I’m about to sit down and watch one of my favorite TV shows, 24, which last week Fox confirmed was going to be done for at the end of this season.

I’m actually ok with the decision — I still love the show, but I think both the show and its main character (Jack Bauer, who will be up there with Batman as one of my favorite fictional characters of all time) have done pretty much all they can. For all of the political bluster and hype (the show made a few headlines for Jack’s tendency to torture terrorists for information, at a time when torturing terrorists became frighteningly close to, if not actually, legal), the core of the show is really a Greek tragedy, and I think that the story is about wrapped up anyway.

Perhaps I should explain.

If you’ve never seen the show, I highly recommend you at least watch season one. Fans of the show each have their own favorite seasons — season two is mostly singled out as the worst season (one of the characters went on the run against cougars in an infamously bad attempt to spice up the suspense), and I personally like season five a lot — but season one, pretty much everyone agrees, is the quintessential 24 story. Jack Bauer is working at CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) when he and his family are taken off guard one evening, and he has 24 hours to fight terrorists and save the world.

The basic premise of the show is that Jack Bauer is the most awesome counter-terrorism agent of all time. Nothing kills him, nothing stops him, and even though again and again and again and again, he’s forced to do the impossible with no time and no tools at his disposal, he usually pulls it off. And the creators of 24 are very good (and to their credit, have been very good the whole time) at ratcheting up that suspense, sometimes in multiple stories. The show itself takes place in real-time — each episode is an hour of the story, and each season is 24 hours — and it’s that ticking clock that really ties everything together. Sometimes the premise pushes things into the silly, like when it takes Jack Bauer 10 minutes to drive across Los Angeles (I’ve lived here for almost eight months now, and sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to go across my street), or when characters continually get thrown into situations just to keep the plot moving. Another common joke among fans is what Jack Bauer must think by now, having gone through eight different days at different times of his life, all of them packed to the brim with much more than any actual living human being could handle. This is a guy who doesn’t even work for CTU any more, and yet gets tortured at six in the morning, finds the time to live through a nuclear blast at 5pm, and then wins a fistfight against an agency mole at midnight. He gets in shootouts hourly at this point — he’s a hero.

And yet he’s a flawed hero, because, without spoiling the story, his crazy life has cost him. Jack’s tried to quit his job multiple times, and yet each season, something finds a way to pull him back into the action. His family and his relationships have suffered — if the person he’s dating hasn’t turned out to be a mole or a plant, then their sibling or parents usually are, or their son gets into trouble with someone who is.

And it’s wearing on him — in the promo for this last season, he jokes with his granddaughter that “you’re supposed to call me Grandpa.” And indeed, as season eight has pushed on, signs keep appearing that Jack is past his prime. Oh, he’s still superhuman — he still takes down terrorists with ease, and he’s still always, always right about that suitcase being a bomb, or that person lying, or the terrorists playing two parties off against each other.

But while the early secondary characters in the series were usually incompetent or traitorous, they’re now starting to be right as well. Not in the always-right way that Jack is (like Batman, he never, ever goes the weak route or bothers to compromise), but in a way that they’re kind of right, too. Things in Jack’s world are changing, and the real tragedy of 24, the real finale, may be that for all of Jack’s hard work and suffering and sacrifice, he may not have changed the world at all.

Of course, I don’t know how the show will actually end. In a way, though I will be sad that there’s not a new 24 on every week during the seasons, I’m kind of glad to see them call it quits. Every story needs a worthwhile ending, and I expect a good one from 24. Jack needs to finally, once and for all, have saved the world. There’s a rumor that he’ll die, and there’s even a rumor that they’ll do a movie (though I actually hope that doesn’t happen — not only are they suggesting that they won’t do it in real-time, which seems blasphemous for 24, but don’t we all remember the mess that Serenity was? That show really needed to go on, and yet the movie was still a mistake. I did like the TV movie that 24 put together, but it was really just another episode, not what they’re talking about in terms of a movie).

But no matter what, Jack’s story deserves an ending. I have my doubts that it’ll be happy — this show never really ends on a good note for the characters involved, even if the 24 universe (which is actually a few years ahead of ours, thus explaining some of the surveillance technology that we don’t happen to have in general usage yet) is still intact and running. So end away, 24. And no matter how many more members of CTU turn out to be moles, or how many times Jack gets shot in the arm and lifts something an hour later without wincing, I’ll still be watching.

As with that, I’m off to watch the show. Forgive me for hurrying — we’re running out of time!

Update: Just saw this week’s show (and the promo at the end for next week) — they are already pushing the finale hard. I can’t wait. I’m not sure how much of the show has actually been shot so far (I seem to recall they shoot about six weeks ahead, which means the last four will have been done with the knowledge that the show is ending), but I reckon it’ll be a nice finale. Not quite as epic as Lost, but I’m looking forward to it.