For diehard fans of 24, this season finale included many chewy morsels (spoliers!)…

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So, Tony’s hail-Mary attempt to spread mad-cow gas via the D.C. Metro was foiled, leaving the conspirators desperate to spring him from Jack Bauer’s clutches. Out of the failure of an ad-hoc plan, the bad guys were somehow able to get a pair of killers (including, of course, Tony’s now-bewigged sidekick) to the airport, presumably buy tickets to enter the gate area, befriend Kim Bauer, ice her minder, and then show Jack live video of an unsuspecting Kim about to be whacked if daddy doesn’t help them out?

I’m so willing to suspend my disbelief, 24, but this is crazy even for you. What has so far been a fairly tightly plotted season (again, for 24) is devolving into its usual desperate attempt to cobble together a climax out of spit, bubblegum and Kim’s vacant stare.

But at least this does set up a fitting showdown between Jack and Tony, no? And that will make it all better, right? Oh, 24, I’m such a sucker for you.

It’s always darkest before the dawn and all that, but last night’s episode of 24, in which mad-cow-gas-stricken Jack Bauer was reduced to a shadowy caricature of his former self, got me to thinking: What if there really is no cure for Jack? What if they let Jack die in a blaze of glory to end this season?

That would be a cool, ballsy move. In the meantime, the showdown between Jack and Tony previewed for next week indicates the show is ready to kick back into high gear as it heads into its final hours. It’s about time. The most compelling thing about this week’s episode was that freakish tear that ran down Chloe’s face and hung around between her lips for a good long while before meandering down her chin.

If she’s sad now, how bad will she feel if Jack himself gets a silent clock?

I’ll get this out of the way first: I’m not a 24 fan. I tried it on for a while, but it just never really fit me. I have watched a complete season of the show, though, and that would be season 2. This chapter of 24 is renowned for the horrible plot tangents involving Jack Bauer’s daughter Kim, which included an episode where she was cornered in the wilderness by a cougar, causing her to flee to an underground bunker with creepy Kevin Dillon: Comedy Gold. Since this is the only season of the show I’ve watched, Jon & Al Kaplan’s project, 24 Season Two: The Musical, is just perfect for me.

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Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for 24 last night–could be the crappy weather had something to do with it–but didn’t this episode seem almost perfunctory? Lots of characters enslaved to an unwinding plot, going through the motions of killing double-crossing terrorists and threatening the well-being of families and hollering the names of dead presidents (when is David Palmer going to replace Andrew Jackson on the 20 anyway?).

The mad-cow gas is really taking its toll now–and, gee, the way those brain-wasting diseases work is by wasting away the brain, right? So if they don’t miraculously cure Jack Bauer soon, won’t he need a drool cup on his next mission?

Look at me, trying to impose standard story logic on 24. That’s kind of like insisting on nutritional labels for packets of meth. At any rate, the one moment where someone broke out of the confines of the established plot was when the president’s daughter came completely unhinged. I know it’s part of the standard process of adding obstacles and complications, but it’s the one thing that felt reasonably fresh about the episode.

Well, that and the fact the consortium of conspirators has a really cool voice-garbling teleconferencing system…

Despite the lack of a silent clock for Agent Moss when Tony suffocated him last hour, this week’s extended corpse examination pretty much confirms he’s toast, unless the Crank franchise guys get hold of him.

The continued efficient ruthlessness of the bad guys–setting traps for the FBI, slipping a kill pill to Jon Voight in his holding cell–helps to keep all of the nagging plot questions at bay. Even though this is an above-average season, the conspiracy, particularly Tony’s role in it, is particularly baroque this year. So many things had to break exactly the right way for Tony’s various actions–giving Jack intel on the attack, blowing up the WMD-tipped missiles, getting captured and apparently almost killed by Starkwood–to make sense that it boggles even a mind not fogged by mad-cow gas.

Let’s talk spoilers, shall we?

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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

All right, so we know Jack Bauer isn’t going to be killed by the mad-cow gas. We know that in part because Slumdog Millionaire’s Anil Kapoor has already been cast for next season’s round-the-clock crisis. But even knowing that Jack’ll survive somehow, we still want 24 to ratchet up the suspense a bit more before pulling out the old “not to get anyone’s hopes up but we have an experimental cure we’ve been working on”–and I think I speak for most sentient beings when I say I hope Elisha Cuthbert’s been taking nonstop acting lessons since her last appearance as Jack’s daughter, Kim. Or maybe that infamous cougar will eat her before she can save dad’s life with her smokin’-hot stem cells.

There’s some nice scenery chewing by Jon Voight in this episode–and he shows a surprising burst of old-man strength in dispatching his weak-in-the-knees board chairman with hand-to-hand aplomb. But Tony’s uniform switcheroo with the too-easily-overpowered security goon–haven’t we seen something along those lines before? What’s next–Jack flying a military prototype jet with an X-wing configuration through a gauntlet of fire to destroy the Death Star canisters of mad-cow gas?

These are the 24 episodes I like the least: The big conspiracy has been revealed and the forces of good must gear up to defeat it. Lots of transitional tedium, with only the likely return of Aaron Pierce to official government service to bring cheer into our hearts. That and, of course, Tony’s almost-nonchalant reaction to his would-be assassin getting taken out at the last second by the turncoat Starkwood stooge: “What’s going on?” Um, you just got saved from getting a bullet in the brainpan, that’s what’s going on. But I guess when you’ve been brought back from the dead like Tony, every other threat feels second-rate.

Oh, and Jack’s probably got a sped-up version of mad cow. But how will we be able to tell when he’s going crazy? I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t yell all the time and torture people and pull bloody computer storage devices out of dead guys’ still-warm sternums already. Mad cow might actually mellow him out some.

As we near the witching hour in the latest season of 24, the guy who used to write these recaps has decided to go look at naked ladies for a living. But he and I tend to geek out on this series in much the same way (plus, an academic once published a book with a godawful cover in which he criticized me for a column I wrote about 24 and torture!)–so hopefully your recap-reading experience won’t be greatly affected by the changing byline. This week, let’s look past the crackerjack action sequences, the full flowering of Jon Voight’s nuckin’ futs character, Jack’s odd unwillingness to call in a tip to the FBI (”we’re fugitives, Tony–they’d never believe us!”) until such time as the bad guys were jamming communications, the FBI’s willingness to leave a suspended agent in lockdown with full cell-phone access, and the “revelation” that the president’s daughter is exactly as evil and stupid as we suspected. Instead, let’s get into spoiler territory and examine…

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