‘Jack Ryan’ Season 4 Episode 5 Recap: “Wukong” 

Ever since Prime Video’s version of Jack Ryan began, it has expected the viewer to put the same trust in its main character that his CIA colleagues and in the larger Spy Shit universe have. In the Season 3 finale, Jack engineered an international chain of trust that stretched from the White House Situation Room all the way to a naval showdown in the Baltic Sea. At the outset of Season 4, when he was still the Agency’s acting deputy director, Jack essentially told a Senate committee that he alone could fix it, all of that untrustable rot inside the CIA. And now, as he’s launched into a chase across the continents with all of us following blindly along, we’ve trusted Jack and his team to make sense of this show’s frustrating tendency to massively underdevelop its villains. Jack has always been the guy leading the charge, just as John Krasinski’s face has always promoted the show. But by the penultimate episode of Jack Ryan (Episode 5, “Wukong”), it’s really those closest to him that we’re believing in most. And that feels purposeful from a structural perspective, considering this season is the home stretch for Krasinki as the CIA’s golden trust warrior.

Is it significant that the false passport identities of Jack, Ding Chavez, and Mike November are “Harry Caul,” “Martin Stett,” and “Berni Moran”? We’ll never know if they’re just huge fans of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia classic The Conversation or what, because the three operatives are admitted into Malaysia without incident. (Maybe we just have to trust that they’re in on the bit.) They’ve followed Chao’s coordinates here, and he greets them not in his potential bad guy form, but as the man working from inside Zeyara Lemos’s criminal operation to impede her dastardly plan and escape Malaysia with his family intact. And Zeyara, who in Episode 4 (“Bethesda”) finally revealed her true criminal nature – we always suspected, but it was difficult to get a read, considering her character only surfaced randomly – has also lured Cathy Mueller to Malaysia. The physician thinks she’s here to administer aid to refugees, to help Zeyara fight for her supposed cause. But Cathy was baited from the start. Perhaps Lemos understood she’d need insurance against Jack’s worldbeating ways? That was never made clear. And besides, we haven’t seen Jack and Cathy correspond directly since he sent her a “wish you were here” text from the picaresque coast of Croatia. He doesn’t even know she’s in Malaysia until Chao tells him.

In Episode 1 (“Triage”) of its final season, Jack Ryan hastily introduced Greer’s ex-wife and two teenage kids, only to forget about them entirely but for James Greer, Jr. Now, once angry about everything his absentee CIA agent father missed, Junior’s psyched when Dad calls him for an assist with busting his stabbed ass out of Walter Reed Medical Center, and father and son track down Tuttle together. (“You wanted to see what I really do, right? Shit doesn’t get any more real than this.”) If the Ryanverse eventually spins off a James Greer/James Greer, Jr. action drama starring Wendell Pierce and Anthony J. Abraham, count us in.

With Chao’s help, Jack, Mike, and Ding infiltrate the Wukong Casino and its vault, where they place explosive charges on the triggers that remain after their last-minute interception of the first batch back in Dubrovnik. Zeyara, her scheme rapidly unraveling, tries to detain Cathy in a decommissioned prison as valuable collateral. But Mike destroys her convoy with a commandeered gunship – no matter what November’s up to, Michael Kelly plays him with a detached sardonic wit that’s totally infectious – and Cathy shoots a henchman to free herself from Lemos’s clutches. That leaves Chavez and Jack to collect Chao’s family and bolt for their airstrip extraction point. But not before their secret ally is wounded by his triad counterpart Tin Tun. Bleeding out, and seeing his wife and young daughter safely depart, Chao detonates a sack of explosives and dies in the blast, taking Tin Tun with him.

Zeyara’s private army is closing in on the runway. John Krasinski and Abbie Cornish finally have an opportunity to make a real connection as a couple as Jack and Cathy rush a few desperate, fleeting “I love you”’s on the way to her boarding the plane, and the team must stay behind to cover its exit. Cathy and Chao’s family take flight, Jack and Ding take out a few of Zeyara’s goons, and elude the rest with the help of Mike and his chopper. But not without taking fire. And we already know that Lemos’s organization has serious reach. So as Jack calls Greer on a satellite phone from the rocky Thailand beach where they crash landed, who shows up but more heavily armed goons in tactical gear. This was the operation Tuttle was running remotely from Maryland when Greer broke down his door and took him in. But Zeyara didn’t call Tuttle to put him in play. She called Ade Osoji, the speechifying oil lobbyist who ingratiated himself with Elizabeth Wright. It’s Osoji who’s been running Tuttle this whole time, in cahoots with Zeyara in a transnational criminal scheme that’s bouncing bio-terror weapons – and their triggers – from Malaysia, through Lagos, Nigeria, and onward to Mexico for eventual insertion into the US. And on Zeyara’s orders, the assault team in Thailand nabs Jack Ryan. 

Remember the Malaysian torture chamber at the very beginning of this season? Jack’s just gonna have to trust his friends to get him out of this one. Because Zeyara’s initial shipment has been expedited to America’s southern border.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges