Suspend all disbelief ye who enter here...
Spoiler alert! Read on if you want to learn what happened in this episode of "24".
We begin this hour with one of Fayed's minions wisely convincing him to quit searching the sewer for Jack and to focus on killing thousands instead of just one.
Jack runs out into the light of day, locates a car, breaks in and finds a GPS enabled cell phone. Excellent! Jack immediately calls Bill and asks to be patched through to 2.0 who, along with his Oval Office crew, is skeptical that Fayed is being truthful and that Assad might not be quite evil incarnate. Now, new guy Tom I can buy being skeptical, but 2.0 and Karen owe their jobs to Jack being right in the past. I chant to myself "Suspend disbelief - there wouldn't be a show if they didn't act like idiots."
Jack realizing that he is on his own to save the world, once again, hotwires the car, punches in the coordinates for Assad's location which he overheard Fayed supplying to CTU and heads off to El Segundo (at least it looks like that's where the GPS is pointing him to) to look for Q-Tip's wallet and to save Assad from the missiles CTU is sending his way.
Once at Assad's hideout, Jack has no weapon but no worries. A stick and a recycling bin are all he needs to draw out, distract and disable one of Assad's minions and to strip him of his weapon and use him as a hostage to bust into the lair and tell Assad of Fayed's devious plan and the oncoming CTU missile equipped helicopters. Jack manages to get Assad and Fayed's mole out of the house before it and the remaining minions are destroyed by a very surgical strike neatly contained to just the one house in a dense urban neighborhood. Again, excellent!
We then visit the Islamic-American Alliance where two FBI agents (one played by Scott William Winters, brother of Dean, who played Cyril in Oz) demand the Alliance's personnel records from Walid Al-Rezani (formerly Chief of Staff to Commander in Chief, Gena Davis) and newly discovered Palmer sibling, Sandra (Regina King). Until Sandra reveals herself to be a fraction of the woman super-villan 1.0's wife Sherry Palmer was I shall refer to her as Sherry Palmer Lite or SPL for short. SPL calls brother 2.0 and demands that he call off the FBI attack dogs and that they stink of Thomas Lennox. 2.0 agrees but asks her to keep an open mind about Tom.
Bill Buchanan calls 2.0 and crew to tell them that Assad's body cannot be found in the wreckage. They then collectively wonder how could Assad escape their grasp and foil their plan certain to end the attacks. Um, folks, do you remember that little man (Jack is indeed a tiny, tiny man but that's good for scrambling and infiltrating and stuff) you brought back to the greater Los Angeles area?
We see Fayed back at his warehouse command center preparing yet another suicide bomber to attack.
Back at CTU Chloe uses her mad satellite skillz to figure out that it was Jack who helped Assad escape. I wonder, why is she telling Bill this after Bill went along with handing Jack over to be killed? Then I remember last season and think, because ultimately Bill is awesome.
Jack, Assad and the mole break into an abandoned house and Assad tells him more of his make-nice-with-Westerners peace plan. Jack then goes into another room in the house and possibly goes to the bathroom (gasp!) but definitely gets out of his bloody button up and switches into a nice tight grey t-shirt. Sweet! Jack's clothing is very important to his ability to save the world. For instance, wearing what TVgasm dubbed "Slightly Faded But Nevertheless Useful Extreme Hoodie of Infiltration" last season, Jack would flip up the hood whenever he needed to infiltrate and he never failed. Sorry George Michael, sometimes clothes do make the man.
Jack decides to torture the mole to get dirt on Fayed's plans and whereabouts. He half heartedly sticks him in the shoulder region and gets nothing. Assad then shows him how it's done and sticks the mole in the knee, gets the dirt and then kills the mole. Jack having to be schooled like that makes him think he doesn't know how to do this anymore. Don't worry Jack, I'm sure it will all come back to you soon enough.
Over at the Islamic-American Alliance the FBI agents are back with a warrant and they start to seize a computer with the personnel files. SPL pulls a Chloe-like maneuver and digitally shreds all the files and so the FBI agents arrest her and Walid.
At Ahmed's house (Isn't Ahmed about the age teen-terrorist Behrooz would be about now?) Ahmed opens up a wall to extract "the package." Then the redneck is back and geometry-boy rushes over to help Ahmed and arrives just in time to see Ahmed shoot the crazed racist neighbor after a fight in which Ahmed is seriously injured. Ahmed turns the gun on geometry-boy and demands that they go back to his place.
Jack and Assad follow up on the mole's dirt and head to a train station where they locate the suicide bomber and his accomplice. Jack sends Assad off to follow the handler (who just hangs out with the bomber until the last minute to make sure he doesn't chicken out) while he follows the bomber onto the train. Jack identifies himself to the ticket taker and then proceeds to kick the bomber out a window just as he is detonating his bomb.
The ticket taker then alerts CTU to Jack's aliveness and around the same time Karen Hayes is notified that a call from Fayed to the bombers was intercepted and thus it dawns on CTU and the White House that, duh, Jack is alive and well and, as always, right. But, again, I remind myself that without a lack of faith in Jack, there would be no Jack awesomeness.