‘Jack Ryan’ Season 4 Episode 4 Recap: “Bethesda”

With only six episodes in its fourth and final season, Jack Ryan doesn’t have a whole lot of time to keep teasing out its big central conspiracy, this confluence of international criminal organizations that freely corrupts CIA operations and seems able to reach anyone, anytime, and act with total impunity. So with time running out, both for the series and in its storyline – the confirmation hearings for Elizabeth Wright’s directorship are now just three days away – Jack Ryan Season 4 Episode 4 (“Bethesda”) gets breezy, lets a few more connections fall into place, and puts Jack fully on offense. Watch out, henchmen and assorted evildoers of the world – Jack Ryan is once again gunning for you. 

We get started in Dubrovnik, Croatia, the ancient Mediterranean port city where last episode’s action led Jack, Domingo Chavez, and Mike November. They hope to make contact there with Chao, but first they’ll need invites to “The Marketplace,” a black market bazaar operated by an underworld heavy called Olafsky (Visar Vishka), and that’s where Mike November’s long list of contacts comes in handy. A high-end Dubrovnik madam named Katarina (Katarina Ces) agrees to sneak Jack and Ding into Olafsky’s medieval fortress compound – she delivers her girls via boat to paying customers at the Marketplace – and lets them know of an old contact in town who also has a plus one. It’s Zubkov (Ivan Mathias Petersson), the eccentric Russian arms dealer who Jack and Mike bamboozled into helping them last season, and once they commandeer his yacht and interrupt him in a compromising position, he’s “happy” to help again. (The Zubkov character is a good callback for Jack Ryan; Petersson plays him as an obsessive but bumbling rich bad guy who doesn’t want to admit that he actually kind of likes Mike and Jack.) The team is all set to infiltrate the Marketplace. But that whole meeting up with Chao thing doesn’t go as planned.

Elizabeth Wright is back from Lagos, having cemented the partnership between President Okoli and his chief rival, the warlord Ekon Ameh. And even though it was President Bachler who sent her to Nigeria in the first place, Senator Henshaw, the intelligence committee chair, tells the acting director that foreign entanglements are exactly what got the CIA in trouble during the Miller era. “Losing Jack Ryan,” he continues, “that was a great first step. But rather than point out any similarities you share, I’d take a different direction.” It is requiring all of Elizabeth’s considerable patience and powers of compromise to keep the political side of her job in balance, and since she can’t aid Jack directly without blowback, she has to trust that he’s making the right moves in the field. “We’re very different creatures,” she tells the lobbyist Ade Osoji of her and Jack. “But we share the same mission. Same logic. If I’m thinking it, he’s out there doing it.”

Also out here doing it is James Greer, who’s chasing down a lead on the shell companies used by Miller and his unknown criminal associates. And when he establishes that a signatory for one of the companies is actually a young kid lying comatose in a Bethesda long-term care center after a football injury, it’s clear the companies are a front for someone or somebody else. Which is when Tuttle makes another phone call – we still don’t know who’s running this guy – and gets authorization to take Greer out. He gets the drop on the new deputy director, and manages to stab him in the gut. But Greer’s been doing this a long, long time. He yanks Tuttle’s tanto blade out of his own belly and slashes him with it before leaping off the bridge to safety and, eventually, a hospital recovery room. Greer! He’s still got it.

The reason why Jack and company can’t meet Chao at the Marketplace is because he’s not there. He was instead summoned to Geneva, Switzerland by Zeyara Lemos – uh-oh – the international philanthropist who’s been buttering up Cathy Mueller with lunches and WHO platitudes, and even has the ear of Elizabeth Wright. Zeyara has actually been secret partners with the Silver Lotus Triad this whole time, and she reveals to Chao that she wants him to fully take over the Myanmar side of their operations from his business rival Tin Tun. Chao takes this in stride – remember, the last time we saw him, he was angling to escape Myanmar and the triad entirely – and in Dubrovnik, where Tin Tun has attended the marketplace in Chao’s stead, Jack and Chavez and Mike are still acting on the assumption that Chao wants out. Is he himself trying to play Zeyara? Is he still Chavez’s valuable asset on the inside? Or was he never that at all? Developing.

At Olafsky’s exclusive party, cocktails and trance music obscure the ugly true nature of his business, which is the sale of weapons and women to the highest bidder. And after Mike manages to bullshit his way into their face-to-face meeting, he busts it up and grabs what Tin Tun is selling the kingpin: “triggers,” slim, biometrically controlled devices with an as yet unknown purpose. Later, after a gun battle that sees Chavez using a grenade launcher he appropriated from the Marketplace’s weapons kiosks to blast a way through for him and Jack, the group takes out Olafsky once and for all. But they didn’t silence him before they asked what the triggers do. His only answer? They’re “a way to change the world.” And after another firefight that leads to them leaping into the Adriatic Sea in order to be exfiltrated by Katarina, Jack, Mike, and Chavez are left with the triggers and more lingering questions. Suddenly, Chao sends them a set of coordinates. Wherever they lead, that’s where Jack and his two-man army are headed next.    

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