24: Another one (or 2? 4? 6?) bites the dust.

Previously, on 24...

Jack tracks the security boyfriend Tarin to a hotel but he escapes with President Hassan's daughter, Kayla, and he kills an undefined amount of cops on his way out (more on that later). The bad guys want to use Kayla to try and get "File 33" from Hassan, which has confidential secrets about U.S. defense strategies. If the terrorists got their hands on those, then they could blow us up like that *(snaps fingers).

But when Hassan doesn't hand over File 33, the terrorists are supposed to kill Kayla, but Tarin decides to save her, and they escape again! He pushes her into a car, but Johan is right behind them and he shoots and kills Tarin, and Kayla drives off to find CTU!

Then we find out Tarin isn't dead, he was working with Johan, and they wanted Kayla to escape so that she would drive to CTU, and inside her car is an EMP bomb, and a security guy tries to drive the car away in time, but THEY'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME and it blows up and the EMP takes out all of CTU's communications systems!

Meanwhile, Stephen Root knows that Dana is guilty and is going to bust her, but the evidence is probably erased in the EMP blast. She'll end up getting away scott free, but at least Ortiz will dump her by the end of the season. Jack doesn't do much this week. He just rides around in the car with his boyz, Cole and Owen. They'll party next week, Bauer style, fo' sho'.

Now onto this week's death tally. Being an official scorer is a tricky thing. I had to call some other 24 fans looking for consensus on tonight's kill count. Initially I had Tarin shooting three cops to escape the hotel, but I wasn't going to count those as kills because they were all wearing vests (presumably of the bulletproof variety). Then he gets out of the hotel and his getaway driver shoots two cops in the alley. These two I was going to count as kills.

Called home, Mom answered. "Mom, I need to ask Dad an important question about 24." "Oh, yes, he said it was a good one and he was excited earlier because he said they killed four cops!" Dad gets on the line and we count them all up, and he says 4 cops killed. "But what about their vests?" "NO! We need the kill count!" Thanks Dad!

Called Dave. "Dave, how many cops did Terin kill?" "Well, he shot four or five. I'll say... yeah, four or five. 4 and a half" (pause) "But they were wearing vests..." (Jessica, wife of Dave, can be heard in the background, "He killed six cops!") Then we recount them all again. She thinks 4 in the hotel and 2 in the alley. Dave still thinks 4 or 5.

So I'm going to average it out and going with 4 cops killed (Ben's lowball guess of 2, Dad and Dave's guesses of 4, Jessica's guess of 6). Just know that the final tally will be plus or minus 2 kills for the bad guys. If later in the show someone says "I can't believe Terin shot and killed exactly___ amount of cops!" then I can update later.

Death Tally!
Bad guys: 5 (4 cops, 1 security guy killed by EMP).

Phew. Bad guys are up to 28 kills, give or take, and we're on pace for 84 this season. Another hour ticks by without a kill for Jack.