Corey Hawkins wears a MTM Falcon

One image from 24: Legacy has Eric Carter mid-room, a pistol braced in both hands, the watch on the wrist that grips it, a black case against the white of his shirt. Corey Hawkins plays Carter, the lead FOX installed when it rebooted 24 in 2017 without Jack Bauer. Carter is a former Army Ranger sergeant who led the raid in Yemen that killed the terrorist Sheikh Ibrahim bin-Khalid, and the kill earned him a fatwa: the dead man's followers spend the day hunting the squad that carried it out. The reboot kept the real-time clock and the split screens. It cut Bauer's twenty-four hours to twelve and gave them to someone new.

The watch is an MTM Special Ops Falcon, and the choice runs back through the franchise. The original 24 cycled through Jack Bauer's watches over its run: a Rolex Submariner in the first season, a Casio in the second, then the MTM Black Hawk that became his signature. The Falcon is the watch MTM built to replace the Black Hawk, the second edition of that model by the company's own account, so the reboot reached for the same maker and, in effect, the next version of Bauer's watch. MTM still lists Hawkins and 24: Legacy on its own site.

The Falcon is a flashlight you can read the time on. A 44mm case in steel or military-grade titanium holds a carbon fiber dial and two sets of LEDs: blue ones inside to light the dial, three white ones in the case that throw a beam up to 150 lumens, with a strobe brighter still. A rechargeable battery tops it up on an induction pad and lasts about a month a charge. MTM hand-builds the Falcon in Los Angeles, and the black steel version Carter wears runs about 960 dollars. Almost all of that goes to the dark. A show whose whole identity is a ticking clock has no use for the torch or the strobe. What it needs from the Falcon is the hour, the same thing the show's own clock has been showing on screen all day.