'Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan' Season 3 Review: John Krasi

If you have to choose between action series centered around characters named Jack, your best bet is to go with Reacher as opposed to Ryan.

Way back in the first season of Jack Ryan, there was a brief conversation that tested the titular agent’s loyalty to the CIA. As played by John Krasinski, Ryan was asked directly how he could work for an agency that had been responsible for such a long history of what can be generously referred to as rather shady activity. His answer, at least at the time (as this was largely forgotten since then) was that he believed he could fix it from the inside more than he could from the outside. It was, to put it lightly, a rather dubious answer that he didn’t even seem to believe. Still, he pressed on without much thought, earning the “Boy Scout” nickname that so many labeled him with. Now, going into a third season with even larger stakes than ever before that puts him in the crosshairs, perhaps Ryan should have reflected more on who he was working for and what might happen if he ran afoul of their interests. Perhaps that would have made this season’s focus on backstabbing and betrayal more engaging than the others that preceded it. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

This go-around, we pick back up with Ryan now working in Rome and getting up to his usual spy shenanigans. Part of this involves getting literally thrown out of a place he shouldn’t be, though he dusts himself off and gets ready to give a presentation about what he refers to as the “Sokol Project.” While it isn’t quite as forced as the one he gave to justify the plot back in Season 2, this one is also a bit hard to take seriously. Essentially, this term refers to what Ryan says is a plan to restore the Soviet Union. Obviously, to anyone who has even taken a brief perusal of a history book, this is not something that is real and is an invention of the show to give it some sort of tension. Wouldn’t you know it, just when Ryan is done with his presentation, he starts to get word that someone is trying to relaunch this project. With his fellow officer CIA Officer James Greer, played by an always solid Wendell Pierce, he will now have to try to piece together what is happening. However, after one of his missions ends in disaster, Ryan finds himself on the run after being wrongly accused of treason. Thus, he will have to operate underground in order to prevent what he fears may lead to global conflict.