24: 6:00 AM - 8:00 AM

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

First off, how great was it that the villain pulling all the strings for all these years had the awe-inspiring, super-sinister name... Alan Wilson! I bet they had fun in the writers' room on that one. "We have to come up with the blandest name possible. It'll be hilarious!" And you know what, it kinda was.

Also, Special Agent Renee Walker in the big Wilson takedown scene? Jumping onto the running board of that SUV and taking out bad guys literally left and right before executing a perfect shoulder roll onto the concrete? Dude!

And in that same fight scene, the one guy who got shot up just as he tried to raise his weapon?

And Kim Bauer's arm on fire? Not to mention when Jack Bauer tried to kill himself with those flares? (What's with the Bauers and immolation, anyway?)

And Aaron Pierce bringing the President's crazy daughter to justice? The Tony half triple-cross (which should be an Olympic event)? And how he pumped a slug into that woman's gut without so much as a good-to-know-ya before beating on Wilson? Thrilling. All of it.

But past all the smackdowns and showdowns and crazy twists, 24 finally in its ham-fisted way addressed the torture issue in as much of a nuanced fashion as it could muster. Jack wouldn't change a thing, and yet he craved forgiveness from his new best friend the imam.

And thus the philosophical case was made: If the time bomb is ticking, torture can be a logical last resort, even if its results are suspect--but the one who does the torturing should expect to pay the full price under the law after the crisis ends. No official sanctioning of the act, no decisions not to prosecute, no moral waffling. Agree with it or not, at least 24 makes an intellectually honest case (admittedly after churning out many, many, many intellectually dishonest scenes of torture that almost immediately yielded high-value intel, and occasionally in less-than-last-resort circumstances). The moral argument is simply this: If someone were to, say, kidnap your child and stuff him or her in an airtight box, and you further knew with reasonable certainty that someone in your custody could lead you to the child but refused to do so, you would do anything in your power to make that person give up the information in time to save the child's life--even though you also knew that torture is wrong and that it does not typically yield reliable results. If it was your only chance to recover your child, or to save a city from a deadly mad-cow-gas attack, you would go full-metal Torquemada. In fact, to not torture would be the greater moral failing in such a situation. Take away all the yelling and histrionics and that's what it boils down to. It's an argument that demands, at least, something more than a knee-jerk response from those who oppose torture on absolute grounds.

But then, in the last scene with Renee, 24, perhaps inadvertently (but perhaps not), makes it harder to subscribe to even a narrow justification for torture. Instead of evoking a "Dude, girls can torture, too!" vibe, the show shakes us out of our "rah-rah Jack Bauer" stupor and rubs our face in the evil, transgressive nature of the act with nothing more than a hint of a smile from Agent Walker and an ominously closing door.

Sweet cliffhanger, and it makes you think! What more could we ask? Well, I'd have asked that they actually let Jack die, but I'll probably still enjoy watching that head-butting so-and-so limp back into action next season. I know I'm looking forward to seeing how things turn out with Renee. Maybe she will find Alan Wilson's scary co-conspirators, John Jones, Jane Smith and Dave Anderson...