Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is joining The Simpsons as a series online sleuths are convinced has predicted the future.
Following U.S.’ military strike that led to the deposition and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a clip from Season 2 of the Prime Video political action thriller, originally released in 2019, has gone viral. It features the eponymous CIA analyst Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) breaking down why Venezuela should be considered “a major threat on the world stage” alongside — and even over — usual suspects such as Russia, China and North Korea.
“The fact is that Venezuela is arguably the single greatest resource of oil and minerals on the planet,” Ryan says in the scene after listing the Latin American country as having the largest oil deposit in the world as well as more gold than all the mines in Africa combined. “So why is this country in the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern history?”
He focuses on the country’s fictional President who “has crippled the national economy by half” and “has raised the poverty rate by almost 400%.”
Ryan also points out that, unlike other countries that have faced economic collapse such as Yemen and Iraq, Venezuela is “within 30-minute range from the US of next-gen nuclear missiles.”
Social media users have praised the six-year-old clip, which you can watch below, for explaining well the current Venezuela situation.
The parallels are not lost on Carlton Cuse, who co-created Jack Ryan with Graham Roland and served as showrunner for the first two seasons.
“What always surprises you as a storyteller is how often real-world events catch up to fiction,” he told Deadlime. “The goal of that season wasn’t prophecy — it was plausibility. When you ground a story in real geopolitical dynamics, reality has a way of making it rhyme.
He spoke about the choice of Venezuela as the subject of the series’ second season, which was conceived more than seven years ago.
“Graham Roland and I weren’t making a statement — we were telling a fictional character-driven thriller rooted in Venezuela’s long-standing strategic relevance,” he said. “Our job was to make the situation feel credible. We approached Venezuela as a country where democratic ideals, economic reality, and geopolitical interests have been in tension for a long time — and where choices are never simple.”
As for potentially looking into the future, “the season came from our desire to tell a fictional story about the forces at play, not from imagining an outcome,” Cuse said.
Speaking of the outcome, there are some similarities between the culmination of Jack Ryan‘s second season and the real-live events of this weekend as the fictional Venezuelan president on the show also gets removed after Ryan and the Venezuela CIA Station Chief fly a helicopter into the Presidential Palace.
But in the series, they confront the corrupt President who is exposed, with the opposition winning the election. The reality involved a military operation by U.S. special forces.
“Any time the United States uses force abroad, it’s a moment that deserves reflection,” Cuse said. “The consequences are born most significantly by people who have very little control over events. I can only hope things move toward stability and peace for the people living there.”
