acting director of the FBI and Hannah Wells' Reasonable Authority Figure when his predecessor is killed in the Capitol bombing. As he and Wells begin to investigate, a Trauma Conga Line ensues: his son is taken hostage by the conspirators (who end up killing the boy anyways), he is forced into falsely confessing to the murder of Majid Nassar, gets thrown in prison, loses his reputation and his career, and finally ends up shot dead by Nestor Lozano when he finally gets the chance to do anything to fight The Conspiracy. The only silver lining is that he gets to pull a posthumous Taking You with Me when his files from spying on Lloyd and Whitaker are successfully sent to Agent Wells right before he gets ambushed and killed.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The fact that Alex's death resulted in Penny technically becoming by far the youngest First Lady in American history has not once been brought up.
about rhetoric regarding a possible follow-up bombing at the Capitol, with the intention of inflicting maximum casualties, during one of President Joe Biden's speeches to Congress, a word-for-word emulation of the very event that puts the show's events into motion. When these concerns were made public, the show actually began to trend on Twitter.