There are no innocent parties in "24" because, in the show's vision, everyone plays a part in that fate. When Edward Rothstein claimed in the New York Times last week that "24" presented a "pop-thriller version of power-drunk war mongers [that] resembles Noam Chomsky's nightmare version of America" in which "terrorist guilt is mitigated," he couldn't have been more wrong. No one's guilt is mitigated in "24" and, unlike Chomsky's view, in which we are powerless in the face of the military-industrial-media complex, every character in "24" has a chance to affect the course of the country by their actions. That sounds like the very definition of citizenship to me -- and the very opposite of a self-hating view of America as a neofascist empire that has reduced its citizens to puppets. What may have upset Rothstein is that "24" did not simply presume that the enemies of the republic lurk exclusively without.

This season's sliest creation was undoubtedly Marie Warner (Laura Harris), when we first meet her a perky, blond bride-to-be planning her wedding to her Middle Eastern fiancé. Marie's older sister Kate (Sarah Wynter), suspicious of the man her sister is marrying, hires a detective who turns up what may be terrorist links. They're phony. It's sweet, bland Marie who turns out to be in collusion with the terrorists. She seems an all-American version of the shallow and committed young activists of Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise," particularly Anne Wiazemsky as the girl who plots an assassination, kills the wrong man and then calmly returns to the scene and kills the intended target. When Kate confronts her sister about how she could be a part of killing millions of people, she gets programmed agitprop in response: "People have to die before things can change." This is exactly where "24" puts the view Rothstein claimed the show to have of America as a rotten, blood-soaked demon -- in the mouth of a young terrorist wannabe sprouting dogma.

Marie returned in the finale for a final appearance and it was stunning. Shackled to a chair in a Plexiglas-fronted cell, she looked like the unholy offspring of Hannibal Lecter and an angel. Harris was preternaturally blond in this scene, shot to make her look as if she were glowing, lit from inside by righteous fire. Separated from her father and her sister by that glass, she seemed to have retreated even further into absolute conviction. Yet not so far away that, like some hovering scourge, she couldn't bask in the chaos she had helped sow. The scene that followed between Marie, her father and Kate might have been a dramatization of the arguments of Paul Berman's current astonishing book, "Terror and Liberalism."

In the book, Berman -- who may be the most eloquent voice the left has right now -- says, "The apocalyptic and death-obsessed mass movements of the past aroused many responses among good-hearted and intelligent people around the world ... It came from people who were themselves liberals, who did not quarrel with any aspect of liberal civilization and accepted its values ... It is very odd to think that millions or tens of millions of people, relying on their own best judgments, might end up joining a pathological mass movement. Individual madmen might step forward ... [But] the very idea of a pathological mass movement seems too far-fetched to be believable." Thus, Marie's father, desperate to know how his daughter could have become this monster, pleads, "There must be a reason." His daughter Kate speaks the truth his good, rational liberalism cannot countenance, "There is no reason, Dad." And the pain of that scene is not that Marie has accepted madness, but that her sister, having been through hell herself, having escaped torture and then death at the hands of her sister, is now in a position to understand the presence of the irrational at work.

If I have not said much about "24" as a piece of craft, about the sustained subtlety and intensity of Sutherland's performance (particularly the rich uses to which he puts that almost purring voice of his), about how the show, with its split-screen images and multiple plot threads, may be the most narratively sophisticated piece of storytelling in current pop culture (it is certainly working at a level that movie audiences no longer seem able to follow), about its almost incredible ability to sustain nearly unbearable tension over a whole season, it's because I thought it urgent to give the show credit for the articulation and toughness and irreducible complexity it brings to its up-to-the-minute portrait of the state of the union.

In the week before the final episode, everyone I know who watched the show imagined that there was no way it was going to turn out well. I imagined us left like Frank Sinatra's Ben Marco at the end of "The Manchurian Candidate," reduced to a choked, despairing "Oh, hell ..." What "24" did was a fine example of how cruelty can be used for artistic purposes. Jack Bauer pulled a rabbit out of his hat, his insistence was proven that the evidence on which the U.S. was going to war was phony, war was averted, the bastards who had schemed against the country got theirs and the decent, brave president was reinstated.

And then it all went to hell.

The cruelty of the finish was only partly the incident that ended this season. The real cruelty was in what preceded it. Palmer, his leadership vindicated, addresses a crowd gathered to hear him. He reassures them of the strength of America, of their own safety, of our ability to pass through a crisis with our national soul intact. You feel the crowd responding, a burden lifted from them, the reassurance of being able to place their trust in a good, strong leader. With an almost Norman Rockwell-like corniness you felt a belief in America as something bigger than yourself, and yet something that depends on each of us for the health of the larger body politic. And then came a Judas kiss in the form of a handshake, disaster from the smallest means after a more grandiose disaster had been averted. Suddenly, what echoed through that scene wasn't Palmer's words but the last words of Marie Warner to her sister: "You think you'll be safe out there. You're wrong."

With devastating precision, the show swept away the sense of relief we had finally been allowed after the preceding 23 hours and 45 minutes. It was a setup for next season, and it could have seemed a version of the Cold War warning that ends Howard Hawks' "The Thing" -- "Keep watching the skies!" -- reconfigured for the age of terror. It was something considerably more: the show's way of saying that there is no relief from the part each of us plays in the fate of the republic. And so, with the sound of a man's heartbeat replacing the show's usual digital ticking of the clock, "24" ended its second season by telling us that the fate of the country rests on our ability to hear the heartbeat of the republic, especially at its most fragile.

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