‘Jack Ryan’ Season 4 Episode 1 Recap: “Triage”

In the fourth and final season of Jack Ryan, John Krasinski’s version of this character who has endured in print and on film for nearly 40 years has a brand-new shiny title. The crusading analyst-turned-field officer is now deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Well, acting deputy director. There are upcoming senate confirmation hearings to contend with, just as there are for Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel), Jack’s stalwart former boss at the agency’s Rome station, who after the calamitous events of last season was made acting director of the CIA. The previous director, this guy Miller (Jonathan Bailey), was declared incompetent by President Bachler (David Bedella) after he disavowed Ryan and ignored his intelligence that revealed missing suitcase nukes and a fomenting Russian coup. So now, with Elizabeth in the top spot and Jack alongside, their mandate is to right the listing ship that is America’s premiere foreign intelligence service. And that sounds like a shit ton of paperwork. But lest we worry that the final six episodes of Jack Ryan will be a slog of bureaucratic bickering and intensely boring staff meetings, the first installment begins three weeks in the future, where Jack is found to be trussed up in a drippy Myanmar torture chamber, his captors at the ready with jumper cables and a car battery. Jack, Mister newly-minted Deputy Director, is about to get zapped.

How did he get there? Well, Jack Ryan loves its globetrotting, and this time it starts in Lagos, Nigeria, where an assault team infiltrates the presidential palace and murders the country’s top man in his sleep. Directing the assassins from afar is Tuttle (Michael EcElhatton, operating with the same fleshy impassiveness he employed as Roose Bolton in Game of Thrones), who phones Chao Fah (Louis Ozawa), a casino boss and crime lord in the Shan State of Myanmar, and tells him their target is eliminated. “The Lagos shipping lanes are clear,” Chao reports into another phone, and then we’re back in Washington, DC, where Elizabeth and Jack are briefing Bachler in the Oval Office. They have no knowledge of the action against the Nigerian president, but it’s clear the killers used Agency equipment, and that’s a problem for the US in general and Wright and Ryan specifically, whose confirmations are pending before the senate. “If you don’t know which operations your agency is running,” Bachler says, “they’re going to use that against you.” 

Michael Pena has also joined the cast of Jack Ryan this season, and as we meet his character, Domingo Chavez is praying solemnly in a church on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. He’s also holding a decorative box containing two severed hands, which he delivers to the Marquez drug cartel. “Those hands are the key to Asia,” Chavez’s contact there says, “to pure product, to the Silver Lotus Triad.” Again, all roads – and human appendages, evidently – lead back to Chao and Myanmar, who soon heads to Mexico to meet with the cartel and Chavez personally. It’s a partnership meant to control the US black market. But as Chao tells his henchman, “There are things much bigger than drugs at play.” That Chavez seems to be working for his own interests, or at least for more than one side, is probably not what Chao meant.

Something that never made any sense about Jack Ryan is how Abbie Cornish was introduced in season one as infectious disease expert Dr. Cathy Mueller and promptly disappeared for the duration of the series, which is probably why her season four return initially feels so awkward. Over a quiet dinner at Jack’s DC apartment, it’s generally established that he put in some work to get back into Cathy’s romantic graces. But Cornish and Krasinski are going to need more than a few brief scenes to establish some chemistry between these two, the kind of chemistry that immediately enlivens the proceedings when Wendell Pierce resurfaces as James Greer. (Pierce executes two perfect uses of “motherfucker” in as many minutes.) Jack’s longtime CIA mentor and sturdy ally in the field is these days flirting with the private sector – he’s not getting any younger, and is attempting to work a bit less and hopefully repair the relationship between himself, his ex-wife, and his two teenage children. Greer’s private life wasn’t a factor in previous seasons of Jack Ryan, either, so for its final run, the series is clearly putting an emphasis on what’s personally at stake for these seasoned Agency warriors as they face another emerging global threat.

“The CIA is a perfect microcosm of the American people,” Jack tells a closed session of the senate intelligence committee, “which means that we are in danger of being splintered. More easily controlled by outside interests, both foreign and domestic.” We already know that some of those outside interests will eventually get Jack into their torturous, jumper cable-loving clutches. But it’s also becoming clear how central to the Agency the violence in Lagos and confrontations in Yucatan are. With Greer’s help, Jack has extracted from former director Miller’s files nine different CIA operations with no other official record of existence. Black bag ops, redacted and off the books, that he and Wright immediately elect to cancel. If they kill the funding, they can hopefully expose the players. And that’s why Jack, returning to his apartment after a night out with Cathy, doesn’t seem entirely surprised when Chavez emerges from the shadows and puts a pistol against his skull. “Turn Pluto back on. You have 24 hours.” Well, there’s a warning from an outside interest. At least he didn’t chop off Jack’s hands.  

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