Watching 24’s Renee Walker take a circular saw to an informant’s thumb at a Long Island auto parts store, one thought came to mind: Now that’s what I call going rogue.

Oh, Renee. Tough, sexy, smart, befreckled Renee. In what may be the most startling transformation of a female character on24 since the revelation in Season 1 that Nina Myers was a mole, Renee returned to CTU a haunted and damaged vision of her previous self. The episode’s thwarted assassination attempt (yes, another one), cold-blooded murders, and even its gallery of Russian mob tattoos (blown up to a wall-sized scale, thanks to some nifty new CTU technology) couldn’t compare in shock value to what last season’s events had done to this once idealistic FBI agent.

Renee returned after the determination that the Russian mob was behind the attempted assassination of Kamistan President Omar Hassan. We learned that several years earlier she had gone undercover and infiltrated the Russian mob—and could therefore help enlighten CTU about the day’s events. Or as CTU chief Brian Hastings put it, “What does a Russian gang have against the leader of the Islamic Republic?”

I was surprised that the head of an elite counter-terrorism agency couldn’t come up with at least a few possible scenarios before posing that question in front of his staff. Then again, Hastings was wrong about everything both large and small that transpired up to that point. Think about it—when Chloe told him that she couldn’t reach Jack, Hastings concluded that Jack’s cell phone had died or that he had hit a spot with bad reception. In all fairness, maybe AT&T is Hastings’ service provider. But while I initially admired his stoop-shouldered, snarling nastiness, now I’m just relieved Hastings never went to work as a TSA screener.

Jack, still hoping to catch the last plane out of New York, was right about everything. So right, in fact, that he ended up in Queens, at the scene of hitman Davros/Mike Farmer’s murder of a fellow cop and his wife. A quick bit of advice: Never suggest to a Russian assassin “to do what ya gotta do and leave us alone,” because invariably what he has to do is kill you. Jack’s arrival at the house led to his first beating of the day, a nasty post-taser pummeling delivered by an angry NYPD cop with an accent as thick as the East River and a Joe the Plumber- sized dome.