JACK RYAN: Season 1: French Connection

Craft-wise, this episode delivers. The plot tightens, the villain and his family come into sharper focus, and the pace picks up in a way that makes the hour genuinely absorbing. If quality alone decided things, this would be an easy recommendation.

But quality isn't the only measure, and the content here is serious. Ten obscenities, a strong shootout with blood and casualties, an explosion, and a stabbing all land in a single episode — and then there's an explicit, partially depicted sex scene with rear and upper female nudity and upper male nudity. It's a scene the review itself calls unnecessary, one you could skip without losing anything the story needs.

That's the trouble: a well-made episode wrapped around content that doesn't have to be there. When the content is this graphic and this avoidable, the answer is simple — skip this one.

Terror suspect Suleiman sends his brother ahead to Paris while he stays behind in Yemen with his family and his men, quietly plotting an attack. His wife, Hani, grows uneasy — about the soldiers around her children, and about what her husband is really involved in. Back at Langley, analysts Ryan and Greer hack into Suleiman's phone, uncover a cell operating in Paris, and head to France to try to stop it. Meanwhile, Ryan finds himself drawn to Cathy, the daughter of a former boss.

Four stars means this is strong, confident television, and the source review backs that up: the story ramps up speed, and viewers learn more about the villain and his family in ways that deepen the stakes. This is a series that knows how to build tension.

The same review is candid, though, that the episode stumbles in two places — "unnecessary politically correct content" and what it calls "a scandalous scene." The craft is real. So is the cost.

At its core, this episode argues for something biblical: don't compromise your moral standards just because everyone around you has. That conviction runs through Ryan and Greer's work defending innocent lives, and it's worth taking seriously.

The episode also spends real time inside its villain's Muslim household — his wife's growing unease, a brief scene of a priest leaving a church, and multiple Muslim characters practicing their faith. In a separate strand, Greer, revealed here as a Muslim wrestling with doubt, is told by a friend that God is still with him. The source review flags this material, along with the sex scene, as content that didn't need to be in the episode — not because faith itself is the problem, but because the storytelling choices around it feel like added weight rather than necessary ones.

Underneath the spycraft is an old human hunger: for justice that actually protects the innocent, and for integrity that holds even under pressure. Scripture names both. "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

This is a well-crafted, tense hour of television with a genuinely good moral compass running through it — and content graphic enough that we can't recommend it. Our answer stands: skip it. If you're looking for something to watch with the family instead, start here:.