Review: Jack Ryan, Season One (2018)
2nd October 2018– MINOR SPOILER WARNING –
View this post on Instagram
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is a political action adventure that has it all, keeping viewers on the edge of their seat as a new, powerful adversary is chased across the globe. The show’s first episode gets in enough detail about all of the main characters, giving you just enough to understand who everyone is and what they do without putting you to sleep within the first hour.
As suggested in the title, it follows a story of Jack Ryan (John Kransinski). A former US marine, he now works as a TFAD (Terror Finance and Arms Division) Analyst for the CIA. Jack and his branch are given a new head of department, James Greener (Wendell Pierce). Unfortunately, Jack has a brief run-in with him on the way to the work after Greener nearly knocks him off his bike. You can feel the tension building during their first scene together after the accident.
Jack Ryan finds himself being dragged further and further away from being behind the safety of his office desk and more into the field. After being reluctant to do so in the first episode, when he is ordered onto a plane heading to Yemen, he ends up jumping at any chance to get into the action.
If there is just one minor flaw with this show, it is a side-story, following a US Drone Operator, which it doesn’t seem to link up with the main plot of Jack Ryan’s manhunt for Suleiman (Ali Suliman), the terrorist they are trying to thwart. It may pay off in second season but we will have to wait and see.
Apart from that, this season is excellent from start to finish, though sometimes you feel like you can predict what’s going to happen. For example, when the CIA come close to capturing a high value person of interest and you’re only on episode 3, you know they are going to get away for at least another week.
It’s the final episodes that really put the throttle down and don’t let it back up. As the tension rises between Jack and Greener, everything you may have thought was going to happen is thrown out of the window. You’re left sitting on the edge of your seat, biting your nails down to the bone, terrified the show is going to cut off at any second without a conclusion to the season.
This show is a definite must-see. You could binge watch the entire season in a day and not regret it.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Kamron Kent
@kentkamron