24 has thrilled us with the twists and turns of its complex plots and shocked us over and over again with its unforseen deaths, unimaginable betrayals and timely triumphs. But the most memorable scenes of the show are the ones that tear out our hearts and make our throats tighten up at the emotion of the scenes. So without further ado, here are AIG's top 24 most emotionally gutwrenching moments of 24.
24) Kim explains to her father that it is her duty to do whatever she can to help stop the virus, even if it means putting herself in the line of fire. When Tony discovers that Kim Bauer is the only available match to play a decoy Jane Saunders so that CTU can intercept Jane, Kim agrees to the assignment without hesitation, however this doesn't sit so well with Jack, who still sees her as his little girl in need of protection. He tells Kim he gave her the job at CTU so he could make sure she was safe. Kim replies, tears welling in her eyes, that she took the job because she wanted it, not because Jack wanted her there. She then goes on to say that it is her DUTY to assist with the investigation. The pride in Jack's eyes at his daughter's strong will and sense of conviction mixed with his fear for her safety is heartbreaking.
23) Teri and Kim's execution is halted at the last moment. Angry that his plan to frame Jack for the assassination of David Palmer at the San Clarita Power Plant fell through, Ira Gaines orders his men to execute Kim and Teri. Kim and Teri are dragged, kicking, screaming and sobbing to two pre-dug shallow graves and forced to their knees. They lock hands and sob in anger and helplessness, waiting for it to be over. Just as Eli and Neil are about the shoot them, Gaines orders them to be kept alive. Teri and Kim collapse in tears of relief as they are limply dragged back to the guesthouse where they are being held captive. Both Leslie and Elisha capture this moment so well and make us all feel the experience as though it were us on our knees on the receiving end of two big ass guns.
22) Tony plays the dead wife card. Desperate and disbelieving that his best friend and closest ally, Jack, sees Michelle's death as an acceptable loss, Tony angrily screams "My God, Jack! Didn't you learn anything from what happened to Teri??!!??" This pushes Jack over the edge, as he pushes Tony and tells him to shut up. As Tony strides away, ready to throw everything out the window, including his brotherhood with Jack, to save Michelle, he screams "Just because you sacrificed your wife doesn't mean that I'm gonna sacrifice mine!" Man o man. Those are some harsh words, but the truth in them is what makes this scene so hard to watch and yet so hard to look away from.
21) Jack comes face to face with Nina for the first time since he learned she betrayed him and murdered his wife. As Nina is led into CTU in shackles, she walks stoney-faced, silent and looking straight ahead - that is, until she she sees Jack from the corner of her eye and can't resist turning her head and her eyes towards him. Their eyes lock in a burning gaze, and then just as quickly she looks away. Yum yum yum.
20) Teri tells Jack she's pregnant. In the final conversation he will ever have with his wife, Jack's heart breaks when Teri tells him about her pregnancy and how she sees it as their second chance at happiness. There is a definite finality to the conversation, but not for the reason Jack thinks - he believes he may not return alive after trying to rescue Kim from the Drazens, but he is unable to tell Teri this. With chaos surrounding him as fire and rescue clean up after the explosion in Palmer's hotel suite, Jack and Teri's final phonecall is a little pool of calm, with all the proper tragedy of hope and foreshadowing of destruction attached.
19) Flaming Hot Tony Michelle Action Part 1. After watching her unstable brother attack his former lover (and Michelle's coworker) in front of the entire CTU staff, Michelle sneaks off and hides in a dark hallway so she can have her emotional breakdown in peace. Tony follows her, and comforts her as she sobs. Then, the floodgates open as all of the feelings they have for each other and the stress of the day reaches its breaking point, as Michelle hungrily kisses Tony, wanting the comfort and the human connection his embrace provides. The sheer HEAT of this kiss was enough to make all of us want to go out and get it on immediately. The most passionate TV kiss EVER. Hot hot stuff.
18) Jack corners Nina during the course of her attempted escape from Faheen's hideout, faced with the perfect opportunity to exact revenge on her for killing Teri. The look on Nina's face tells us that she is fully expecting to die. The chittering of Jack's gun in his shaking hand is audible as he trains it on the back of her head, wanting so desperately to pull the trigger, yet unable to do it. There is far too much emotion on his face for the reason to be JUST because they might still need her for information. Clearly, in that moment, he was as yet unable to lay to rest the woman he once loved and knew intimately.
17) Jack watches Kim from a distance on the street outside the Matheson house as she plays with Megan, then gets out of his truck and approaches her. Kim is stunned to see him. Jack tells her how much he misses her, and Kim replies that she misses him too, but it is too difficult for her to be around him because it constantly reminds her of Teri's death. As Jack emphatically voices the belief that he knows what happened to Teri is his fault, Kim suddenly embraces him tightly and assures him that she doesn't blame him, but that she just needs time to heal. This scene is so brazenly beautiful in its simplicity and its honesty that we almost have to look away.
16) As Jack is bound to a chair, trying desperately to convince Nina that he has turned against CTU, he tells her he is no longer the man she knew before. She replies "I don't know about that" and then seductively runs her hands up his thighs, imploring him to "convince her." What ensues is a mad passionate makeout session, where all of the anger, the betrayal, the malevolence and the passion between them is released in such a bizarre, yet perfect, expression of destructive intimacy.
15) At St. Mark's hospital, Jack tells Teri that Kim has been kidnapped by people who want to assassinate David Palmer in an effort to thwart Jack's investigation. Who can forget the moment when Teri's face transforms from massive panic to utter horror as her husband reveals that the wall between his work and his family has finally come crashing down? Teri clings to Jack as Jack makes impossible promises to bring Kim home safely, in that moment believing that her husband is the hero who will always make everything alright.
14) After Tony is shot in the neck by one of Salazar's goons, Jack desperately pushes his way through a crowded mall and falls to his knees, cradling the bleeding head of his brother in arms in his hands. In this moment, the bond between Jack and Tony is literally cemented in blood. As he races toward his fallen brother, all Jack can see in front of his eyes is the pool of blood growing around Tony's head, and everything else falls away.
13) David tells Sherry she's not fit to be the First Lady, and that he never wants to see her again. After she puts David's career above the life of Kim Bauer, David realizes just how ruthless and conniving his wife truly is, and just can't deal with staying with her knowing her true nature. As David walks away, and Sherry follows him screaming at the top of her voice, he pauses at the door one last time, tempted to look back, wondering if he is making the right decision. At last he exits, walking out of the room and out of Sherry's life - or so he believes.
12) The Killing Lesson. Jack talks Kim through taking the life of Gary Matheson, her abusive, psychotic and homicidal boss. I know my guts were in knots as Kim throws down her cell phone, puts both hands on the handle of the pistol and emits a primal scream as she pulls the trigger, then collapses to the ground, hugging the clothing in the closet they are in as she looks at Gary's lifeless corpse, completely spent.
11) Believing he is going to die, Kyle Singer reconciles with his parents through a sheet of impenetrable plastic. Who could forget the tearful and gutwrenching scene between the Singers and their son as Kyle tells his parents that they always make him feel safe, where the physical barrier between them is almost more painful than the reality of his situation.
10) In the final preclock of the third season, Jack sits in the driver's seat of his SUV in the parking lot of a hospital, sobbing uncontrollably. After the dust has settled, Jack is no longer able to sustain the machine-like focused persona he adopted since killing Nina, and he breaks down, each horrible and moment being replayed on his face. He cries for his addiction and what it has done to him. He cries for Claudia. He cries for Tony, his fallen brother and for Chase's severed hand. He cries for Ryan Chappelle and all the people at the Chandler Plaza Hotel. He cries for Palmer. He cries for Nina. He cries for his love of Kim. He cries for Stephen Saunders and where it all went wrong. In this moment, Jack reclaims the humanity he abandoned in the thrid act of the season in order to complete his objectives, and boy does it come flooding back. His tears are ours as well.
9) Jack shoots Nina under Gaines' orders at the oil rigs. Forced to make an impossible choice between potentially sacrificing his best friend, confidante and former lover or sacrificing his family, Jack is apologizing in desperation and heavy regret to Nina even as he is firing his gun at her chest. The pain on his face and the fear and disbelief in her eyes are beyond words.
8) Kim discovers Nina trying to escape in the basement of CTU and holds her at gunpoint. Nina begs Kim to walk away, saying that she shouldn't be a part of this. Somehow, though Nina wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger on Jack, killing Kim and leaving him to suffer that loss as well somehow seems wrong to her. In her final moments, we realize that Nina does have some humanity in the depths of her black black heart, in her love for Jack despite herself. The tragedy of it is that when Jack discovers them, he is unable to show the same mercy on the woman who betrayed him so brutally so many times, and his revenge gets the best of him. Our guts are roiling as he pumps three bullets into the skull of his soulmate.
7) Jack collapses to the ground on the docks of the Port of Los Angeles after Nina tells him Kim's body was found floating in the harbour. Believing his daughter to be dead, for that moment Jack's entire existence is his pain and the futility of everything he's done during the day to keep his family safe. He drops the phone to the ground as Nina's voice trails off, tinny and forgotten, as he curls up in the fetal position and sobs, a broken man. Then his anger blinds him as he snaps back into machine-mode, preparing to exact revenge on the men responsible. One of Kiefer Sutherland's finest moments.
6) Jack says goodbye to Kim when he believes he must sacrifice his life to detonate the nuclear bomb safely. In the one scene that brings tears to our eyes no matter how many times we watch it, we see Kim barely able to function after realizing how much she loves her father and how much time she has wasted being estranged from him, and we see Jack try to remain strong for her even enduring his own emotional breakdown. When Jack tells Kim he wants her to grow up to be the kind of person that would make Teri proud, who's heart wouldn't be in their throat?
5) Tony tells Michelle that keeping her safe and keeping her alive is worth every moment he will spend in prison. After being arrested and charged with treason for placing Michelle's well-being above national security and public safety, moments before he is hauled away to answer for his actions, Michelle is still unable to deal with the reality that she will likely be separated from the love of her life for the next 20 years. Tony brings her back to center with a passionate kiss, then tenderly expresses that he has not an ounce of regret for doing what he did, for following his heart and choosing love. The scope of the love between Tony and Michelle is monumental. The tragic irony is that in order to keep their love alive, Tony had to accept that it would inevitably tear them apart.
4) The final conversation between David and Sherry Palmer. Sherry, after threatening to go public with Palmer's involvement in Alan Millikens death, tells Palmer the only way she will consider keeping it quiet is if David remarries her. In an effort to keep Sherry with him so that Wayne can ransack her apartment looking for the only piece of physical evidence tying her to the crime, David agrees. As Sherry embraces David, we realize that in her own twisted way, everything Sherry has done has been for love - to be reunited with the love of her life. Vintage stuff, people.
3) George Mason tells his son John that he is going to die. After having been exposed to lethal levels of radiation during the raid on a warehouse where the nuclear device was assembled, George has only hours to live. Estranged from his only son for years, the tragedy is that Mason is able to set aside his cynical and selfish pride only in impending death to reconcile with his son. Superb performances by both actors.
2) Jack is forced to execute Ryan Chappelle. The death of Chappelle stands out as one of the all-time most emotional scenes of the show. Ryan Chappelle is, in one episode, transformed from a hard-nosed bastard with no human empathy to a very human, very fragile figure of martyrdom as he realizes that for all of his ambition and drive in his career, he has lived a lonely, empty life of solitude, as a single tear rolls down his cheek. As well, the emotional cost for Jack is huge. Absolutely heartbreaking.
1) Jack discovers Teri's lifeless body in the basement of CTU. After expending every last ounce of his soul during the day to protect his wife and daughter, Teri winds up dead at the hands of the one person Jack really trusted in the one place he believed she would be safe. This is without a doubt the most pivotal and gutwrenching moment of the entire series, as it completely sets the tone for all that is to come. It is also the moment that the series set itself apart from other primetime dramas in refusing to give the audience the happy ending. Prime TV viewing!
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