by Jeff Alan, Contributing Writer
At long last, the Amazon Prime hit series Jack Ryan has concluded with its fourth season, and the story of Jack Ryan is over. After several delays, Prime released the third season of the show and quickly announced the fourth, leaving us with very little time to wait.
Season Four starts with Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) in the role of deputy director of the CIA with Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel), and they are tasked with cleaning up the CIA. They get word of the assassination of the Nigerian President, and they deduce from one of the captured assassins that the orders were given by the CIA. The Senate questions Jack about the assassination, who feels hesitant about the organization’s integrity. Jack neither confirms nor denies the involvement of their agency in the assassination, which cast ill suspicions around the Senate table. Ryan grows worried that this mission was one of former CIA director Thomas Miller’s (John Schwab) unauthorized operations.
Meanwhile in Yucatan, Mexico, cartel member Domingo Chavez (Michael Peña) executes a rival cartel leader in a display of dominance, and sends word to Myanmar triad leader Chao Fah (Louis Ozawa) to offer an alliance between the cartel and triad, but conflicting visions between Fah and another triad leader create tensions between all parties involved.
After tensions rise further, Chavez arranges an abduction plan to get Fah and his family out of the country. The triad agrees to meet with the cartel in Yucatan, and offers their pure ingredients for the cartel’s drug production, but shortly into their meeting, a firefight breaks out and Fah gets separated from Chavez, changing their situation drastically.
Back in Washington, Ryan and his girlfriend, Dr. Cathy Mueller (Abbie Cornish), get back from a gala event in the attempt to unite with Nigeria after the assassination, but Chavez shows up in Ryan’s apartment with a gun to his head asking about an operation Ryan knows nothing about.
The rest of the season reunites Jack with his team consisting of James Greer (Wendell Pierce), who is brought into the fray, and Mike November (Michael Kelly), who is still working the private sector, and comes to the aide of Ryan and Greer for another intense operation. Together, working with Chavez, they come up with a plan to find out who is pulling the strings and how to stop the unforeseen events that are to come.
The new season of Jack Ryan brings the same level of exciting, action-packed spy thriller fun that we remember and love from the previous seasons, yet it still feels a bit hollow. It has a mere six episodes in its run (compared to its previous season’s eight episodes), and it feels condensed and rushed, somehow only being slightly shorter than the past seasons.
The cast doesn’t do anything wrong, the pacing isn’t exactly the issue either, and it ends in a satisfying way that feels like the full story has a clear close to it. So why am I feeling like it’s missing something? Maybe on a second watch I will feel it ends a bit better, but on the first watch, I just felt like it was missing more of the stakes the last three seasons had. Being that this season was a bit more condensed, the “world-ending stakes” aren’t enough, and we don’t get a proper buildup to the season’s main antagonist like we did in previous seasons. Even new characters that team up with Ryan, like Chavez, don’t get the layering that they needed to feel like they deserve to be on his team.
It’s a fun ride of a season — and more importantly, a TV series — but I think this final season falls a bit too flat. There are points where I could have used a more fleshed-out story, and I think a full season would have helped do that.
Rating: High Side of Just Okay
Jack Ryan is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video
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