If, like me, your so-called life has significant late-night gaps, empty hours when you’re too tired, or too lazy, to do anything improving, like reading another history of the Thirty Years War, whose impact still echoes down the corridors of time, or “significant”, like watching a new version of Don Giovanni,1 you might, if you’re not careful, find yourself watching “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” exclusively on Amazon and now in its second season. I know Jeff is supposed to be the enemy of all red-blooded Americans, but Jack Ryan, at least, knows that it’s a jungle out there, and only the strong survive. Take no prisoners, dude! None!
The first season featured (naturally) a ruthless Muslim terrorist who murdered hundreds of French folks by locking them in a cathedral that he then proceeded to fill with nerve gas, and later detonated a bomb near DC that blanketed the area with highly radioactive something or other. One could point out that no terrorists have ever deployed, or attempted to deploy, these “weapons of mass destruction,” but wouldn’t it be awful if they did?
Fortunately, Jack Ryan, a Washington bureaucrat’s wet dream come true, is on the case. Like most of us Beltway folks, Jack is an ex-Marine, Harvard Ph.D. pushing pencils for the CIA as an analyst, who naturally gets recruited for a “field mission” where he displays an astonishing aptitude for kicking ass, and, while at home, an equally impressive ability to seduce the pretty daughters of obnoxious billionaires. Who’s your daddy, honey? Who’s your daddy?
Cheesy in concept but impressive in execution—not quite Bourne Identity polish but close to it—the hours flew by, pretty much, as long as you ignored the fact that none of the terrible things that, the show implied, can only be prevented by both eternal vigilance and ruthless ass-kicking, are in fact at all likely to occur.
Surprisingly—to me, who, I guess, can only be described as an eternal optimist—the second season started off ten times worse—with Jack giving a lecture that can be boiled down to the phrase “The Venezuelans are coming! The Venezuelans are coming!”
Damn straight, Jack! Those bastards south of the border are out to destroy us! Because those damn Russians are sending them missiles with nuclear warheads! Be afraid! Be very afraid! Because if those damn Venies, as I like to call ‘em, ever get their hands on a nuke “We’ll never know it. Because we’ll all be dead!”
Yes, that’s so likely, so likely that the Russian would give Venezuela a nuclear weapon, and that Venezuela would immediately use it to attack the U.S., knowing that the U.S. has, you know, only 4,018 nukes, which I suppose would all be wiped out in the Venezuelan “first strike”, even the ones aboard submarines, allowing Venezuela to, apparently, wipe out the entire U.S. population without suffering retaliation in return. Uh huh.
Jack “expands” on this drool by claiming that, even if the Venies don’t get their hands on a nuke, we’re still toast, because Venezuela’s natural resources make it the richest country on earth! Except that that also isn’t true. I just happened to write a post recently discussing the potential mineral wealth of nations, and Venezuela’s count is impressive, $14 trillion, but it comes in tenth rather than first, well behind number 1 Russia (a “whopping” $75 trillion2) and number 2 USA (a still not bad $45 trillion).
Venezuela’s supposedly unmatchable mineral wealth proves to be an important plot point—the “Russian nuke” schtick mercifully gets pretty much dropped for the rest of the show—but I paid progressively less attention as the show wore on, though production values remained impressive. I watched largely to see whether Venezuela did nuke the U.S., and, as I say, that bit proved to be a bit of a red herring. But, please, Jeff, next time around see if you can’t get a script writer to the left of John Bolton instead of the right.
1. Back in 2006, I wrote what appears in retrospect to be an hysterically florid review of a 2001 Opernhaus Zürich production of Mozart’s greatest for the Bright Lights Film Journal. What can I say? I was young, only 61!
2. I used to work for a woman with a Ph.D. in French literature who for some reason liked to use “whopping” to describe any large sum.
