Reacher Recap: And Russo It Goes

The greatest trick Reacher ever pulled was convincing the world that a bunch of homicidal killjoys would be fun to spend time with, at least in 39-to-44-minute increments. Episode six of Reacher’s second season, “New York’s Finest,” opens with the four reunited Special Investigators on a playground near enough to the scene of the warehouse explosion that ended the prior episode that we can see the emergency vehicle lights reflected in the smoke cloud just behind them. They’re debating what sort of explosives whoever set the trap used — although that whoever, in the estimation of all except their leader, Don’t-Call-Him-Major-or-Mister Reacher, seems to be their former comrade Tony Swan. “I’m not going to assume Swan’s dirty,” Reacher reiterates.

Detective Russo swings by to tell them that examination of the bombed building indicates a skilled saboteur set the charges — someone with military training, perhaps? Also, the cops have found the car of one Marlo Burns, the New Age Technologies executive who sent the Special Investigators into an ambush in Episode Three and fled her home in Episode Four, abandoned somewhere “north of Manhattan.” Russo declines to accompany the team northward but warns them not to leave a trail of corpses in their wake. “He’s like that angry, pissed-off detective from that movie,” O’Donnell observes.

“Which one?” Neagley asks.

“All of them,” O’Donnell says. (It was a late night in the writers’ room.)

Cut to our four heroes examining Marlo’s car, which seems to have collected a windshield full of parking tickets already. Reacher divines that Marlo must have stopped for a snack at a nearby convenience store before finding another ride. This could just be Reacher getting hangry, but no, the team instantly spots Marlo and her tween daughter Jane on the convenience store’s surveillance video feed. We don’t even get to see them cajoling or threatening the kid minding the register into sharing the video!

The kid invites Neagley to squeeze in next to him for a better look at the low-res black-and-white screen, but she’s “not the squeeze-in type,” Reacher says. Besides, she only has eyes for the Nintendo Switch Jane is carrying in the surveillance video. Neagley figures she can go back to the Burns house and find Jane’s gamer tag on a smart TV or some other wired device, then use the I.P. address of wherever Jane is playing from to determine her geographical location. Sounds plausible-adjacent to me!

Somewhere in Pennsylvania, Azhari Mahmoud — the arms broker who’s been driving cross-country from Colorado using the I.D. of the plastic surgeon he killed because the doc had the bad luck to resemble Mahmoud — has attracted the notice of a State Trooper because of the apparently illegal air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror of his rental car. This sounds like the sort of law that’s intended to be enforced selectively and invites abuse, so it’s ironic that the trooper is a Black woman and the man she’s citing for this misdemeanor is also a person of color.

Mahmoud tries to charm his way out of the ticket, but she has to run his license anyway, sealing her fate. He’s already stabbed her by the time her dispatcher radios her back with the news that the license she’s just checked on belonged to a homicide victim and that backup is en route. It’s another inert scene intended to burnish Mahmoud’s shitheel cred and another airball. There’s just nothing Ferdinand Son-of-Ben Kingsley can do to make Madmoud a memorably loathsome villain, no matter how many plastic surgeons or policewomen we see him shiv.

The team makes themselves at home at Casa Marlo while Neagley prepares to game the night away until Jane pops up online. “I can’t believe people actually play this shit,” gripes Reacher, who presumably spends his long bus-travel hours reading paperbacks or staring out the window at this great nation of ours. Neagley tells Reacher he might go for a first-person shooter. “I am a first-person shooter,” he retorts. But then, so are all his friends.

He announces he’s going to get some shuteye while Neagley works the joy-cons, but no sooner has he helped himself to Marlo’s bed than Dixon lets herself into that same borrowed boudoir to help herself to Reacher’s … well, she’s tense, she says, after getting shot at so often and so recently. Doffing her blouse and climbing atop him — though scaling might be a more apt verb — she half-apologizes for interfering with his oft-stated Sleep When You Can rule.

“It’s not that firm a rule,” Reacher says. She’ll be the judge of that, amirite?

This is going to be a big episode for Domenick Lombardozzi’s Detective Russo. He visits his boss, Lt. Marsh, at home to tell his old mentor that he knows Marsh set up the Special Investigators to be killed by the biker gang in Boston (Toronto, obviously) in Episode Four. Russo didn’t sell them out, and Marsh was the only other person who knew where they’d be. Marsh denies it until Russo invokes 9/11, telling his boss that he’s “sullying the greatest police force in the world” by aiding and abetting terrorism. Marsh finally admits guilt, telling Russo he’s been assured that none of the missiles changing hands while he looks the other way will be used in the United States. Marsh took a payoff to keep New Age security chief Langston briefed on the Special Investigators’ progress because he feared that standing on principle would get him killed — just like Russo’s old man was murdered after refusing a bribe. Lombardozzi and Al Sapienza, the Sopranos and cop-show veteran who plays Marsh, do a more-than-competent job of chewing their way through this cliche pile-up.

Back at the Burns residence, Reacher and Dixon skip the cigarettes and instead enjoy a post-coital flashback to their Army days. The flashback opens with a close-up of Dixon and returns to the present with a shot of Reacher, making it unclear exactly whose recollection we’ve been watching. This has been a problem with the flashbacks all season: We never quite know which member of the team is doing the remembering. With all of them save for Reacher now convinced Swan has betrayed them, there’s an opening here for some Rashomon-style narrative trickery, with Swan behaving differently in the memories of different people.

Showrunner Nick Santora has not availed himself of this opportunity. Reacher is not interested in the subjective nature of truth and the soft lie of memory (though it wouldn’t surprise me if Reacher had read Marcel Proust on one of those long bus trips). Reacher is about the fantasy of an invulnerable, incorruptible, and fearless Size XXXL man breaking the hands or splitting open the skulls of the bastards. Reacher is about the freedom of owning nothing but a toothbrush and being answerable to nothing of one’s own Size XXXL conscience.

Anyway, that flashback shows us another authority figure letting Reacher down, just like Russo’s mentor, Lt. Marsh, has disappointed him. He and Dixon are doing some sexually frustrated paperwork when their C.O., Lt. Col. Hortense Fields, drops by the office to order them to terminate Operation Kite Runner, the big heroin bust the team has been working on for two years. The discovery of a drug trafficking conspiracy within this command would embarrass its senior officer, a colonel who’s about to be awarded a long-sought promotion. So rather than stain his record with a public scandal, the colonel has ordered the Special Investigators to drop the case. None of the soldiers found to be involved thus far will face anything more than minor penalties. All will receive honorable discharges. The big fish the Special Investigators were chasing will be allowed to continue pushing smack using all the tools and resources of the United States Army. Reacher swallows this shit pill, but we can see it won’t be long at all until he spits it right back up in the colonel’s face.

Back in the present, Reacher confesses to Dixon that he’s been thinking about Operation Kite Runner. For a moment, it seems as though Dixon interprets Reacher’s uncharacteristic indulgence in reflection as him asking if they’ll keep sleeping together after their current entanglement is over. Then she remembers who she’s talking to and shifts to the kind of pillow talk Reacher needs: She’s grateful for all he’s done for her over the years and in the extremely recent past. So when the time comes, she’ll do the dirty deed of killing Swan. There, there, silly boy. Go back to sleep.

Neagley burst in with the news that she’s tracked Marlo and Jane to a residence less than an hour away. Curtis, the friend who has taken Marlo in the belief she’s fleeing an abusive boyfriend, refuses to call Marlo out to the garage, where the team has cornered him at gunpoint until Reacher threatens to shoot him in the leg. “Shut up, Curtis!” is the scene’s comic refrain. Curtis is a funny name! This particular Curtis appears to be a prosperous gay man who is neither a terrorist nor an arms dealer nor a crooked cop, so I wished the team could’ve found a less menacing way to approach him. Still, they were operating on the assumption — despite Reacher’s oft-repeated warnings against assumptions — that Marlo, whom Curtis was sheltering, was part of the conspiracy that’s been bumping off their former comrades in the 110th.

Marlo manages to convince them otherwise, probably because she insists Swan was a good man, as Reacher still wants to believe he was, covertly working with her to try to puzzle out why so many of the “Little Wing” guidance chips New Age was manufacturing were being rejected as faulty. (A: So they could be written off and sold under the table to Mahmoud for a cool $65 million.) Marlo says she only accepted the bag of cash Dixon and Neagley found at her house to convince Langston, New Age’s bent security chief, that she wouldn’t make waves, lest he harm her and her daughter. At the team’s behest, she calls Langston and arranges to meet him in an ambush-friendly locale selected by Team Reacher. But first, they have to deposit Jane into Russo’s care to keep the kid out of danger.

The site Marlo has given Langston as their meeting place is revealed as a parking lot for buses and semi-trucks, exactly the sort of remote but obstacle-strewn locale where a Reagan-era shoot-’em-up, or a 2020s streaming throwback to films of that golden era, would end. Dixon and O’Donnell have taken up a position on the upper deck of an open-top tourist bus to kill Langston and his lackeys after Reacher and Neagley box them in.

Why Langton doesn’t recognize this as a setup from the jump is a reasonable question, but he figures it out soon enough when Russo calls Reacher with the inconvenient news that he and Jane are in a high-speed chase, fleeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons. Reacher orders all three of his comrades to go help Russo, leaving him alone to deal with Langston and his three yegs. There follows a funny bit of Batman-style ninja craft wherein Reacher — whom the show has reminded us of only a few scenes earlier, in the words of poor Curtis, is “eight feet tall and 300 lbs.” — somehow conceals his Chevy Suburban-esque bulk inside a passenger bus so effectively that he’s able to surprise, disarm, and kill two gunmen who venture inside looking for him. He drags the third beneath a nearby truck like he’s Pennywise the Clown in Dickies. Langston, however, eludes him when he’s rescued by several other gunmen in a helicopter — one that Reacher, who again is an extremely large target, emerges from cover to fire upon ineffectually with his pistol. This guy is a genius, except for when he’s an absolute fucking idiot.

Meanwhile, Neagley is somehow following Russo’s extremely vague directions to intercept him with Dixon, O’Donnell, and Marlo in the car with her. She arrives at Russo’s never-stated location in time to run down the last gunman. The kid is safe. But the same can’t be said for Russo, who took two rounds to the chest while heroically covering Jane’s escape. The honest cop holds up his bloody hand, silently imploring Neagley — whose most oft-reiterated character trait, even more, fundamental than her love of video games and sugary breakfast cereals, is an aversion to physical contact — to take it. In this silly series’ most stirring moment to date, Neagley hesitates for a beat before seizing the dying man’s hand and squeezing it hard.

Look, I’m not some 300 lb. sociopath who only lowercase-r reaches out to his friends when he needs their help killing some people and who owns nothing but a passport and a toothbrush. This scene got to me. I salute you, Maria Sten and Dominick Lombardozzi.

• Taking Jane into protective custody, Russo takes a sweet but oddly specific swing at making it fun for the kid, promising her they’ll “get a chicken cutlet sandweeeech and watch an Adam Sandler movie or something.”