Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jack Ryan’ Season 4, The Final Episodes Of John Krasinski As The CIA’s Crusading Wonderboy

It’s the six-episode series finale for John Krasinski and Prime Video’s version of Jack Ryan, the character Tom Clancy debuted in 1984 with his first “Ryanverse” bestseller, The Hunt For Red October. And like the Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford versions before him, Krasinski’s Ryan has been both a desk jockey analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency and an officer in the field. His latest challenge? Becoming the agency’s deputy director after the tumultuous events of last season. In Season 4, Krasinski and co-stars Wendell Pierce, Betty Gabriel, and Michael Kelly are joined by a returning Abbie Cornish as well as Michael Peña.   

JACK RYAN – SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The Shan State of Myanmar in foggy half-light. A man, shrouded and bound, is hauled into a restricted facility. His bare feet are dragged across rough concrete, but that’s the least of his problems, because this torture chamber’s main attraction is just ahead. The hood is removed; it’s Jack Ryan (Krasinski). And he’s about to experience local hospitality at its highest voltage. 

The Gist: It’s another sticky situation for Ryan, who over the course of the series has foiled the plots of financial terrorists, influenced political chicanery in Venezuela, and been both the cause of and solution to an international incident between destroyers of the US and Russian navies. This guy gets around. But before Jack Ryan shows us how its protagonist ended up captured in Southeast Asia, it flashes back to three weeks earlier, where assassins sent by Tuttle (Michael McElhatton, Roose Bolton on Game of Thrones) murder the President of Nigeria in Lagos in a plot that connects to Chao Fah (Louis Ozawa), a Myanmar-based drug business kingpin and casino owner. Jack, who’s been made acting deputy director of the CIA under its new acting director, his old Rome Station boss Elizabeth Wright (Gabriel), is tasked with teasing out the details of numerous off-the-books agency operations. And what he discovers seems linked to moneyed global interests, the international drug trade, and secret stuff inside the CIA with its own multinational reach.

Back in season one, Jack Ryan introduced Abbie Cornish as Cathy Mueller, and then neither she nor the character were ever seen again. But now Jack and Cathy are back together – “He begged,” she tells James Greer (Wendell Pierce), Jack’s friend and CIA mentor – and Greer himself is taking a renewed interest in his personal life, attempting to be a steadier presence in the lives of his ex-wife and their two teenage children. Greer will almost certainly end up back in the field with whatever Jack gets up to. But the CIA lifer isn’t getting any younger, and the lucrative private sector still calls. 

In Yucatan, Mexico, a man named Domingo Chavez (Peña) makes a gruesome delivery to the Marquez drug cartel – a pair of human hands placed in a decorative box – and with their receipt, a meeting is put in motion between the cartel and Chao’s criminal organization, which is known as the Silver Lotus Triad. Exclusive control of black market routes into the US is under negotiation, and whoever’s hands those are is a big key to the deal. But before anything can happen a gun battle erupts between the cartel, the triad, Mexican police, and a clandestine team of operators led by Chavez, who seems to be working all sides of this equation. And when Chavez next surfaces, in Washington DC where he threatens Jack at gunpoint, the CIA’s new acting deputy director doesn’t even seem surprised.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This season marks the final run for John Krasinski as Jack Ryan on Prime Video. But the streamer’s nook for what can generally be considered “dad content” has no shortage of plans. The Tom Clancy world is vast, after all, and there has been talk of Prime developing long standing Ryanverse character Domingo “Ding” Chavez into a Michael Peña-led series of its own. And with the renewal of Chris Pratt’s grim guns and retribution drama The Terminal List  for a second season, Prime intends to build out that universe, based on the novels by Jack Carr, with a prequel that features Taylor Kitsch’s character from the original series.  

Our Take: The final season of Jack Ryan features the same opening credit sequence, juxtaposing things from the ordinary everyday against signifiers of the military-industrial complex. It also adheres to a style of onscreen place naming that’s been a feature of most government agency-involved, thriller-action-style titles going back at least to the late 1990s, where text appears as if typed by an analyst or some computer deep within the bowls of CIA Headquarters in Langley. There is a world unseen, Jack Ryan asserts, and it’s watching us. Or at least it’s watching Jack, as he’s once again become embroiled in a thorny scheme with its feelers on three different continents (and counting). The series has always been capable at setting up the players in its conspiracies and their respective spheres of influence, and has delivered with budgets to include military aircraft, naval vessels, a large supporting cast, and location shooting on a global scale. In other words, it’s stable and convincing in its look and feel as an action thriller. It just has to get us to care about the characters it features. 

Jack Ryan seems to suddenly want to emphasize the personal lives of Jack and his trusty CIA counterpart James Greer, but early on, the attempts to do that feel contrived and muddled alongside its usual material, from tactical teams and comms links to secret bad guy meetings and all of their double crosses. Jack Ryan functions best with its titular character leading a charge, with Pierce’s Greer and the always welcome Michael Kelly as Mike November alongside; it knows this, but seems to have realized that Jack’s agency exploits require a counterbalance in personal cost. It’s the final season – it might as well put everything on the line. We’ll just have to see how it aligns these newly active stabs at humanity with its propensity for the usual spy world mechanics.      

Sex and Skin: Nothing much here. Abbie Cornish has returned to Jack Ryan, but at least initially, her and John Krasinski’s scenes together as a romantic couple feel dull and transactional. 

Parting Shot: When Jack arrives home late at night, only for Chavez to emerge from the shadows of his kitchen and put a gun to his head, he manages to maintain his chill. “Turn Pluto back on,” the CIA operator tells the agency’s acting deputy director. “You have 24 hours.”

Sleeper Star: In the early going, Michael Peña’s performance here as Ding Chavez is pretty sedate. But the spot where Chavez exists, seeming to be making moves on every side of a multi-dimensional playing field, is a very interesting one. And when he does perk up, like when Chavez threatens a bent officer of the Mexican federal police, Peña has the ability to put some acid in the character’s throat. 

Most Pilot-y Line: “The CIA is the perfect microcosm of the American people,” Jack Ryan tells a senate subcommittee, “in danger of being splintered,” and he goes on to warn of interests who would use the agency for their own advantage, which seems to already be happening as the final season of the series kicks off. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Jack Ryan is unspooling another thriller/spy/action-style yarn in its fourth and final season, something at which it’s become quite adept. But it’s also setting up what could come next for the Ryanverse as it relates to Prime Video, and at least trying to offer a glimmer of humanity beyond all of the government agency carrying on and mysterious international evildoing. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges