Recap / Jack Ryan S 01 E 01 Pilot

Jack Ryan: I can't go to Yemen!
James Greer: Why not?
Jack Ryan: I'm an analyst. I don't interrogate people; I write reports.
James Greer: Well, that's gonna make a doozy. Get on the fucking plane.

In 1983, two Lebanese boys witness their family's deaths in a U.S. carpet bombing.

In the present day, CIA analyst Jack Ryan notices a series of financial transactions and is dragged out of the office and into the Middle East to counter a terrorist threat.

Hanin, the wife of the man Jack is hunting, becomes increasingly concerned about her husband's activities.

Tropes

• Adaptational Job Change:
  • Jack, in this series, left a lucrative Wall Street job to join the CIA because of a strong sense of duty. In the books, Jack pursued a career in academia (teaching history at the US Naval Academy) after becoming independently wealthy on Wall Street and had to be actively recruited by Greer to become a CIA analyst. This version of Jack also spent longer in the Marines, whereas his literary counterpart was injured and given a medical discharge almost as soon as he was commissioned.
  • In the books, James Greer is a career sailor who moved laterally into the CIA. In this series, Jim Greer is a career CIA officer.
  • Cathy was an ophthalmic surgeon in the books, but an infectious disease researcher in this series.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Jack goes behind Greer's back to freeze a bank account suspected to be Suleiman's, after Greer continues to stall on even believing Suleiman exists. Greer then reveals he did agree the account was worth investigating, but he would have preferred to let it keep going a while until they could get eyes on the whole terror network and mop them up in a single swoop. Jack retorts that Suleiman could well be able to launch his attack before they could do that, and it's clear that there's no easy answer to this kind of situation.
• Combat Pragmatist: When Jack gets into a fight with Sulemain and Ali, he holds his own for a while but will obviously lose due to being outnumbered. As his opponents manage to grab a gun, he grabs a grenade off the dead soldier on the floor and pulls the pin, meaning his hand is the only thing keeping it from exploding and killing them all.
• Crash-Into Hello: Variation. Jack and Greer first "meet" when Jack swerves his bike to avoid colliding with someone who opened their door without looking. He loses control and veers into traffic, forcing Greer to brake to avoid him. Neither man is left with a positive impression of the other, and neither are thrilled to find they now work together.
  Greer: [Leans out of car window] Shithead!
  Jack: Asshole.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • When Greer examines Jack's file, it shows that he was a Marine who survived a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, with serious back injuries and presumably quite a bit of trauma.
  • Greer is introduced in a conversation with an old colleague and now superior in the CIA, establishing that he's taken a huge step down in the organisation after some kind of screw-up, and should consider himself lucky to still have a career. It's not clear what he did, but speculation in the office is rife.
  Jack: Anyone know why he got PNG'd back to headquarters?
  Kassar: I heard he went all Colonel Kurtz in the desert, started making S.A.D. dip their bullets in pigs' blood so anyone they killed wouldn't go to Paradise.
  Jack: Jesus.
  Kassar: Shit.
• Establishing Character Moment: Hanin is first seen joyfully playing soccer with her children, until men with guns pull up to the fortress. She instantly sobers and becomes the calm and dutiful wife she's expected to be, serving the men and answering their questions with deferrals to her absent husband. This establishes her as a loving mother at odds with her husband's terrorist activities.
• Forensic Accounting: Jack's job as a CIA analyst has him looking through records of financial transactions and looking for anomalies. The plot of the series is kicked off when Jack discovers a number of suspicious money transfers from France to a bank in Yemen. A large part of the investigation involves tracking the money to its source and determining what the Big Bad is going to use it for.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Greer is reading through Jack's file, sharp-eyed viewers will notice that it's riddled with spelling errors like "God Conduct Medal", "Certificat of Appreciation", and "Riffle Qualification".
• Instantly Proven Wrong: Jack has met Cathy at her father's birthday party, and has just finished telling her how boring his "State Department" job is when a Coastguard helicopter flies overhead and lands on the lawn. Two coastguard guys get out and enter the gathering, shouting for "Dr. Jack Ryan." After the stunned Jack identifies himself, he's hustled into the helicopter and soon finds himself on a plane to Yemen.
• The Man in Front of the Man: Sulemain is Hidden in Plain Sight as the bodyguard of the man who seems to be in charge, so if they're taken prisoner he won't be the one interrogated. Jack decides to interview him anyway, which means he's with him during the rescue, leading him to realise he's Sulemain.
• Mythology Gag: The page quote echoes previous iterations of Jack Ryan when he first makes the jump from analyst to field operative, in particular a scene in The Sum of All Fears when he protests to John Clark that he doesn't go on missions, just writes reports. Clark snaps back, "So write a report about it!"
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Subverted. Joe Mueller is planning on making a large investment in a South Korean company and is worried that an escalation of tensions with North Korea will negatively affect that company. His old employee and friend Jack Ryan works for the State Department, so Joe asks him to give him heads up on any changes in US government policy on North Korea. He even offers to cut Jack in on the deal. Unfortunately for Joe, Jack does not actually work for the State Department, and if he did, he is too ethical to actually divulge such sensitive information.
• Spotting the Thread: Sulemain reacts to a question during the interrogation, leading Jack to realise he knows something.
• Start of Darkness: The episode, and series, opens in Lebanon 1983 when Sulemain and his brother Ali witness the carpet bombing that killed their family.