lowered my expectations, because I was prepared to absolutely hate it.  It was pretty, bad I kind of but ended up kind of enjoying it in spite of myself.  It probably deserves a D, D+ but I'll give it a C-.  Here's four good things about it and the five biggest misses.

Good things:

1.  Dudes fighting in the jungle is always good TV.  The show would have been better if it had more of Matice, Marcus, and the two other SpecOps guys who we only get 4 lines a piece from.  In fact, if they had just done 8 episodes of those guys fighting their way out of Venezuela, with Jim Halpert only appearing once an episode via a sat phone call, I would have been begging for a season two.

2.  Mike November - The CIA liason in Venezuela was a good character even if he had a really dumb name.  Maybe it was supposed to be a cover name?  Anyway, that actor was funny and cool and did a good job of that trick where you keep thinking he's going to be a beauracratic jerk but then he does something awesome to help the main characters.  Good job by him.

3.  Cathy Mueller and the clinically depressed drone operator disappeared.  Poor Cathy was so bad in Season one that we don't even get an explanation for why her and Jack aren't together.  Everyone just silenty agrees that it's best that she's gone and we're not going to talk about it.  The drone guy from season one was the weirdest part of the show because you kept waiting for his storyline to meaningfully intersect with the main story, and.......it kinda does?  Mostly he seemed to be there just to facilitate a weirdly uncomfortable sex scene.  They kept the story a little tighter this time around.

4.   South African mercenaries are always fun, especially when they change sides midway through the show.  All espionage shows should have South African mercenaries. 

Problems:

1.  Okay, first and foremost we have to talk about the whole Reyes-Bonalde showdown.  Let's be honest, if Reyes is the kind of strongman who would slit his childhood best friend/brother-in-laws throat, he would have had zero problem making Gloria Bonalde disappear at the first sign that she was showing momentum in the polls.  Especially since she frequently drives around with like, one dude for security.  On a related note - Reyes appears to be garbage at fixing elections.   At the The "National Election Council" reports that Reyes is trailing Bonalde 30-70% in the vote.  What?  Why isn't the director of the National Election Council Reyes' dirtbag son-in-law or someone like that?

2. This one is minor, but the whole "Senator Chapin is dirty" subplot seemed unnecessary.  First of all, the guy just oozes "I'm helping Jack Ryan, but secretly I'm in charge of this whole thing behind the scenes" mojo every time he's on screen, so the "big reveal" at the end comes as no surprise.  Secondly, if you had just left out the plot line all together, I don't feel like the story would have been any different.  The last ten minutes of the show were the Bonaldes being reunited (I really didn't care) and Jack busting Senator Chapin (which I also didn't really care).  I could have just turned the show off after Jack and Greer had their final conversation and I would have been fine.

3.  Speaking of unnecessary subplots, the Ubarri character (Reyes second in command) ultimately is pointless.  He spends the whole show fretting about how Reyes is turning dirty (which seems pretty freaking obvious to everyone else), considers turning on him, then just gets murdered by Reyes.  If the point was to show us how bad Reyes was, it was kind of unecessary - we KNOW Reyes is a scumbag.  The worst part is that the actor who plays Ubarri is really good in Narcos, but he just kind of wasted here.

4.  Naomi Rapace's character.  So she gets shot - TWICE by Max outside the train station (looks like once to the midsection, then once in the foot/leg), and Max leaves her for dead.  Somehow she knows EXACTLY where Max will be meeting Jack and shows up in time to shoot Max and save Jack.  She then shoos Jack away and stays behind to comfort Max's daughter as the Cops arrive.  Two episodes later, Jack calls her for help from the Prison Camp, because.....She's not in custody?  She's a rogue intelligence agent operating in England who had just escaped from an Mi-5 escort who Max murdered in an Elevator, then been found by the police with a shooting victim - and they just let her out on bail, I guess?

5.  John Kracinzki is a talented charismatic actor who always seems to be having zero fun in this show.  He's awesome in 13 hours, so we know he can pull off the action-hero gig.  But he slogs through every episode of this show like he's trying to pass a kidney stone.  They need to give him more wise-cracking, chop busting with Greer.

In summary, this franchise has so much potential, there's just no excuse for it not being better than it is.  Someone here on the board summed it up when they said the producers were "trying to hard" this season.    We don't need the multiple layers of bad guys and the unnecessary subplots.  Just give us special ops guys taking down bad dudes, a couple of car chases, a little comic relief and a climactic final battle with a terrorist boss/third world dictator and we'll be good.