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When General Hospital gets it right, boy do they get it right. Tuesday’s episode had us on the edge of our seats in the wake of Marco’s stabbing and Rocco shooting Cullum in the back. We’ve known for some time that Steve Burton would be taking a break for a few months as Jason, and we were waiting all episode to see if Marco or Cullum would die.

While we still aren’t sure about who’s leaving and who’s pulling through, one thing we do now know is how Jason will be bowing out of Port Charles. And it’s not at all what we were expecting!

With all of his goodbye tour for the past couple weeks and the plan to take Britt and run to Canada, we’ve been expecting that Jason would quite simply exit the canvas for a bit as he visited our neighbors up north. It was an easy reason to get him off the canvas, but if we’d stopped and thought about it, we’d have realized how little drama there was in it.

Well, that was solved when Cullum threw everything out the window when he destroyed Britt’s crucial medicine and tried forcing her back into the fold. Jason leapt to her rescue, only for Rocco to shoot Cullum with his own gun just when it seemed all hope was lost.

Rocco’s already traumatized by the whole experience, but Jason is doing his best to help the poor teen and, judging by his stonewalling of Dante in Tuesday’s episode, it’s pretty clear he’s ready and willing to take the fall for shooting the WSB Director. And if that’s the case, there’s only one place for Jason to go: Prison.

Whether or not Cullum dies (and, judging by the end of Tuesday’s episode and the way it’s been set up, it’s not looking good for him), shooting the head of an international spy agency is a big no-no. Yes, Jason was planning on doing it anyway, but he wasn’t planning on being caught for it.

It would be one thing, perhaps, if everyone knew how evil and amoral Cullum was, not to mention what he’s really up to, but they don’t. Jason’s in a lot of trouble. And while this will surely be worked out eventually, for now, that trouble has given General Hospital the perfect way to usher Jason off the canvas. But that also means Rocco is going to be going through it, as he wrestles with what he did and the knowledge that an innocent (of this, at least) man is in prison because of him.

As bad as we feel for him, we have to hand it to General Hospital for giving us an incredible, nail-biting episode that just set storyline up for months to come. Now let’s see how Marco and Cullum fare…