So far, so good. As always, they start out burning through 1/6 of their episodes in the first week (2 of 12, rather than 4 of 24) to start things off, but it's pretty good.

I am hoping that the reduced number of episodes will mean a tighter, better-told story, with fewer pointless digressions, and revelations that the season-opening villains were just tools of the real enemy behind it all.

But Jack and Chloe are back, as are a couple of others, with a whole new intelligence agency bringing its cast of amiable techs, smart but mistrusted, competent but ill-informed, bureaucratic clowns, and operatives who are just good enough to be an irritant, not smart enough to join Team Jack.

The issues are updated to be more timely than Muslims with nuclear weapons (though that plotline was reserved strictly for even-numbered seasons - if this miniseries is counted as an odd-numbered season, the blowback & treachery theme is appropriate), and Jack's now-legendary badassery is well-handled in a national security setting that focuses more on the technical than the tactical. Having paramilitary foes was increasingly less of a threat, because Jack has been shown to be hyper-effective at taking down such adversaries. His last handful of kills were not even bothered to be shown on-screen, just the bodies left in his wake as he tore through a Russian consulate. Now, in a world of omnipresent surveillance and widely available information, Jack's force-of-nature action aspect is explainable as an old-time direct weapon slicing through the more finesse-oriented players of the modern game, with his difficulty not in overcoming increasing physical challenges, like more cannon fodder or more elaborate defenses, but in coming to grips with villains who act through political spin and control and who use computers and drones, rather than conventional vehicles with WMD in the trunk.

It's a good time, and Yvonne Strahovski adds a visual element, as a CIA agent with brains, even if Chloe is trying a little to hard to remind us of "girl with a dragon tattoo".

Spoilers:
As for the showdown I mentioned in my title, I don't really think Strahovski's "Kate Morgan" has a chance against Jack. She's going to be on his side before the end. Which means her boss, Benjamin Bratt's comically inept CIA station chief, has even less of a chance of being an effective foil. I am also wondering if maybe she is supposed to be a love interest for Jack. Audrey is back, but she still has a "type", i.e. slimy presidential aides who want to hand Jack over to hostile foreign governments, so the hell with her. Of all the men she's slept with over the course of the show, it's pretty appalling that Paul Raines is apparently in the top 50%, character-wise.