After forcing fans to suffer an extended two-year wait between the show’s second and third seasons, Amazon Prime rushed a fourth (confirmed to be final) season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan into production for a streaming debut just six months since the last one ended. To balance out that gift, however, this will be the first season of the series with episodes released on a weekly schedule rather than a full-season binge out of the gate.

As someone who read several of the original Tom Clancy novels many years ago and has seen most of the movies based on them, I have ambivalent feelings toward the Jack Ryan franchise. In both media, some of the stories are decidedly better than others. Since Amazon launched a streaming series based on the I.P. (but not based on any particular Clancy novel), I’ve watched every season with interest, hoping for it to really catch fire. I’m still waiting for that. For the most part, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is a decent spy thriller series that I enjoy watching, but has yet to transition into greatness. As the final season begins, I’m still not convinced it ever will.

Title:	Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan
Season:	4
Episodes:	4.01 – Triage 4.02 – Convergence
Release Date:	Jun. 30, 2023
Watched On:	Amazon Prime Video

During the show’s third season, CIA analyst and James Bond pretender Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) was framed for the murder of a Russian politician and had to go rogue, disobeying orders from his superiors in order to root out the conspiracy and prevent World War III from happening. Having succeeded at that, all is forgiven by the time Season 4 starts. In fact, the new political administration has promoted Jack to Deputy Director and tasked him with cleaning house at the Agency. His former station chief Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel) serves as Acting Director while preparing for a Senate confirmation hearing.

Wright’s predecessor in the job was corrupt as hell and ran countless shady off-the-books operations that Ryan and White struggle to untangle. One of them seems to have involved the convergence of a dangerous Asian triad and a Mexican cartel working together to slip terrorists and weapons of mass destruction into the United States using drug trade routes, for an ultimate goal that has yet to be determined but certainly seems ominous. To get to the bottom of this, Jack will need the help of his mentor James Greer (Wendell Pierce), his CIA buddy Mike November (Michael Kelly), and a dark-ops agent named Chavez (Michael Peña) who got burned by the former Director and wants payback. Also, his girlfriend from Season 1 (Abbie Cornish) is back in the picture, and I’m sure the writers will find some excuse to rope her W.H.O. doctor into the plot in a semi-meaningful way.

Seasons of this show usually get off to a slow start, and that’s definitely the case here. The first two episodes feature a whole lot of behind-closed-door meetings and Senate hearings and other excuses for characters to sit around talking. That would be fine if the show had sharper dialogue or more colorful characters, but most of the conversations here are utilitarian and expositional, and all of the actors (including normally engaging performers like Krasinski and Peña) have been instructed to dial their performances down so far that the characters barely have personalities at all. Both of the episodes have a couple of pretty good action scenes but, again, nothing especially original or innovative. Plenty of other TV series in recent years have handled action as well or better than anything in this one.

Those disappointments noted, this final season honestly doesn’t seem substantively different than those before it. The previous season built some steam and got more interesting as it went, and I hope for that to be the case with this one as well. Knowing that this will be the last batch of episodes, nothing here gives me reason to give up on the show so close to its conclusion.

Video Streaming

Amazon Prime streams Jack Ryan in 4K HDR. The most interesting thing about this show, visually, is that each season has been presented in a different aspect ratio, growing progressively wider over time. The series started as standard 16:9 in the first season, then moved to 2.00:1 in the second and 2.20:1 in the third. If you expected 2.35:1 in the fourth season, the producers decided to jump right past that and go for a ridiculously wide 2.50:1 instead. I’m not really sure the need for or even purpose of this, other than to be unique. Even on my 2.35:1 projection screen, the image has significant letterbox bars. It must look tiny on a typical 16:9 TV. Compositionally, the extra width offers little to no gain over 2.35:1.

In other respects, the show’s photography remains competent but not particularly striking. The 4K picture is reasonably sharp, but not exceptionally so. Colors and contrast are decent, but nothing about them or the HDR grading catches the eye.

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack delivers quite a bit of very pleasing bass. Music throbs and gunfire booms. Surround activity is mostly subtle until the shootout scenes, which then fill the room with action from all sides. However, the mix takes little advantage of the height channels. Unlike Season 3, which was locked to 7.1.2 format and only utilized the Front Height/Top Front positions, my Top Middle and Top Rear speakers (and even Front Wides!) do actually produce some sound this time, but activity in them is so restrained that it’s barely audible unless I put my ear next to the speaker. Perhaps some later episode will incorporate an attention-grabbing plane or helicopter flyover, but these first two might as well be 5.1.

Related

• Jack Ryan season 3 (2022)