How does Jack Ryan: Ghost War end? The film doubles as the series finale Prime never gave the show

Jack kills Liam Crown himself in the Dubai server room, and the CIA gets Starling's files before they can be wiped, exposing MI6 deputy chief Andrew Spear as Crown's man on the inside. CIA director Elizabeth Wright dies in a London car bomb. James Greer takes over as director and recommends Jack as his deputy.

What Starling is

A joint CIA–MI6 black-ops unit created after 9/11 by Greer and MI6's Nigel Cooke, operating with essentially no oversight. Cooke (Douglas Hodge) is shot in Dubai in the opening act while handing Jack a cigarette pack, which sets the plot moving.

Crown (Max Beesley) is a burned former operative who has restarted Starling and is reactivating the terrorist cells the unit once dismantled — the goal being to prove that groups like Starling need to exist.

The London misdirect

MI6 and the CIA conclude Starling plans to bomb Tower Bridge, replicating a plot the unit foiled 20 years earlier. Armed police find bomb-making material in an old Starling safe house. Jack works out that it 's a decoy while on the phone with Greer, seconds too late: Crown detonates a car bomb that kills Wright (Betty Gabriel) instead. Greer, injured, chases Crown through the streets and loses him in a shootout.

The Dubai skyscraper

Jack, Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller), and Mike November (Michael Kelly) fight up through a half-built tower to reach Cooke's server, with analyst Patrick Klinghoffer talking them through the upload. Jack pulls the whole Starling network before the drives can be destroyed. Crown shoots Marlow. Greer arrives by helicopter and cuts through Crown's men, but Crown is Jack's kill — no hesitation, which is the point the film has been building toward.

Where everyone lands

• Liam Crown — dead, shot by Jack.
• Andrew Spear — exposed as the Starling mole inside MI6 and dealt with.
• Emma Marlow — shot, survives, recovering. The film also reveals Cooke was her estranged father.
• Elizabeth Wright — killed in the London bombing.
• James Greer — director of the CIA.
• Jack Ryan — deputy director, off Wall Street and back at Langley for good.
• Mike November — back on staff at the CIA rather than freelancing.

Why this reads as the show's real ending

Season 4 left Jack in the field and Greer in the deputy's chair. Ghost War moves both of them into the positions Clancy's novels always had them in — Greer running the agency, Ryan one seat down — and closes out the post-9/11 thread the series raised but never resolved. Krasinski and Wendell Pierce have both talked about continuing, and the film ends with the trio intact, so it functions as a finale and a pilot at once.

For the record: the movie sits at 42% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.8 on IMDb from more than 9,000 votes. Audiences liked it considerably more than reviewers did.