Jack Bauer is still saving America on "24," but in the show's seventh season, the post-9/11 action hero appears to be grappling with real-world criticism of his hardball tactics.

There's a new administration in town, and a trailing legion of civil libertarians, do-gooders and smug senators with subpoena powers. They want to crawl all over the recent past, second-guessing years of successful counterterrorism operations that worked the dark side.

In one of the new season's opening scenes, Bauer is asked if he tortured a suspect.

"According to the definition set forth by the Geneva Convention, yes I did," says a defiant Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland. But later, in one of the few flashes of self-reflection in the show's first hours, Bauer says the American public has a right to know what's done in its name.

"We've written more deeply and in a more nuanced way on the subject," says Howard Gordon, the executive producer and chief writer of "24," adding that the debate over torture intensifies as the season progresses. "We felt we couldn't denounce Jack and wash away the last years of the show, but we do have him travel some distance on the subject and give voice to different points of view, particularly in the president's character, who isn't falling for the whatever-it-takes formulation. She holds fast." President Allison Taylor (a Hillary Clinton manquee) is played by Cherry Jones.

The new "24 "season is set in Washington rather than Los Angeles, an attempt to freshen the brand. A woman president has just taken office and the country is threatened by operatives from the fictional African nation of Sangala, where a murderous thug has just staged a coup.

Gordon promises that Bauer will evolve over the course of the season and that the "deep moral questions Americans have had to face" because of issues like Abu Ghraib will provide a context for the show's narrative and the character's evolution. As was clear in "Redemption," the two-hour prequel that ran in November, the sins of the past are beginning to weigh on Jack, and the show's writers. But in the first four hours of the new season, at least, Bauer appears not to have entirely shed his reliance on tough-guy tactics.

Bauer is pulled away from a Senate hearing on his methods by an FBI agent who needs his help on the emerging Sangalese crisis. Bauer is warned to rein in his abusive tactics.

"We're the FBI, not CTU; we honor the law even when it's not convenient," one FBI agent says.

Pretty soon, however, FBI agent Renee Walker, played by Annie Wersching, is prodding a hospitalized suspect's wound with her gun and turning off his oxygen supply to get him to talk.