The opening salvo (which hits our screens on 12 February) was perhaps the most exciting yet – it’s all up for grabs this time around. But that’s all I’m really going to say about it because, rather irritatingly, the screening I was at was introduced by a Sky PR bod who basically signposted the most notable moment in the episode, even to the point of telling us when it would occur.

Obviously, programmes have to be publicised, but with something as plot-heavy as 24, specific storyline details should surely remain undiscussed – not even alluded to. Thus, if anyone else in the world apart from me is intent on actually watching the thing come February (and to be fair, it did notch up 17 million viewers in the US) keep away from Sky One until then. Cripes, even the continuity announcer could blow it all.

Er, actually, here’s one small plot detail I am going to reveal: There’s a lovely moment when Jack Bauer is (inevitably) dragooned back into action again. The whole thing is undercut with our hero producing a pair of dark glasses from within his hither-to hidden stash of weapons. Cheesy and trite, yet, but amusingly self-aware.

Tick-tock-tick-tock …

The subterfuge is revealed on the excellent documentary that appears on the DVD release of the series. The producers had lied to the crowd to protect the fidelity of this, arguably the most shocking of endings, from anyone who might want to post it on the internet – how could they trust them again?

Trust. It’s about an expectation from the viewer that the programme will take them on a particular journey from start to finish. In a cop show, the standard will be that a crime with be solved during the time we spend with the characters; in a sitcom something happens and hilarity ensues. 24 doesn’t care about any of that; it doesn’t have a genre exactly; it’s impossible even to tell what is going to happen from one episode to the next.

Events will occur in real time, but that’s all they’re promising. In the past there have been a number of artistic attempts to capture the real time events of a person or character or group of characters over an extended unbroken period, usually a day. German performance artists The Gob Squad recorded their vocal meanderings over a extended drive around Germany and presented it unedited in 18 half hour slices; on television the E4 feed of Big Brother captured much the same effect over a longer period. In TimeCode, Mike Figgis actually recorded an ensemble drama with overlapping plotlines in real time and presented the results in shots at four corners of the viewing screen. The John Badham film, Nick of Time offered a plot in which Johnny Depp’s daughter is kidnapped and he’s told he must kill a US Governer within 75 minutes or his child will die instead. The last two are the clearest influence on 24, at least in the first year; but it encompasses all of them to some extent, twisting them to offer a much richer experience. Real time is only part of the issue.

In the first five minutes of far too many shows to count it’s possible to clock the ending. In this series of 24 that has never been the case. By the end of the first hour the viewer knew that a bomb would be going off somewhere and that Jack Bauer needed to find out where. At this stage our assumption could only be that come hour 24 we’d be watching Jack’s last minute attempt to America the nuclear threat. At no point could we guess that instead he would be at a stadium trying to prove that a recording had been falsified in order to implicate three innocent countries in the bombing. And convince a new president that the retaliatory war, which could begin within moments, was illegal. Heck, the “baaamb” (as Jack insisted on calling it) was exploded mid-season.

The potential death of Palmer was another example of the sheer unpredictability of the series; that he may have been assassinated by Mandy, who had lit the fuse of the first series, simply could not have been foreseen. It was an utterly audacious move and offered the possibility that the hoods who had been buzzing about both series were at the behest of an even larger organization to be revealed in the following season. And we thought they were making it up as they went along.

This final episode was breathtaking entertainment, which wore its filmic influences in its sleeve. The aforementioned stadium scene looked like it had been cut in from a 1970s political thriller directed by Alan Pakula. You almost expected Warren Beatty or Robert Redford to turn up in a corduroy suit with some other piece of evidence. After all the scrabbling about in the dark at the end of the first series, they were making the most of the sunlight with this massive location. For some reason, though, it felt slightly wrong that after all the corridors, rooms and basements the final scenes should take place here. It created angles and vantage points, and places for Bauer to pick people off, but overall it was a vastness which didn’t seem true to the rest of the series. It could be mostly excused though because of the entertainment value of seeing Sherry Palmer legging it across the stalls, running away from having to have a confrontation which didn’t involve her silver tongue.

The most important aspect of the episode was that, before the cliffhanger, all the loose ends which might have been forgotten in lesser series were tied up. Having been proven right Tony and Michelle (whose brother was still knocking about the holding cells) got their old jobs back, the former glaring down his boss Chappelle: “Either fire me or get out of my chair.” They had their moment in which potential romance continued to blossom.

The Warner family so disliked in the early episodes because of their interminable wedding day were reunited. Silence of the Lambs was referenced as the now utterly psychotic Marie Warner simply sat chillingly as her father wanted answers and while sister Kate advised him that they wouldn’t get any. “You think you’ll be safe out there.” Marie whispered. “You won’t.”

Meanwhile Calamity Kim Bauer was finally re-united with her father after 24 hours and didn’t manage to trip over anything. Kim has been a real weakness this year taking part in storylines without any real connection to the main thrust. Her role just seemed to be something to cut to when everyone one else was driving their car or searching for something on a computer. The most shocking example of this kind of shoehorning appeared in hour 22 two when her father’s plot effectively paused while he talked her into defending herself.

Some have written that to end this series with a cliffhanger was an unsatisfying move. Personally I would have been disappointed if it hadn’t. For me the end of the first series hadn’t worked because the death of Teri Bauer had felt like an after thought and an appalling pay off considering what she’d been through that day (including the amnesia). The wait for the next series was more about what else can be done with the format rather than what is going to happen with the characters. In this series the opposite is true. We want to know what Jack whispered to former lover turned enemy agent Nina Myers all those hours ago; who were the men in the café and on the boat, how do they fit into all of this; will the president survive? If the viewer is wondering from week to week, why not month to month?

Will Palmer die? I hope so. What I mean to say is, the governmental shenanigans have now been played out and its difficult to see what else can be done. The next series needs to be even tighter, even more about the characters and their lives, about the small emergencies rather than those on a global scale. Interestingly we know it’s happening three years hence (therefore in the future) which will be plenty of time for Palmer to recover (or not) and to give Kim Bauer a plotline which isn’t completely irrelevant to the main story, and for the status quo to change utterly (fingers crossed for Tony and Michelle). But whatever happens during those next 24 hours, I think we can be confident it’s going to be something very special indeed.

So the question we can’t dodge is: did the last episode of 24 deliver? Well, we’re going to get that salubrious task of bestowing judgement on the programme out of the way early here with an unequivocal “yes”. This viewer left tonight’s episode feeling well satisfied – and for a programme that’s been as convoluted, complicated and inconsistent (albeit only ever wavering between compulsive and watchable) as 24 has over the last six months, this is no small feat. The much-lauded downbeat ending didn’t feel especially brave to me (as it’s been described elsewhere) but it did feel fitting. After everything that’s been pitted at Jack Bauer it would have seemed a major cop-out for the series to rest with all elements restored to normal and everyone happy. A lasting sacrifice had to come to legitimise the 23-episode preamble.

Three months ago, OTT reported back as 24 reached midday. At that stage we identified a watershed in the series’ development. The initial storylines had been exhausted and there was a sense of the programme shedding its skin as Gaines, Kevin Caroll (the bogus “Alan York”) and Gaines’ compound were all written out. And it certainly was the case that from this point onwards 24 seemed a little less focussed. Storyline threads were not so neatly bound in with the main narrative, and that sense of a strong, thumping logic driving the story became a bit more diffused. What had felt contained – a pressure cooker – now seemed to be bubbling over and spilling out in every direction. Yet, the programme remained essential viewing, thanks to the characterisation and some shameless set-pieces.

In that previous review of 24 OTT commented: “Palmer remains underdeveloped, and apart from where his own storyline has intersected with Bauer’s, he has remained one of the least interesting elements of the programme.” Almost to spite this criticism, the relationship between David and Sherry Palmer has grown over the series’ second-half to become one of the most fascinating aspects of 24. Whereas a lot of US TV drama venerates ambition, 24 refreshingly presented Sherry Palmer’s desire for David to get into Office as a deeply negative force. The programme didn’t particularly seek to challenge her motivation, only to show the damaging effects of untempered ambition. The break-up of the couple’s marriage as a result in the final episode was as well realised as any seen on screen for some years, and marked out this “B” story as something equally as compelling as Jack Bauer’s exploits.

However, whereas 24 took its own path in the depiction of the Palmers’ relationship and with many of the conventions of TV drama, it did let itself down badly with one key casting decision. Dennis Hopper as Victor Drazen was an unhappy confluence. Enlisting this notable Hollywood “baddy” as the series’ ultimate bogey-man smacked of a lack of imagination which remain unredeemed by the accompanying poor performance. His death half-way through the this final episode was rightly hurried to make way for the excellent denouncement as Nina Myers shot her way out of CTU. Only in the final reel did 24 recapture some of the inventive and scary villainy that Gaines had effortlessly peddled earlier on.

Thankfully, though, 24 has been too rich a series to be undermined by one square-peg. Destined to be tagged as one of the defining programmes of 2002, upon reflection it could be argued that the series’ strongest asset wasn’t its “real time” format, at all. 24‘s greatest strength has been in clearly delineating how and when the narrative will progress, timing us into and out of each episode, rolling along on a format that invites us to always look forward to the next instalment. As it is, I’m looking forward to series two. The clock’s ticking…

24‘s primary appeal is to those attracted by drawn out epics. Prior to the first episode, one knew that if it turned out to be good, here would be a guarantee of 23 further TV appointments. Whilst such a demand on viewer loyalty is perceived to be a significant risk in an age in which TV programmes (particularly American) have to engage an audience straight away, in truth there is a burgeoning tradition (at least in cinema) that suggests audiences are in fact predisposed to the occasional long, drawn out tale. The success of both the Star Wars trilogy, and the recent Lord of the Rings film (which confounded Hollywood convention by failing to provide any level of resolution at the end) attest to this. American television, too, has offered up similar attempts at a long-form narrative. However, neither Murder One nor Babylon 5 can be described as unqualified successes, and the demise of The X Files has been largely attributable to regular viewers’ increasing weariness and confusion with its unfolding arc.

24 then walks a high wire. Regular viewers return each week because of the distinctiveness of the narrative drive, yet what hope has the series of attracting new viewers over the course of its 24 episode life? 24 has, however, provisioned for this via an ingenious narrative structure that gives the illusion from the first minute of being locked on an inexorable course, but in truth is able to make last minute plot diversions in order to react to its changing relationship with the audience. The 12th episode, as well as representing the mid-point of the entire saga, serves to set the reset button on much of the story, thus enticing new viewers in to what will likely become an almost entirely self-contained second set of 12.

The primary focus of 24‘s first half has been Jack Bauer’s hunt for his kidnapped family. Appropriately for the “midday” episode, the arc concludes with a “high noon” (as Bauer lays siege upon the kidnappers). Always gripping, it is during such action scenes that the show’s conceit of playing out every minute of Bauer’s day comes into its own. We know that we will have to endure every second of Bauer’s infiltration into the kidnapper’s den, as well as witness in every detail his eventual escape. The action itself may be conventional, the reaction of the players predictable, but there is a strange compulsion to stick with it, watching as events unfold in “real time”.

Not that this narrative conceit doesn’t have its drawbacks. There is a reliance on telephone conversations to bring geographically dispersed characters together, and whilst necessary to progress the plot, this makes for visually uninteresting exchanges, losing much of the potential for interplay that face-to-face contact provides. Nevertheless, the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks, and there is an immense satisfaction in witnessing events put into motion, and then seeing the consequences turn up later on in the programme, right at the designated time.

With such a high concept though, something has to give and with 24 it’s characterisation. So far, 24 has relied upon our desire to see Bauer rescue his family. The compulsion of a husband wishing to save his family awakens something innate in all of us. The same cannot be said of the race to save a US Senator. Like many of 24‘s characters, Palmer remains underdeveloped, and apart from where his own storyline has intersected with Bauer’s, he has remained one of the least interesting elements of the programme. One suspects that the sub-plot involving the uncovering of a murder committed by his son will soon fall by the wayside, as he increasingly becomes the focus of Bauer’s attention. Whether or not this proves to be as engaging and nail-biting a story as that played out in the first half of the series remains to be seen, and will rely heavily on the performance of the principle actors.

Such anxiety as to how 24 will play out can only be a compliment. Having invested now half a day of our lives in this unfolding story, we deserve a dénouement befitting the tension, plot twists and performances we have seen so far. The series must be careful of not repeating the same trick too many times (so far both Tony Almeida and Alberta Green have been presented as “bad guys” only to be eventually revealed as on the side of the “just”), and one is fearful that the final plot twist (for there must be one) will reveal nothing more devastating then that one of Bauer’s other CTU colleagues is really working against him. The gradual disclosure of one of Bauer’s earlier missions though, hints at a more satisfying source for plot twists a little further down the line, and due to the craft and skill which one has seen applied across 24‘s first 12 episodes, one must remain optimistic that the most enthralling television drama in years will stay true to its course.