If watching 24 (Mon, 9pm, Sky1) is like being in a relationship - which it isn't, but bear with me - then this is the seven-year-itch period. For the first few seasons, you couldn't get enough of it; driven by raw desire, you even found its weaknesses charming rather than annoying. A subplot in which Kim gets chased by a mountain lion? You simply chuckled and forgave your beloved for being so silly.

By season four, you were going through a rocky patch. Those same idiosyncrasies were starting to grate. Things picked up a bit for season five, but season six was like sharing a home with someone you've fallen out of love with. It was clearly in an unhappy rut - setting off nuclear bombs every few minutes and torturing people half to death - while you were yearning for freedom, fantasising about seeing other shows.

Season seven, then, is the make-or-break holiday you've booked together in a bid to rekindle old passions after a trial separation brought on by the writers' strike. And so far you've managed an uneasy truce. It seems guarded and keen not to offend; you're weighing up the security of staying against the liberty of burying the relationship for good. Incidentally, I don't know if you've had sex on this holiday yet because the metaphor doesn't stretch that far, although for the sake of completeness let's imagine you have, and it was OK-ish.

Anyway, episode one opened with what is hopefully 24's equivalent of a vision of America's real future, as Jack Bauer and his neocon masters find themselves on trial for human rights abuses conducted by the bloke who played Clarence Boddicker in RoboCop. In previous series, Jack's readiness to torture suspects with ordinary household objects started out funny. How we chuckled when he threatened to shove a towel down a man's throat until his stomach started to ingest it, then rip it back out, bringing half his digestive system with it. But the tee-hees ebbed away as real-life stories about waterboarding and the like began to dribble out of the putrid black sponge that was the Bush administration. To make matters worse, it turned out the show was directly affecting the mindset of military recruits: the US army had to remind fresh cadets that stapling someone's eyelids to the floor shouldn't be attempted until you'd at least asked three or four questions.

Even some of the new cast members seem uneasy with the show's history. Former Larry Sanders star Janeane Garofalo, who plays office nerd Janis Gold, told USA Today she was "initially very reticent to do it, because I heard about the rightwing nature of [the creator's] politics and the torture-heavy scripts. And then I thought, 'I'm unemployed!'"

Well, at least she's honest.

Anyway, thus far the worst Jack's done is hold a ballpoint pen under a man's eye and ready his elbow to make a scooping-out gesture. By his standards that's nothing. He probably does that at children's parties. Worryingly, I was inwardly urging him to do it, so I could be appalled and entertained at the same time. But he's got other things on his mind, namely the return of Tony Almeida, who's come back from the dead to play the bad guy. Or is he the bad guy? It's hard to say, because when Jack shouts "what the hell happened to you?" at him, he clams up and looks hard instead of answering.

To make him look evil, Tony's been given a buzz cut and some scars, and looks a bit like an Action Man figurine that's been standing in a car park for the past four years, braving the elements. I'm prepared to bet this is just a bit of role play to keep the relationship fresh. By episode nine Jack and Tony will doubtless be sidekicks again, spit-roasting the terrorists in a bid to extract confessions, and high-fiving over their shuddering victim's back. I've been wrong before, mind.

But now I've got to find out.

I'm hooked again, dammit. Oh, 24: in the words of Brokeback Mountain, I wish I knew how to quit you