Third night of the third season of Fox's 24 - so how we doin' so far?

Pretty cagey of the writers to set this 'un three years after last year's mock-Middle Eastern terrorist threat since it gives our cast time to recuperate from last season's day-long chase. Too many consecutive days of this Perils of Pauline stuff, and Jack & Kim Bauer would probably keel over dead from exhaustion.

Still, you've gotta wonder why the fact that Season Two ended with a seemingly successful assassination attempt on Dennis Haysbert's President Palmer barely gets mentioned. Turns out Palmer's survived that attempt, though not without an occasional ominous tremor or two, but whatever happened to the slimy moneyed miscreants behind that appalling plot? And what about that oily v-p who attempted a palace coup in the midst of all the chaos?

In other words, that three-year gap gives 24's scripters leeway to skip over plenty of tricky unresolved questions from the past two seasons. What about the imperiled little girl who lost both mother and sleazebag abusive father last year? And now that they've introduced Sunnydale's former high school principal as the Prez's adviser/brother, where's the rest of Palmer's troubled family? And how about the duplicitous Nina? I know 24's writers are hoping you'll ignore such questions in favor of a brand-fresh slam-bang terrorist threat, but I can't quite do it.

This year's baddies are a pair of Mexican drug-runner brothers named Hector & Ramon Salazar who've initiated a biological threat on the city of Los Angeles. The duo hope to blackmail the president into releasing Ramon, who's been imprisoned thanks to the efforts of an undercover Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland). As a souvenir of his narc-work, Bauer now has a monkey on his back: he sweats almost as much as last season's irradiated CTU chief George.

As for Bauer's daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), she's now gotten a job at CTU, the better for her junky dad to keep tabs on her - which makes sense, considering the gal's propensity for plunging her idiot self into perilous situations. For the first three eps, at least, the moronic post-adolescent moves get made by Kyle Singer, a Cali kid who's been suckered into transporting what he thinks is cocaine for the Salazar brothers. Poor dumb-ass Kyle is apparently carrying more than drugs: to the hawk-eyed agents of CTU, it appears as if he's Typhoid Mary for an ultra-deadly and fast-acting viral weapon. Lovers and longtime CTUers Tony & Michelle Almeida (Carlos Bernard & Reiko Aylesworth) attempt to rally the troops, but - uh-oh! - looks like there's at least one mole in the unit. (How well do they screen these folks, anyway? Not too tightly, I guess, since they hired Kim and put her in a position of some responsibility.)