‘Jack Ryan’ Season 4 Ending Explained: “Proof of Concept”

Jack, hung on a truss like a wet shirt on a wire hanger, his bare feet dangling in a steel tub of water, braces for high voltage as a henchman checks the car battery and clacks the leads on his jumper cables. We’ve arrived at the moment that began this fourth and final season of Jack Ryan, and Zeyara Lemos, only recently revealed as its villain of all villains, stands by like Auric Goldfinger in C-suite finery. She demands to know what Chao revealed about her criminal operation before he was blown up. She’s got a whole plan to keep the global terror pain train rolling, and torturing Jack for information is just damage control. “It’s not really about the bombs,” she tells him, bombs being both the bombs Jack and his team destroyed and the bombs currently en route to bomb the US. “Proof of concept. Your country is vulnerable. It always has been. Someone just had to reveal that to the rest of the world.” Well, alright. But what’s that sudden disturbance in the bowels of her Malaysian prison lair? Who’s here, Zeyara demands to know. And Jack’s eyes shine through the bolts of pain. “A friend.”

It’s Domingo Chavez, of course, who has mounted a solitary rescue mission using improvised weapons and materials. Once Jack was kidnapped from their chopper’s crash zone, he knew Lemos took him alive so she could bleed him for information. So Ding and Mike November – a cool as ice duo that should really continue their adventures in a post-Jack Ryanverse – embarked on a scramble for supply and support, ambling into a Thai fishing village where Ding secures knives and spearguns while Mike enlists a vaguely trustable local to drive him to a nearby air force base. They need a plane for exfil. And Jack Ryan the series orchestrates a nice throwback to Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan in 1994’s Clear and Present Danger when November flashes some CIA credentials to get it. “Put it on the company card.”

Jack’s torture session reveal isn’t the only thing resolved here in the season finale. At a hearing chaired by her frenemy Senator Henshaw, Elizabeth Wright is confirmed as the new CIA director, 11 yays to 5 nays. (Henshaw was a nay, naturally.) Her first order of business? Corral another frenemy, Ade Osoji, who the CIA now knows was running Tuttle and was instrumental in Zeyara’s multinational scheme to smuggle bio bombs into America. But Osoji is a smooth operator. When confronted in her office by Wright and Greer, he denies their proof and immediately demands immunity. It’s a cool scene because on one hand, Elizabeth and James can take another villain off the board, but on the other, Osoji’s slippery diplomatic chicanery illustrates what Jack Ryan has been harping on all season: the weaknesses in America’s systems of government and justice allow elite levels of criminality to apply pressure and win influence.

Even when he’s up against it, Osoji is full of speeches. “Today society is just one big ocean of indifference,” he tells Elizabeth, “controlled by corporate interests that swim freely in autocratic waters. Gone are the days of heroes and villains. If you hope to stop the Zeyaras of this world, you have to learn what justice actually looks like today. Not what you hope it can be.” To a point, this resonates with the new CIA director. Wright acknowledges to Greer that the agency’s tactics must change, and they must access the best minds to change them. But that’s a statement of intent for some future iteration of the Ryanverse. For now, she enlists Washington, DC police to slap the cuffs on Osoji. He might be immune diplomatically. But he’s still going down for ordering Tuttle to murder former director Miller. 

In Malaysia, Lemos’s torture tactics migrated from jumper cables to boiling water and coarse salt applied to the skin of Jack’s back. Yikes! But it wasn’t ever going to break the CIA’s wonderboy, and besides, Chavez moved silently into position and exacted a little frontier justice on Zeyara before helping Jack out of the prison. When they arrive in DC via Mike November Airlines, Greer and Cathy are there to greet them. But the battle isn’t over. A flash drive Chao slipped out of Malaysia with his wife and daughter has revealed the last remaining vestige of Zeyara’s big criminal undertaking. Those bombs? They’re being smuggled into the US inside Toyota trucks loaded onto a tractor trailer vehicle carrier. Jack, somehow in nearly automatic full recovery from being brutally tortured, leaps back into action, and soon he’s in Texas at the US/Mexico border operations center, backed up by Ding, Mike, and Greer. They locate the semi in question, the driver panics, his accomplices open fire, and a full-on gunfight breaks out at the border crossing before they can locate and defuse the bombs. All in a day’s work for Jack Ryan and his friends.

“You’re absolutely right,” Jack tells Senator Henshaw a few days later, during another senate hearing back in DC. “I did not follow protocols. My team and I acted on instinct.” But it’s not like he’s making excuses. And he’s definitely not apologizing. Jack tells the committee his goal was to prove to the American people that the country’s system of government could once again be trusted. And to that end, his instincts were more than enough to go on. As Henshaw crows about a CIA once again gone rogue, Jack reveals his final ace. It’s a letter, signed by Henshaw, authorizing the expedited truck shipment that they just intercepted. This Texas senator was bought and paid for by the Zeyara Lemoses and Ade Osojis of the world, and he’s forced to publicly face the music as Jack departs the hearing in triumph, his friends in tow.

Elizabeth Wright, James Greer, Mike November, and Domingo Chavez are gathered on the Capitol steps, overlooking the National Mall. “Well, now that we’ve burned the place down,” Ding asks, “should we get back to work, professor?” But Jack Ryan just grins. Work? He quit, remember? And besides, it’s time to take a break. But before he strolls off, arm in arm with Cathy Mueller, Jack Ryan pauses to frame his pals against the Capitol backdrop. “Hell of a team photo.” John Krasinski and his CIA wonderboy might be hanging it up. But that doesn’t mean the Ryanverse and the friends he���s made there won’t continue the fight. 

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