Jack Bauer, one of television’s most famous counterterrorism experts, is back at it.

Fox’s newest season of 24 starts in January, but we get a prequel this weekend that connects the dots between the show’s last full season (in 2006) and its 2009 re-launch. Of course, 24 is most famous for its temporal conceit: Each episode is supposed to unfurl in real time (over 60 contiguous diegetic and extra-diegetic minutes), with the entire season transpiring during a single 24-hour period. That provides quite a few narrative challenges for the show’s staff, but it can create a sense of mounting tension (across episodes) that is rarely matched by other hour-long dramas.

And then there’s Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack.

Jack is supposed to represent a paradigmatic instantiation of American patriotism. His capacity for self-sacrifice is legion (and includes both personal and professional examples), and it is only matched by his singleminded willingness to stop terrorists — by any means necessary, legal or illegal. He once cut off somebody’s head just to maintain his cover. He even executed an innocent colleague in the counterterrorism unit (as a concession to a crazed terrorist) in an attempt to save future American lives. Jack makes the hard decisions.

In a moment dominated by the “war on terror,” Jack is our nationalist fantasy of a kinder and gentler form of patriotic Machiavellianism. For Jack, the ends (of American safety and security) justify the means, even when the means include torture, which Jack regularly and deftly employs, and especially when we can trust that the law enforcement agent who violates people’s most basic civil liberties really, truly does have our collective best interests at heart.

For those who don’t know, 24’s America has already elected two African-American presidents, anticipating Obama’s historic victory by several years, but the forthcoming season finds the Oval Office occupied by its first female politician (eat your heart out Hillary), Allison Taylor, played by Cherry Jones.

In this weekend’s prequel, Jack isn’t in Los Angeles (where he’s been for every single season thus far). He’s in South Africa, helping an old friend deal with child soldiers, treasonous American operatives, African warlords, and conspiracies of global capital. All in a day’s work for Jack Bauer.

In the past few years, Jack has lost just about everyone he has ever cared about. And it even looks like one of his old partners, Tony Almeida, is going to be back with a particularly evil/pernicious vengeance this time around.

Of course, the economy’s recent downturn has displaced terrorism (at least for now) as America’s central preoccupation. And there’s no indication that Jack Bauer knows the first thing about derivatives or suggesting some foolproof technique for solving our global banking crisis. But he might be just the distraction from such matters that some people crave. Indeed, when everyone else is being laid off, we might gain some small solace from the fact that Jack is still gainfully employed and up to his old tricks, even though it looks like his old West Coast unit might have been downsized out of existence (see the trailer above).