Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's Mary Sue

I recently watched the first two seasons of Jack Ryan.

Sorry, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.”

One of the most obnoxious and useless aspects of critical discourse in the 21st Century is how often female characters are accused of being a “Mary Sue”, which is to say, an idealized character without flaws. A statement that is intended to render the character worthless, without merit, and beneath contempt. The term comes from fan fiction, where a lot of people wrote stories where a character who was essentially them would meet whatever characters. Men did this, too, of course. Moreso than women arguably. But men are of course never accused of this. Or when men do this, it doesn’t render their work as inherently worthless.

I thought of this watching Jack Ryan because it’s hard to think of anyone who wrote a protagonist who was an idealized version of themselves more than Tom Clancy did.

Why am I saying this?

Jack Ryan was an Irish-Catholic from Baltimore. His father was a police officer. He attended Boston College and has a PhD. He was a marine before getting injured. He became a broker and a self-made millionaire before he began working for the CIA

Tom Clancy was an Irish-Catholic from Baltimore. His father was a postal worker. He attended Loyola College and has a bachelor’s degree. He was ineligible to serve in the military. He worked as an insurance agent at his wife’s family’s firm before he began writing about the CIA.

Jack Ryan is a nothing character. By which I mean there’s nothing there. He rows. That’s the closest thing he has to a character trait. Which makes sense because he’s just Clancy if Clancy were smarter, tougher, stronger, richer, and more successful.

As a sidenote, there are plenty of complaints people have made over the years about the conservative and reactionary politics and the racism in the novels (and there’s a lot), but I remember reading a few of the books back in the nineties and was puzzled by how Clancy had Ryan engage in insider trading. And it wasn’t a bad thing. He did it a few times and made a lot of money.

Of course when terrorists try and manipulate the market to make money, that’s bad and offensive and they need to be stopped. The books make that clear. But when patriotic Americans do it, well…

I wasn’t a big fan of the Chris Pine movie that Kenneth Branagh directed, but it managed to tie these biographical details in a way that worked and made sense instead of just being some middle aged man’s wish fulfillment character. And even if I don’t think the movie fully came together, Pine and the script really turned Ryan into a character more fully than any other actor managed to before or since.

In the world of the TV show, in the fashion of these stories, there are no systemic problems. There are just a few bad individuals. One man who runs a private military security firm. One senator. One lawyer in Caracas. One military official. One politician. Kill them or prosecute them and suddenly things are fine.

The first season is well made but…predictable. Boring at times, despite all the action. There’s the mastermind, who unites Sunni and Shia and multiple groups. He was radicalized in the West. His wife wants none of this and escapes with her children.

The show wants to be well-meaning and nuanced. Her journey out of Syria and Turkey is the path that a lot of refugees have taken since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. By showing how people can be radicalized in the West it’s making a point about how we treat Muslims and people of color. Though of course in this show, as in many shows, the terrorists were in Europe and it’s always emphasized that assimilation and integration are near impossibilities in Europe unlike in the United States.

In other words, just as the problems are caused by individuals, the problems are also about…people not in the United States. There are no systemic problems – at least not in the US. The US doesn’t have bad policies that have their roots over decades or even centuries. It’s all the fault of a few bad apples and people from somewhere else.

On the other hand I’m sure there were viewers who hated the show for not being completely xenophobic and going out of their way to degrade Islam and belittle the humanity of Arab characters.

The second season suffers from the problem that a lot of second seasons do. Quality wise, it’s about the same. The show is fairly dumb and unrealistic in a lot of ways. They have some good actors and sometimes let them shine. It fails because it has nothing to add, nothing interesting to say, and a non existent character at the center.

But the show’s biggest problem is one that it shares with a lot of shows, where the first season is a story about entering a new world. Ryan goes from sitting in a cubicle (and played by Krasinski! Ha!) to being dragged to Yemen and France and Turkey and then finally to chasing suspects down a subway tunnel and shooting him. It’s about a character who has a specific skillset and in a certain set of circumstances and he gets pulled into things.

Of course in the manner of a Hollywood movie, this character is good at seventeen different things and is superman. But that idea, that someone sees something in us and nurtures it. Encourages us. We all want that in our lives. I think we want that when we’re young and that does’t change as we get older.

But the first season tells that story, has the hero enter a new world. And what comes next? Now it’s just ordinary and commonplace? He does it again so it feels like a sequel and a hits a lot of the same beats, doing the same thing? I struggle to think of a TV show that’s done a good job of doing this.

In the second season we shift from Yemen and Middle East terrorism to Venezuela. Because why not? Throw him into any crisis and he’ll know what to do. It’s not like people have specific skills and learn languages and that this particular knowledge is valuable. No, this is the age of the consultant, who knows better than anyone. And that’s what Jack Ryan is, ultimately. A consultant. With a gun, yes, but a consultant nonetheless.

Of course now people are continuing writing more Clancy novels. With Clancy’s name much bigger than the title. And now there are “Jack Ryan Jr.” novels. Which just makes me thinks about the old cartoon “James Bond Jr.” The novels are, I’m sure, bad and cliched in different ways than that kids cartoon was. But in the end, I’m guessing that they’re not any better.

But what did I think of the show? Krasinski is fine. There are a lot of supporting actors who have moments, ranging from Naomi Rapace and Michael Kelly, Jordi Moll, to great talents they waste like Abbie Cornish and Marie-Josee Crosee. And why even hire Arnold Vosloo and Allan Hawco and Susan Misner and not give them anything to do?

The star of the show is Wendell Pierce. Who has been an incredible actor for years, even before The Wire and Treme, but here he shines. He takes this material and he turns it into something more. More interesting. More thoughtful. More intelligent. More nuanced. A real complex human being dealing with complicated issues. If the other characters were half as real, this could have been a good show.