Former Marine, now CIA "Analyst", Jack Ryan gets tossed into the action after uncovering some dodgy money laundering happening in Yemen.
Back to the real positives and Jack's boss quickly becomes a really likeable character although why they had to drag both his and Jack's backstory out to the final episode where neither's story really played strongly to the central story, I don't know. Likewise, the "Villain" was an awesome character but a little too quiet and lacked being seen anywhere near as important as he should have been to the whole series.
Mousa's wife was clearly not onside with her husband from the word go. We all knew she was going to either leg it or spill the beans on him sooner or later. Although it's obvious why she changed her opinion, we don't really get to truly appreciate why she feels the need to flee so early because all her change of opinion in her head mostly happens before the show starts. Regardless, her and her children's escape is tense on numerous occasions and one of the real positive gripping moments, aside from that in France which happens after the opening episode.
Jack's girlfriend took an awful long time on me to grow as a character, yet from the minute she first shows up in a laboratory talking about infectious diseases, you know that's going to play into things ... which amazingly takes until very late on in the series for either her or Jack to really pick up on. Sure, for them it must have taken a while to put 1+1 together but for us, the audience, who'd seen everything going on for ages, it was just too obvious that her and the whole thing about Ebola was "a thing" before they did.
Yes, Mousa doesn't really do much at all, all series. He gives a few speeches, we see his backstory in some flashbacks, and he gives a good dialogue about how he needs to setup the finale bomb himself to prove himself to his followers, but, then, even that never materializes, so one has to wonder at times exactly what he has done to win so much praise and admiration from his followers because we see so little of it.
What I thought
Having been given a personal recommendation that this show was well worth a watch, I did indeed do my usual litmus test of watching the first episode and forming an opinion of if it was worth continuing with. However, with this show that was a little bit of a red herring.
Wiki describes this as an "action political thriller" series, which whilst one could certainly say it covers all of those three aspects at reasonable frequencies, if anything, the one that defines the series as a whole, is 'thriller' and then even that might be a stretch. Can we just got for "drama"?
The first episode is an absolute marvel of storytelling, with serious action, real emotion, grit, WTF moments, and that general rush you get when you watch something new that hooks you in quickly and leaves you wondering "Who's that?", "What's that got to do with anything?" and "What's going to happen next?" throughout. I really can't praise the opener enough. It was not too far from going beyond "Very Good" in my ratings; given I don't get too excited or worked up about much these days, that shows how good it was.
What follows afterwards though for the next 7 episodes is like a former shadow of the amazing opener. It's as if the series took a shot to the knee and spends the rest of the series dragging its heels and giving us fleeting spits and spots of what was being regularly served to us on a plate in the opener.
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| This is how it feels from episode two onwards ... |
There's a lot to like about this show though, and it's well worth a binge on Amazon Prime as it's only 8 episodes and its inadequacies will get lost the quicker you watch it all. It's hard to explain but after the first episode truly establishes Mousa Bin Suleiman as the main bad guy and the brothers as emotionally charged "villians" it's as if the story attempts to do everything to drag things out in directions that don't serve the main premise, or the absolute terror or villainy of the bad guy. There's some emotionally charged moments in the French Excursion but it manages to fall flat with a shoot out that should be left to cowboy films, much less the end-confrontation between Jack and Mousa which was the premise the story tried to keep setting up throughout (the online chat they had - "The Analyst") yet it turned out to be a distant chase, no dialogue and a limp conclusion via one long range shot. Sure, not all military operations go the way as TV shows do, but this is a TV show, we are being setup for a finale, and, well, not only does it seem to struggle along with any regular momentum but we get no pay off. Even the random closing scene where one of the henchmen is seen off months later, just felt like a "and by the way" moment tagged along to just tie up loose ends. Funnily, loose is a decent word to describe this show, as the potential was there for it to continue as strongly as it did in the opener but aside from a few moments along the way (Mousa's Wife struggling to flee - and most of the scenes in France) it really all totally became a bit of a damp squid when it should have all mattered much more. It didn't help that the big setup to infiltrate Mousa's compound resulted in a lot of sweaty marines shouting and aiming guns, but noone being home: much like this show.
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| These two played off each other brilliantly. |
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| Mousa's wife and children's story is a strong one. |
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| Hey, I know all about Ebola, but I doubt that'll be relevant ... |
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| I'm bad, and I'm going to show it by ... not doing much. |
However, all this aside, as a binge watch show, it's worth the effort, and you will get some satisfaction along the way, although it is a bit of a let down overall after the opening episode.
My Rating
6/10 - Starts amazingly but then sporadically limps along to a flat finale. Worth a bag of popcorn on a rainy day though.
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