Best & Worst: 24

By the end of season one, we knew Jack was tough, we just didn't know how tough.

We do after he singlehandedly storms a terrorist base.

First he drives a van through the wall, then he guns down everything that moves, before cold-bloodedly executing baddie Victor Drazen (for Dennis Hopper's crimes against accents presumably). The man is the angel of death in a long-sleeved T-shirt...

Jack's daughter Kim has always been a rubbish character - basically a hostage waiting to happen.

But she sank to her lowest in season 2. Especially when, wandering haplessly through the wilderness, she stumbles, gets her foot caught in a trap and then spies a cougar creeping ever closer. We were praying for the damn thing to eat her...

Working with Jack rarely ends well for anyone, but poor square-jawed sidekick Chase (or 'Jack Lite') really got it bad.

With seconds ticking down until the bio bomb chained to Chase's wrist goes off, Jack does the only thing that any reasonable man could do: he slices off Chase's hand with an axe so he can stick the bomb in an airtight container...

After failing to discover the location of a nuclear suitcase bomb in time, the darn thing goes off.

Jack watching a mushroom cloud form over a distant part of LA (presumably very far distant...) is possibly the dumbest moment in 24 history. A bona fide fridge-nuker.

Mason was the pencil-pushing CTU bureaucrat you loved to hate in seasons one and two, but he's gifted the best exit in the show's history.

Already dying of radiation poisoning, he sacrifices himself by piloting a plane containing a nuclear bomb and crashing it into the desert. George, we salute you...

Really? Even if she was still a full-time CTU employee, giving the top job to socially inept Chloe would be a bit ill-advised.

Giving it to her when she started the season as a temp who barely knew her way around the office is laughable even by 24 standards...

And you thought that all the torture stuff came later, didn't you?

Jack's description of just what he could do to a suspect armed only with a towel is... er... stomach-churning (basically he'll forcefeed it to him and then yank it back out, bringing his guts with it...).

Much better than the moment in series 8 where he actually does rip out someone's stomach.

How would you slow down a suspect so that satellite support can get into place?

If you're Jack Bauer: buy some time by pulling on a mask and pretending to rob the gas station convenience store that the bad guys are in. No...

After three seasons of betrayal, backstabbing and sexual tension, Jack finally puts mega-harpie Nina Myers out of his misery.

It would be a series-defining chunk wherever it happened, but to set it in the same room where Nina killed Jack's wife Teri two seasons before? Genius.

Fat compu-nerd Edgar Stiles was always difficult to like, but even he deserved a better ending than this.

When CTU is attacked by nerve gas, he dies simply because he can't waddle into an airtight safety room quickly enough. Grim.

They shot an alternate ending where Jack's wife Teri lives but thank the TV gods they binned it (you can still see it on the season one DVD).

Not only is it a genuine telly shocker moment, but guilt for Teri's death at the hands of Nina Myers was the motor that kept Jack ticking lethally along series after series.

Jack needs info from a mortally wounded informant.

Trouble is, the CTU operating room is being used for surgery on his girlfriend Audrey's badly injured ex husband (shot while saving Jack's life).

Jack's solution? Storm in and force them at gunpoint to operate on his suspect instead, thus costing Audrey's former hubbie his life.

This isn't proper 24. It's a clunky soap opera with semi-automatic pistols...

The bad guy is obviously the suave middle-eastern fella, right? Course it is...

Except it's not. It's actually his fiancee, the pretty, sweet, innocent blonde girl. She's the lethal terrorist killer. Brilliantly barmy..

After all that's happened, Jack climbs into his car at the end of the finale and has a little sob.

Yes, he's had a long day, and yes, he's just cut off his mate's hand with an axe, but crying? Jack Bauer crying? No, no, no.

Terrorist Stephen Saunders is going to release a deadly toxin unless CTU boss Ryan Chappelle is executed (don't ask why...).

But even Jack's not going to execute an innocent man – even one as bureaucratically annoying as Chappelle – in cold blood is he?

Of course he is...

It's not the fact that Robert Carlyle's retired special forces operative turned childminder dies in the 24 telly movie one-off.

It's how he dies that annoys us.

Seriously, is there a bigger cliché than having to be left behind after you stand on a mine that will go off if you move?

Jack and Audrey are pinned down in a warehouse, the baddies are closing in...

Jack's got no back up... except, wait! Who's this coming in, guns blazing? Why, it's disgraced former CTU agent Tony Almeida, last seen being wheeled off to prison at the end of season 3.

It's an even better return than his comeback in season 7... and he had to return from the dead to do that.

Jack being called 'Grandpa' by a small blonde moppet sent chills of spell-breaking horror down our spines.

Still, at least her mum Kim and her family swiftly disappeared from the final season before some enterprising baddie started using them as hostages.

All through the season, you're wondering just who's behind big baddy Henderson's team of nasties...

It's only as he makes a panicked phone call to his boss that you discover... it's none other than reptilian Richard Nixon-a-like Charles Logan.

Jack vs The President of the USA? Bring it on...

After faking his own death in order to avoid being killed by the government (again, don't ask...), Jack moseys off into the sunset.

Literally.

It's a syrupy moment that belongs in The Littlest Hobo rather than 24. He gets a much better exit at the end of the very last episode...