The promos for last night’s 24 promised a really big twist and we certainly got a doozy. Tony isn’t a –duh! duh! duh! — smooth criminal, after all! Turns out he’s really deep undercover and working for his old CTU boss Bill Buchanan (loved Bill’s curly white hair!) to stop a government conspiracy.

Aw, man. I really dug Tony whispering all those sinister threats as a muy macho baddie. Even though the former CTU agent is one of the good guys, Tony still has some issues with the government. And he has done a few “bad things” while working with a crew that has a serious beef with the good ‘ol USofA.

OK, let’s take last night’s thrilling two-hour episode from the top.

Colonel Ike Dubaku, Juma’s right-hand man who’s also affectionately known as “The Butcher of Sangala,” told the prez he means business. Either she halts her intervention plans or he’ll use the CIP device to kill tens of thousands of Americans. “Don’t sacrifice your fellow countrymennnnnnnnnn,” Dubaku barked in that cool African accent of his. “Stand your forces down.”

Meanwhile, before we learned the real deal on Tony, the Feds let Jack interrogate, er, question him about the location of that CIP thing-a-ma-jig. “Why don’t you save yourself some time — and some pain,” Jack said. Look closely and you could almost see him salivating when he said it. A torture-happy guy like Jack sure wouldn’t last long in a Obama Administration. I hope the writers eventually tone down all this torture business, though. It’s going a bit too far.

Tony, still playing that deep undercover role extremely well, attempted to get under Jack’s skin by basically calling him a punk for working for the same people who want to put him in The Big House. “Every second you help the government,” Tony shouts, “You’re spitting on Teri’s grave.” Teri, for those who just started watching 24 recently, was Jack’s wife. She died in his arms at the end of season one, an image that still haunts me to this day. Talk about one of the best season finale’s in TV history.

OK, Jack starts losing patience with Tony and says he’ll kill him again and that this time he’ll stay dead. That’s when the choking of Tony begins and when Jack’s former buddy whispers “Deep Sky,” which was obviously a code for a phone number. When Jack calls, it’s Charlton Heston as Moses, no, I mean Bill Buchanan on the other end with those sparkly Paul Newman-like eyes of his. And Chloe’s with him! I didn’t realize how much I missed her constipated-looking face until she started talking and telling Jack she saw him on C-SPAN and couldn’t believe how that smug senator was talking to him. “You looked good, though,” Chloe added. And so did she. Nice long, shiny hair.

The best part of the 10-11 a.m. hour was watching Jack and Tony bust outta FBI headquarters like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. There’s Tony jumping all over cars and there’s Jack crashing a car from a three-story parking garage. “This is gonna hurt,” Jack said right before he pulled that crazy Die Hard stunt of his. Somewhere, Bruce Willis was taking notes for Die Hard 38: The Apocalypse.

When things settle down for a minute — and it’s really for only a minute on 24 — Tony fills Jack in on his death. Tony was actually a corpse for 10 minutes, but David Emerson, a big, bad British Special Forces dude, injected him with a hyperthermic compound that brought him back to life. David, you see, wanted Tony to work for his crew because he “fit the profile.” You know, pissed off tough guys with grievances against the government. But David was taking this whole “let’s shaft the government thing” a bit too far, so Tony wound up working for Billy B.

Speaking of Bill, I don’t remember him being so cold in previous seasons. Sure, he was always as cool as the other side of the pillow, but last night Bill was straight-up gangsta. When Chole told Bill sending Jack undercover with Tony could lead to Jack’s death, a stone-faced Bill replied, “Then Jack’s death solidifies Tony’s position in the crew.” Well, hot damn!

It didn’t take long for Jack to earn his stripes with David. Sure enough, David didn’t trust Jack and wanted him killed from the get-go. Trust is a hard thing to come by in the bad guy business. But fortunately for Jack, the “two traffic cops” David dispatched to snuff him out weren’t up for the assignment. They lose their jobs through early termination (that means death) and Jack is immediately hired as their replacement. I wonder what kind of health benefits come with the gig.

As for the show’s ‘B’ plot, we learned more about the president’s son’s death. His girlfriend told his dad, or as I like to call him, The First Dude, he didn’t commit suicide but was murdered. That murder had something to do with him finding out about a kickback scheme at the brokerage firm where he worked and him also discovering that a senior member in the White House was doing some shady business with firms in Sangala. (Wanna bet that senior member is Ethan Kanin, the prez’ top aide? Bob Gunton was such an evil warden in The Shawshank Redemption, he just has to be a bad guy on 24, too.) Anyway, the girlfriend gave The First Dude all the info so he could blow the whistle on the scheme. First Dude may not make it to the, oh, 2-3 p.m. hour.

Another great episode full of juicy plot twists, intense gunplay and loud car crashes. Typical 24 mayhem. All that and we also got to see what Jack Bauer would look like if his name was Jane Bauer. Comely Fed Renee Walker did a pretty mean Jack Bauer impression as she tortured a sniper in his hospital room by sticking a gun in his ribs and cutting off his ventilator.

But, seriously, all this torture mess has to stop soon.

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