It’s long been whispered behind closed doors, but if you needed any more proof that virtually any project is immediately elevated by the presence of Michael Peña, then look no further than the fourth and final run of Prime Video’s Jack Ryan, which sends John Krasinski’s spin on the Tom Clancy hero out with his best run of episodes yet.
Let’s hope those rumors of Peña’s Domingo Chavez getting his own spin-off prove to be true, because by the time the credits come up on the eighth and final installment, you’ll be left wanting more of not just the actor’s welcome addition to the small screen franchise, but the universe as a whole. Citadel SpyVerse, take note; there’s a lot of catching up to do in order to become Amazon’s marquee espionage property.
The platform has come in for something that exists between praise and scorn for its “Dad TV” subgenre, of which Jack Ryan is most definitely a part of alongside the likes of The Terminal List, Bosch, and Reacher to name but three, although that always seemed a little harsh. Setting its stall out early, season 4 of the former begins with a cold open that finds the title hero being tortured and interrogated, but it takes a while for the story to catch up to that point.
Instantly laying its cards of intrigue on the table, there are countless moving pieces never left to linger on the board for too long, and even at that, you’re never quite sure if they’ve been placed deliberately or not. Having averted nuclear disaster at the end of season 3, Ryan is something approaching a hero, and he’s finally got an ally in the hot-seat as the deputy to Betty Gabriel’s acting CIA chief Elizabeth Wright, even if they’ve got a string of hearings to overcome before being cemented in their positions.
Being the rogue that he is, though, it doesn’t take long for Jack to take matters into his own hands and go off-book when yet another government-backed conspiracy emerges. The Nigerian president is assassinated by a black ops team, and there’s a trail that leads right back to the agency, before splintering off in several different directions that stretch around the globe.
Hit squads, drug cartels, and terrorist organizations are all intertwined with a common goal, compromising both the sanctity of the institution Ryan holds so dearly and his place in it, because he’s the one that’s going to be held accountable. Running out of people to trust, he shuts out his boss and recruits his own crack squad of willing renegades that includes Peña’s Chavez, the always-reliable Wendell Pierce’s James Greer, and scene-stealer extraordinaire Michael Kelly’s Mike November to traverse multiple continents in the name of cutting the head off the snake.
Deepening the personal and professional ties are the myriad of peripheral figures who gradually become more integral as the episodes progress; a list that includes – but isn’t limited to – Abbie Cornish’s Cathy Mueller returning for the first time since season 1, Louis Ozawa’s businessman and family man Chao Fah, Okieriete Onaodowan’s fast-rising political hotshot Adebayo Osoji, and Zuleikha Robinson’s philanthropist and environmentalist Zeyara Lemos. It takes a while to get a handle on who connects to who and why, but suffice to say, loyalties and allegiances are always shifting in the shady world of international espionage.
One of the most refreshing elements about season 4 is that it takes the focus away from the CIA for great stretches, placing the external motivations of the principal players at the forefront. It’s hard to put a fresh spin on such a familiar genre, and while Jack Ryan has never been groundbreaking, it upends the expectations it had set across its first three runs to re-paint its own canvas in bold new colors.
Ryan might be a do-gooder at core who always follows his moral compass, but he’s not above getting his hands dirty or bending the rules and regulations if it pushes him closer to his ultimate goal. That extends to Greer, too, who gets a surprisingly well-developed and complex arc that puts him at a crossroads between the job he loves and the family he lost because of it, which is mirrored in the ongoing developments surrounding Ozawa’s Chao Fah, creating a strong overarching dynamic threaded throughout the entire ensemble that pays off spectacularly by the time the resolution is reached.
The charming and charismatic Peña might not seem like the obvious candidate to play a cold-as-ice badass, but he’s a man of many talents. Here, he doesn’t even need to rely on quick-witted responses or moments of levity in the slightest, with Chavez a thorn in the side of everyone as he discovers that he’s been manipulated by people who themselves are being played like puppets, with bullets more often than not his go-to solution for solving any problem. Magnetic, mysterious, and a fantastic scene partner for both Krasinski and Kelly, it’s a bummer that we had to wait until the last season for him to get in on the party.
Tightly-plotted, briskly-paced, and punctuated with several standout action sequences that hammer home its cinematic credentials, Jack Ryan doesn’t go quite so far as to pull out all of the stops, but it knows exactly what it is and uses that to its advantage. There are certain tropes the spy thriller simply can’t run away from, so instead of trying to deconstruct or reinvent them, the show simply decides to twist them just a little to make them feel different. “Binge-worthy” is a phrase that gets overused in the streaming era, but even those who weren’t particularly enamored with the first three seasons may find themselves powering through the fourth in short order.
Not only that, but Jack Ryan does what any TV show drawing to a close should do, and it does it in style; the story is brought to a definitive conclusion, but there’s just the merest hint that further adventures are looming just around the corner. It may or may not happen, but anything that leaves you wanting more by the time it bids farewell can’t be called anything other than a resounding success.
