24: The First Four Hours...

Even though I'd seen the spoiler on Drudge, that totally blew me away. I'm still a bit stupefied. This season proves, once again, that nothing's off the table. If you haven't seen it yet and plan on picking it up off of iTunes or something, then you should probably stop reading.

Jack finds out just a few moments too late what Curtis's beef with Assad is. Assad attacked Curtis's unit in the midst of Desert Storm. Curtis was injured and four of his men were taken. They were later beheaded by Assad. So needless to say, Curtis wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of President Palmer's pardon of all of Assad's previous crimes. Once Assad is out of Jack's sight, Curtis brandished his gun and puts it to Assad's head. With Curtis about to kill CTU's most valuable asset in its attempt to stop Abu Fayed, Jack does what he has to.

He fires at and kills Curtis. I figured that Curtis was going to be trouble ala Tony trying to kill Christopher Henderson last season. My guess was that he would kill Assad at some inopportune time and get hauled off to a holding cell. I never would have guessed that Jack would do it.

And as Jack is on all fours, puking from the realization that he's just killed Curtis Manning, one of CTU's teams arrives at the location of Fayed's suitcase bomb. During the firefight, off it goes. Mushroom cloud. In suburban LA.

I'm psyched to see how Surnow and Cochrane develop this. Last season had one hell of an opening. This one started out slow, but it definitely tops it.