(S06E03/S06E04) -- Okay. Let me catch my breath.

Seriously.

Curtis Manning is dead. (Or at least I think he's dead. He looked pretty dead.) I knew he was ticked off that the "good" terrorist, Hamri Al-Assad, got a full pardon from President Palmer II in exchange for help tracking down the "bad" terrorist, Abu Fayed, who was in possession of a suitcase nuclear bomb. And Curtis had good reason to be ticked. After Assad's people ambushed Curtis and his Army squad in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Assad himself beheaded two of the soldiers on videotape. Curtis just couldn't let Assad get away clean. So he pulled a gun on him. And Jack Bauer shot Curtis in the throat to protect Assad.

Then Jack cried. And threw up. And gave up, telling CTU chief Bill Buchanan that he was through with all this counterterrorism stuff.

Then a nuke was detonated in Los Angeles. (The Drudge Report was right in its speculation regarding the bomb.)

And, when the 24 clock got to the end of hour four, there were four more suitcase nukes floating around inside the United States.

At first, I thought that the third episode was off to a slow start, gradually increasing the suspense. The major development seemed to be Fayed's demand that the President release 110 suspected terrorists being held by the government in exchange for an end to the three-months-long terror attacks on American civilian targets. And even though Palmer deemed Fayed untrustworthy, he thought that making this deal -- over the objections of his chief of staff Tom "The Biscuit" Lennox, unusually docile in the two new episodes -- was at least, a stop-gap measure.

Another major story line of the third hour was Jack and Assad following the "handler" for the would-be LA subway suicide bomber who Jack thwarted in episode two. The duo staged a traffic accident where Jack rammed a stolen SUV into the handler's vehicle, totaling it, while Assad pulled up and offered the guy a ride. This led CTU to raid the handler's storage unit, which the handler proceeded to blow up. Amid the ruins, Jack and the CTU team found a laptop with critical information about one of the 110 suspected terrorists, a nuclear engineer, along with intel on a nuclear bomb.

Thus far into episode three, nothing overly dramatic had occurred, other than the threat of a nuclear bomb in terrorist hands.

Meanwhile, the injured suburbanite teen terrorist, Ahmed Amar decided to take his neighbors hostage, forcing the dad to pick up a device from someone (the device turned out to be the nuke's triggering mechanism) and deliver it to Fayed.

This is the point when we moved into hour four, and things got nutty.

After the dad, Ray, got the device by beating a guy's head into the ground, he demanded Ahmed release his family. Ahmed let the mom go, only to have her rebuff her husband's pleadings and Ahmed's orders not to do anything. She called the police, which eventually led Jack, Curtis and Assad to her home. Ahmed was shot by someone from the CTU tactical team, but his teenaged hostage, Scott, remembered the address to which his dad had been told to deliver the device.

As a different tactical team was dispatched to Fayed's warehouse -- where the newly freed nuclear engineer had already rigged the trigger to the nuke -- Jack learned of Curtis' history with Assad, just before Curtis put a gun to Assad's head. The trauma of shooting his colleague sent Jack over the emotional edge as he lay on the manicured grass in a California suburb, looking as lost as he did when he stepped off that Chinese plane four hours ago.

Minutes later, President Palmer and staff, as well as agents from CTU-Los Angeles, were watching a live feed as their team invaded the Fayed warehouse. And the terrorists detonated the nuke. While everyone stood there watching their monitors, mouths agape, CTU analyst Nadia Yassir translated an Arabic phrase some of the detainees in a federal lock-up facility in Washington, D.C. had been overheard uttering. It translated to "five visitors," visitors being code for weapons.

Whew!

Other story lines:

Sandra Palmer, the President's sister and attorney for the Islamic American Alliance (IAA), was freed from federal custody after she intentionally erased personnel files for her organization that the FBI wanted. But her boyfriend, Walid Al-Rezani, the head of IAA, remained in custody with other suspected terrorists. It was Walid (who I keep thinking of as Geena Davis' chief of staff from Commander in Chief) who overheard the "five visitors" phrase.

A trio of CTUers -- Chloe O'Brian, her ex Morris and analyst Milo -- had a love triangle goin' on in the midst of the insanity. At least we finally learned why Morris and Milo were acting like children in a schoolyard spat. Morris was jealous that Chloe had gone out with Milo a few years ago. When Chloe called them both on it, the bickering stopped. At least for the time being.

And yes, several folks posted comments to my season premiere post saying that I didn't mention that presidential adviser Karen Hayes and Buchanan were now married, but living on separate coasts. How this will play out in the overall story, I don't know. Remains to be seen.

So, the moral of the first four episodes? Never trust those terrorist dudes, unless of course one has been dubbed a "good" terrorist. Then it's apparently okay.