Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
No amount of action choreography can salvage Reacher from its own declining standards. The fourth season of Amazon’s combat-driven crime thriller concluded with a bang, but it was the kind of bang designed to obscure the whimpering underneath. Spoilers ahead.
Two moments nearly cheered me up this episode. First, when Reacher (Alan Ritchson) crosses paths with Lila and Amisha Hoth, the so-called Karambit Sisters, if he had simply drawn a sidearm and eliminated them on the spot, much like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Second, when Reacher boards a train out of town and spots an elderly homeless woman sitting precisely where Anna Merrick took her own life at the beginning of the season. That suicide was the inciting incident that set the entire plot into motion. At the time, Reacher feared she was carrying a bomb and would detonate on the train.
Now, upon seeing the destitute old woman, Reacher sits beside her, tears off a portion of his Philly Cheesesteak, and offers it to her. My preferred ending? This woman is the suicide bomber, and when he sits down next to her, she detonates—blowing up the train, killing Jack Reacher, and sparing the rest of us further suffering.
Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
Alas, this limping relic of a series will press on, and after this season, I have fully abandoned hope that it will ever return to its former quality. By “glory days,” I mean Season 1, because nothing since has come even remotely close (though Season 3 was passable).
The bulk of this episode consists of one extended action sequence. After Congressman Sampson thwarted the suicide bomber in the previous episode, our heroes sprint off to locate the Hoth sisters. A security guard fires at them for no discernible reason, yet they escape. Remarkably, none of the protagonists die this season, though I had genuinely hoped Jacob might fall in the finale. No such luck.
The heroes are so clever and the villains so incompetent that everyone returns to the old abandoned restaurant—which should logically be a sealed-off crime scene roped off by actual police by now. But details are irrelevant. That is the lesson Season 4 hammers home with monotonous regularity. Season 2 famously intoned “details matter” some fourteen trillion times, yet Season 4 discards every last one. The Hoth sisters and their inexhaustible ranks of henchmen therefore return to the site where they were manufacturing chemical weapons and committing murders, because there is literally nowhere else in Philadelphia for them to go. Or something.
Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
The good guys arrive and a significant fight breaks out. Some of the action is well-executed. Reacher’s skirmish with three hired thugs contains enjoyable beats—leaping down a staircase into a door that snaps a man’s neck, nail-gun dispatches, and a conveniently placed elevator shaft. The persistent problem, however, is that it takes Reacher an inordinate amount of time to defeat these men. Reacher is meant to be an ultra-violent, supremely competent fighter. He should have cut through a dozen adversaries in this fight, not linger against the same three for so long.
Compounding the issue, there is no strategy. One of Season 1’s greatest strengths was the meticulous planning that gave Reacher a tactical edge. He orchestrated ambushes with precision. Here, they simply charge in with guns drawn. Tamara and Jacob engage in a tedious firefight with several henchmen inside the room housing the chemical weapons. At one point someone cautions against shooting the containers since everyone would die, but this neither restrains nor prevents either side from firing. Through some miracle of divine intervention, no one ever discharges a round into the jars or knocks them over. What extraordinary fortune.
Tamara exhausts her ammunition no fewer than eighty-six times during this gunfight. That is her covert gift. She runs out of ammunition repeatedly and still manages to gain the upper hand. Cast her in a Resident Evil film immediately.
Cut Me Deep
Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
After Reacher dispatches the thugs, the Karambit Sisters make their entrance. I relish nothing more than watching my indomitable tough-guy protagonist get thoroughly beaten by two petite women, so this was a exhilarating sequence. They slash him across every surface except the throat—their signature target. Reacher loses an overwhelming percentage of his blood and several critical appendages, yet still manages to hurl Amisha out the window. Rest easy, she is no Hans Gruber. She survives.
At one point, Lila—crazed with bloodlust as Reacher bleeds from an unfathomable number of lacerations—growls, “I don’t know what I like better, bleeping you or killing you!” Reacher stabs her with a syringe filled with the chemical weapon and replies, “I know what I like better.”
But then he never reveals what! It is one of those memorable moments where the viewer must determine the deeper meaning for oneself. Like the scene in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray whispers something to Scarlett Johansson that we never hear. Profoundly deep, indeed. Though not nearly as deep as the karambit strikes crisscrossing Reacher from head to toe as he bleeds out across East Philly.
Like tears in the rain.
Credit: Prime Video
Outside, the nefarious CIA operative appears and is poised to kill Reacher after some obligatory monologue when Amisha resurfaces—very much alive—and eliminates the Bad CIA Guy. Then Amisha turns on Reacher, but BANG—she drops, shot by sharpshooter and overall hero, Jacob, who deserves his own spinoff immediately. It could join the Expanded Reacher Universe alongside Neagley and Details Matter: The Game Show! and The Bachelor: Reacher Edition (perhaps too soon) and a Tamara spinoff in which she simply runs out of ammunition in every scene. Literally every scene, even ones where she has no business carrying a firearm.
In the final reckoning, all the heroes survive except Sampson, who perished in the suicide bomber’s explosion. His deeply suspicious wife—whom I still believe orchestrated the entire operation—escapes unpunished, and Reacher remains none the wiser. He entrusts the thumb drive to Plum (so now it’s a Plum drive, eh? eh?) along with the cat, because he has grown fond of Plum despite previously treating the intrepid blogger as a nuisance. “Get that Pulitzer,” he says, tearing off half a sandwich and pressing it into Plum’s face before flicking a lone crumb past Plum and the thumb drive toward the cat.
Tamara receives a Medal of Actually Good Detective Work, and Reacher offers her a portion of his sandwich along with a pat on the back. Jacob scatters his sister’s ashes while Tamara holds his hand, but he must release her because Reacher produces a moldy Philly Cheesesteak he has been carrying since that first episode. “You earned it, buddy,” Reacher tells him, and Jacob replies, “It’s not about getting revenge on my sister and nephew’s killers—it’s about the friends we made along the way.”
What a heartwarming program. I do hope they maintain this standard of writing into Season 5. Or at the very least, fill it with so much violence, explosions, and gore that audiences fail to notice what an insipid, increasingly ludicrous affront to their intelligence this show has become.
