This really could be the best season ever. The first season was phenomenal, but it's hard to remember now; believe it was seven or eight years ago. This episode was drama-packed. With CTU out of any capability of helping Jack and Cole track down the terrorists because an electro magnetic device knocking out power, Chloe gets on it. There is an NSA (National Security Administration) team there to try and restore power. But they are taking too long to get the power back–it will take hours. Chloe knows they don't have time and knows a way to get the power back almost immediately. It's risky and the NSA engineer is cocky and arrogant and tells Chloe to leave the programming room. Chloe calls Renee Walker, the FBI agent whom Jack has a romantic interest in and is a very good agent, to tell her that Jack is in trouble and they've lost contact with him. Renee tells Chloe to do everything possible to get the system back up. She tells Chloe to do whatever it takes.
Chloe goes back in the control room and the guy tells her to leave again in tough terms. She pulls a gun and tells him she will shoot him unless he lets her rewire the main board. He leaves and she locks the door. The NSA guy goes straight to Hastings' office. Hastings, if you've been watching, is head of CTU. He tells Hastings what Chloe has done and Hastings, him and some CTU officers, go down to the control room. Chloe is busily working when Hastings and his men get the door open. Hastings tells Chloe to stand down. She pleads with Hastings to let her continue, that this is the only way to stop the terrorists from getting the nuclear rods into Manhattan and exploding the bomb. Hastings, surprisingly, relents and tells Chloe to keep working. He tells the NSA guy to back off. The NSA guy can't believe it, but Chloe is in full control.
She gets the system working and they track down the terrorists. Jack, Cole and two CTU officers are on it and get there. The terrorists, see him coming. The leader and Taren, the traitor, decide to get in the boat and transport the explosives across the water and tell the other terrorists to eliminate Jack and his group.
Jack sees the boat take off and knows this is urgent. The terrorists are in position and start firing. Jack and his men are trapped.
Meanwhile, the parole officer from Arkansas is hot on Dana Walsh's trail trying to find out where her ex-boyfriend is, whom Cole killed in self defense. Cole actually didn't kill him, the ex-boyfriend's sidekick killed him and tried to kill Cole, but Cole shot and killed him. Cole and Dana put the bodies in the water. Now the officer is hot on Dana's trail. The officer is not going to give up and Walsh is in trouble.
Jack, Cole and the two CTU men, have some sort of iron barricade that Jack finds in the warehouse that will allow them possibly to get across the parking lot to a phone where Jack can call CTU and tell them about the boat. They start running across the parking lot holding the iron barricade around them while the terrorists are barraging the barricade with bullets. One of the officers panics. Jack tells him they're almost there, but the officer runs from out behind the barricade and gets shot. Jack, Cole and the other officer make it across to another warehouse. The other officer sees his colleague injured badly but not dead, and thinks about it, then runs out to drag him in the warehouse. He's almost back in the warehouse when he gets shot. Jack and Cole drag both men back in. The first officer is dead and the second officer, who has been a big help in this catastrophe, is barely hanging on. He doesn't make it either.
Jack tells Cole he's going to run out and be a decoy while Cole runs to the phone. Cole tells him it's suicide. Jack tells him it's an order. Jack starts running and shooting and Cole covers for him. Jack knocks out a couple of terrorists before getting shot twice. He's down. Cole knocks out another. When a terrorist has Jack's head in his sights and is about to shoot, he is shot and killed. It's Renee. She has found out from Chloe where Jack and Cole are. She kills the other shooter and Cole gets to the phone. She goes over to Jack, who had his bullet-proof vest on, but is injured. The shots hadn't gotten through, though. He's not in good shape, but it looks like he'll survive. Cole calls CTU and tells them about the boat. CTU sends their men out along with alerting NYPD to block the port.
Meanwhile, the parole officer is waiting for Dana in an office. Dana tells him the records of a robbery she helped her ex-boyfriend pulls off are wiped out due to the outage and there is nothing else she can do about finding her ex-boyfriend. She, of course, helped the ex-boyfriend rob the bank and is complicit in that as well. She is trying to lie her way out of it. The officer says he's going to nail her to the wall for the robbery. She kicks him and then knocks him down with a blow to the back. Then she grabs some sort of wire and starts strangling him. He can't get loose. She kills him. Then she gets on the phone.
On the other line is the terrorist leader. She tells him she has solved her problem and is ready to get them to the site to explode the bomb. She's a terrorist as well. An amazing twist in the story. The show ends with the terrorists getting in a cab (four of them) looking like they're in route to assemble the bomb then detonate it. Walsh will help them do that. She is a traitor.
Next week should be even better.