Entertainment

Grandpa Jack

Will “24’s” Jack Bauer finally get his happy ending?

As Season 8 of Fox’s thriller opens, we find Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) taking a nap on a couch while his granddaughter, Teri, watches cartoons.

“Jack?” she asks.

“Sweetie, we already talked about this, remember? You’re supposed to call me Grandpa.”

“You don’t look like a Grandpa,” Teri says, as if a 3-year-old would make the distinction.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Jack replies.

MORE: WHY ’24’ SHOT SCENES IN DOWNTOWN LA

In the next scene, Jack informs his daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) and her husband Stephen (“Vampire Diaries” star Paul Wesley) that he wants to move back to Los Angeles with her.

It’s a far cry from the Jack we’ve watched over the years: new Jack is feeling his age and wanting to hang up his agent credentials.

“Kiefer was remarkably game to play Grandpa,” says Howard Gordon, “24’s” executive producer. “What’s great about Kiefer is that he’s not afraid to embrace the fact that the show is in its eighth year, and he’s an actor of a certain age and for Jack to be a static character is absurd. Jack has been so down and so out and so dark for so many years, we both agreed that conceptually this character had to be in [a good] place.”

Of course, it’s “24,” so Grandpa Jack’s new-found domestic solitude doesn’t last long.

His old informant, Victor Aruz, finds him and drags him into a plot to assassinate Omar Hassan, president of the fictional Islamic Republic, who’s trying to complete a historic peace agreement with the US.

Whether Season 8 is “24’s” last remains to be seen, but the show’s ratings and the producers’ ability to come up with new stories will largely dictate Fox’s decision.

“Every other year we’ve known we’re coming back for another year. This is the first year that we don’t know,” says Gordon.

The initial story about the assassination attempt on Hassan wraps up quickly and then explodes into something larger and more complicated.

That turn of events brings back Renee Walker (Annie Wersching), a former FBI agent who’s a sort of female Jack. That pair finds themselves quickly involved again, with her now going almost more rogue than Jack.

CTU is back this year, after Season 7 took a break from using the fictional agency as its homebase.

This time, CTU is located in a super-high-tech underground bunker somewhere in New York City, and its look is cooler and sleeker than ever.

“Like Los Angeles, CTU became this tired thing, but we missed having CTU as a character in the show,” says Gordon. “Still, it needed a redesign. Seven or eight years ago, it felt like our show defined what five minutes in the future looked like. We’ve tried to do that again with this new CTU.”