Spoilers follow.  Be warned.

Another day is over.  I made it through another 24 hours.  Actually, I’ve now made it through 168 hours of Jack Bauer’s life (or 170 if you include the 2-hour movie from last fall).  And apparently, Jack is going to make it through as well.

Ever since the first season shocker of an ending, when double agent Nina killed Jack’s wife Terri, I have been convinced that Jack was going to die every year.  I mean, that twist was so good and unexpected that only killing Jack could really top it.  Attempted assassination of President Palmer - ho-hum.  Jack taken to prison camp by the Chinese - boring.  Jack fakes his own death - whatever.  It has gotten to the point where I’m disappointed at the end of each season that Jack survived.

This year I was even more convinced he was a goner.  For godsakes, the man was exposed to a deadly bioweapon and has been increasingly symptomatic for much of the season.  As is typical of 24, they’ve been giving us all the time cues — “He’s got six hours to live” — and yet the so-called cliffhanger here is that his daughter Kim is going to save him with an experimental stem cell therapy.  Yeah, right.  Last time we got a time cue, Jack had about 45 minutes left until he went belly up and they expect me to believe they’re gonna pull him out of it with an untested treatment in less than an hour.  Um, OK.  But they probably will do just that, given that one of the last things we saw was the doctor rushing off to prep the OR.

Which is too bad.  Because killing Jack would have been thematically better this season than ever before.  The whole time he’s been struggling with his past.  In the last moments of the final episode, he confesses his sins to an Imam (yes, an Imam!) and then slips into a coma.  Meanwhile, as a queasy companion scene, the good F.B.I. agent who has struggled with Jack’s methods this year, appears to have contracted her own case of cowboy justice  — we see her for the last time closing an interrogation room door to be alone with and possibly torture an uncooperative witness.  Layering on the melancholy is the President’s decision to turn in her own daughter who ordered a hit on a bad man (which was a ridiculous twist).

These are three of the most depressing cliff hangers I’ve ever seen.  What’s the message?  Everyone dies, no one makes the right choices and eventually even good people pay a horrible price for taking a stand.  Thanks a lot, 24.

Speaking of ridiculous twists, every season of 24 has them.  This season was no exception.  They have become as expected as the death of a major character, which also is now a staple go-to device whenever the show needs a mid-season reboot.

There are a lot of choices for stupid twist of the year, but my winner for the dumbest is the appearance in DC of Gen. Juma of the fictional country Sangala.  Remember the circumstances — the U.S. is about to invade Sangala to prevent a genocide led by Juma.  The whole plot so far had been about how Juma had somehow managed to gain control of all U.S. computer systems and blackmail the President into backing down.  Yeah, and that’s the part that I was on board with.  But just as it seemed that Juma might win, we discovered that instead of staying in Sangala to triumphantly rule over his stolen country, he had traveled to the U.S. to lead a team of Sangalan commandos to take over the White House.

Oy.  Where to begin.  First of all, if you were a dictator who had spent all morning trying to get the U.S. not to invade your country and you thought you might succeed, why would you also be smuggling yourself into the U.S. for a suicide mission?  OK, that’s not as bad as expecting me to believe that a genocidal maniac who had been seen on every TV news show managed to get into the country in the first place.  And let’s be honest, dictators send lackeys to do their dirty work - they don’t do it themselves.

But I digress.

Moments like that get me wanting to stop every season and I never do.  A testament to the structure of the show.  By setting it in “real time,” 24 never really gives the viewer time to think about what is happening.  We know that even if it is silly now, it might not be when something happens “in 20 minutes.”  So we wait it out.  And the genius is that because the 24 hours are spread out over four months, we feel the immediacy and the distance simultaneously.  The producers have figured out how to bend and stretch time.  Take that Sangala plot twist.  That happened about two months ago for the viewer, even though in 24 time it happened only about 10 hours ago.  So we forget and the show forgets too.

And I forgive as well.  Which is why I keep watching.

There was a lot to love this season.  The growth of Jack’s character.  The shift from L.A. to DC (though as with all Hollywood productions they steadfastly refused to get the DC geography right).  The use of CTU characters outside of CTU.  And Cherry Jones is the best President since Dennis Haysbert.

I know they’ve already made their decision on Jack.  He’ll live, I’m sure, and next season is apparently in NY.  But I can still put in a final plug to kill him.  Maybe in the first hour of the next season.  Just do it.  It’s time.

Of course, then I’d probably stop watching.  Or maybe not.