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Reacher
The Man Goes Through
Season 2
Episode 8
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video
Reacher, the one-named protagonist of Reacher, just can’t stay out of the lion’s den. After his reluctant ally Detective Gitano “Guy” Russo sacrificed himself to protect a child witness from a trio of button men hired by New Age Technologies’ security director last episode, all Reacher wants to do is pay a house call to Russo’s crooked superior, Lieutenant Marsh.
Before he can do that, he must find a safe place to send that kid, whose name is Jane, and her mother, New Age executive Marlo Burns. Asking his teammates if any of them have ever lived anyplace to which no paper trail can link them, Reacher concludes that the retired firefighter from whom Dixon once rented a room for cash, utilities included, is the best option. Firefighters “have a sense of duty and honor,” Reacher declares. Cops not so much, given that a cabal of sadistic former NYPD officers have been picking off the members of Reacher’s old Army unit, the 110th Special Investigators, to prevent their arms-trafficking conspiracy from being brought to light. Anyway, Reacher decides Marlo and Jane should go hide out with Dixon’s fireman pal up in snowy Buffalo, NY. “It won’t be for very long,” the big man assures them. “We just need to kill a few more people.”
Jane, who’s remarkably chill for a kid who spent the night dodging bullets and watching a man die to keep her alive, asks, “Can we have candy now, or do we have to talk about murder some more?”
I’m afraid we do, Jane, but not with you; you’re dismissed. Reacher can’t stop himself from ruefully observing that the kid took the only Clark bar from the pile of vending machine treats O’Donnell brought to the group. When you live as Spartan a life as this guy, the little indulgences count for more, evidently. Or maybe he needed a sugar high before tackling the dirty job of killing a dirty lawman.
Reacher brings Neagly with him to Marsh’s house, but she waits in the car, asking only that when Reacher confronts the clay-footed cop who set up the virtuous and honorable Det. Russo to be killed, he “make him feel it.” That Reacher does, pinning Marsh to a wall by kicking the man’s desk at him when Marsh — whom Reacher catches literally in the act of stuffing his luggage with big rolls of cash — makes a feeble try for his service pistol. Reacher suggests Marsh reach for the phone instead and turn himself in. (To whom, exactly? The nameless Homeland Security agents we met two episodes ago?) “Prison isn’t a great place for ex-cops, but it’s better than the alternative,” Reacher says. The way Alan Ritchson appears to reevaluate the bullshit quotient of that sentence after he’s spoken it, amending it with a “…barely” is what makes his Reacher such a fun hang despite his sociopathic tendencies.
It also partially compensates for some dodgy plotting in this penultimate episode of the season, wherein various characters suddenly know things there’s no logical reason for them to know because we need to speed things along towards a conclusion. Like, why would Marsh know the names of the three guys that Langston, the evil security chief of New Age Technologies, sent to kill Russo, or that one of them is still alive after Neagly ran him over with her car in the prior episode?
Marsh must know he’s attempting suicide when he makes a second attempt to draw on Reacher. Yes, Marsh was a bent lawman and a conspirator in a plot to supply missiles to terrorists who’d very much like the ability to shoot down Boeing 707s full of American taxpayers. Yes, he set up Russo — his former protege — to be killed, along with ‘tween bystander Jane. Yes, he tried to pull a gun on Reacher, twice, even after the big man offered him the opportunity to turn himself in. It’s still jarring to watch the eponymous hero of the most popular show on Amazon shoot a police officer in the head. Reacher just keeps upping the ante on nasty, and this will only be the third-gnarliest of this episode’s kills.
Watching O’Donnell comfort Jane and Marlo with some gentle parting words as he puts them in a car for Buffalo, Dixon tells O’Donnell — who has become a family man in the years since they served together — that given all he has to lose, she, Reacher, and Neagly would understand if he chose to walk away at this point “with your chin up.”
This cues up our longest flashback yet — three consecutive scenes chronicling the last hours of the 110th Special Investigators. Major Reacher tells his soldiers he’s been ordered to terminate Operation Kite Runner ahead of the big heroin bust they have planned for that night. In another example of this show’s weird expressions of geography, Reacher says the planned buy will happen “on some abandoned military-owned land about five klicks northwest of base.” Abandoned? In an investigation, details matter, Reacher! You say this all the damn time!
Reacher makes clear his intention to arrest the drug-peddling soldiers in defiance of his orders to look the other way. Standing by him will damage and possibly end their careers in the U.S. Army, he warns the 110th, offering them all the chance to walk out with no hard feelings and their chins up. Not one member of the unit takes the proffered lifeboat — they’ve all been changed by life aboard the U.S.S. Reacher, and they’ll go down with the very large ship.
That drug bust becomes a bloodbath, naturally. “This is the military. We don’t need a search warrant,” Major Reacher announces to the suspects. Clumsy writing! Speaking directly to the audience instead of to the characters in the scene! That’s gonna earn you a demerit, soldier.
The buyers show up just as the Special Investigators are taking the heroin-pushing Army personnel into custody, resulting in another John Wick-style mixed-media shootout / hand-to-hand brawl that leaves only one suspect alive and the Special Investigators untouched.
The third scene of the flashback has the Special Investigators celebrating their survival back in their office with Tony Swan performing an acoustic rendition of Heart’s 1975 AOR FM staple “Crazy on You,” “because we sure did go crazy on those motherfuckers!” It makes sense that Lowrey, the old-timer of the unit, knows all the lyrics and is the first to join the singalong, but even Neagly, a ‘90s kid, joins in. They’re all having a nice off-key karaoke session when Lt. Col. Fields barges in, as Reacher warned them he would, to tell them all the 110th has been disbanded and that they can all expect to be punished for disobeying his orders to let the drug deal go through. “Uncle Sam will get his pound of flesh,” he promises. I wondered how many of the Special Investigators had seen or read The Merchant of Venice.
Back in the present, Reacher and Neagly have disguised themselves as nurses to question the button man Marsh told Reacher is alive and hospitalized. Reacher warns the yeg that if he makes a sound, “I’ll rip your trachea out and your last thought will be, ‘Holy shit, he really did it!’”
In a nice detail, Neagly removes the electrodes monitoring the killer’s vital signs and applies them to her own chest, so that whatever torture Reacher devises to extract information from the man will go undetected. And Reacher has something truly horrific in mind: He’s going to inject air bubbles into the man’s catheter until his urethra explodes. “I’m kind of curious to see how you’ll react,” Reacher says. That makes one of us, you elephantine psychopath.
Like the late Lt. Marsh, this guy turns out to know things he should not, like that Azhari Mahmoud, the arms broker buying the Little Wing-equipped missiles that Langston has disappeared from the New Age inventory, will be meeting his contact at 5 a.m., but he doesn’t know where. Convinced that this man has at last revealed all he knows, Reacher admits that blowing the guy’s reproductive system apart would invite questions — but inducing a brain aneurysm would be written off as a natural side effect of the man’s injuries. This is a guy who was about to shoot a 13-year-old girl in the face when Neagly hit him with her car, so we shed no tears when Reacher murders him.
In the hallway, Neagly recognizes another large man in scrubs as a killer sent by Langston to tie up the loose end she and Reacher just snipped off. One tiny element of the killer’s medical-professional cosplay was out of place, you see. This struck me as yet another example of Reacher being set in a world of absolute — not merely moral ones, but practical ones, like people dressing the same way for work every day, that explains a lot of this utterly unhinged shows’s dark appeal in a world as chaotic and random as our own. Do you even need me to tell you that Reacher and Neagly chase this man through the hospital and ultimately kill him with a bone saw? You inferred that, no? Good.
This is, I think, the third time Reacher has contacted Langston using the cell phone of a Langston henchman he has just killed. But this time, Langston isn’t quite as far behind as in the past. He tells Reacher that he used the GPS tracker in the late Det. Russo’s department-issued car to identify the “tug job” (Langton’s phrase) hotel where the team was holed up, and that now he was O’Donnell and Dixon in custody. Once the arms deal has gone through Langston will be $65 million richer and lacking any further motive to commit murder — “more bodies means more bullshit” — so if Reacher surrenders himself, Langton will release him, Dixon, and O’Donnell unhamred once the money has changed hands. Reacher knows this is a lie, but he counters with a clever lie of his own: Neagly was killed in the hospital dust-up, Reacher tells Langston. This ruse, lifted directly from the original 1987 Lethal Weapon, among other classic literary sources, will allow him to use “[his] best soldier” as a hidden asset in whatever plan he cooks up to rescue Dixon and O’Donnell.
It’s bizarre that he immediately jeopardizes this advantage by sitting in a car with Neagly right outside the fence at New Age, but hey, we’ve only got one episode left to wrap this all up. He and Neagly watch a carful of rebellious high schoolers trade some insults with the New Age security guard and then hurl a beer can at the fence, revealing that it’s electrified.
Neagly warns her old C.O. that even with her watching his back, there remains a strong likelihood that if he presents himself to Langston as he’s promised, he’ll be tortured before he’s killed, just like their comrades Franz, Sanchez, and Orozco were. “We live and then we die,” Reacher says stoically. He says everything stoically. “As long as we do both well, there’s nothing much to regret.”
The needle drop that closes the episode as Reacher saunters through the New Age gates is much more suited to Neagly’s taste: It’s “Super Bon Bon,” the lead single from Irresistible Bliss, the second of three studio albums the Clinton-era electro-rock quarter Soul Coughing released before disbanding as a new millennium dawned. Like the 110th Special Investigators, they were here for a good time, not for a long time.
• Surveying the security features of the New Age facility where Dixon and O’Donnell are being held hostage, Neagly notes the lack of cover on the grounds, warning Reacher that the moment he hops the fence, he’ll be “lit up like a Wrigley Field night game.” Did you know that Wrigley Field was for 40 years the only MLB stadium not to have lights installed and that while lights were finally added to the historic ballpark in 1988, its tradition of scheduling most games for daylight hours persists? Reacher knew this, certainly.
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