One thing I need never see again is a drone shot of a speeding car like the one that opens this episode. It looks like a car commercial, and not in a sexy-cinematic Michael Mann or even dumb-cinematic Michael Bay sort of way. It looks cheap. If this is how the now-inevitable Amazon streaming extrapolations of the venerable 007 film franchise will feel, can we just not, please?
As he drives, Duke asks Reacher what he and Angel discussed at the warehouse. Reacher, his right hand still stained with Angel’s blood, plays dumb. Angel’s clumsy ambition is the reason he’s dead and Reacher is alive: He refused to share his suspicions with Duke, insisting on speaking with Beck directly.
Back at stately Beck Manor, Reacher finally gets to tuck into some of the Irish cook’s delicious stew and parler a little français with the French maid, who reveals that Beck has a mechanic on staff, too. Reacher can’t figure out why. Duke summons Reacher to speak with Beck again. Reacher’s instinct is to arm himself for this meeting, but the kitchen knives are out of reach. In Beck’s office — the one decorated with firearms, though Reacher and his DEA allies are still scratching their heads over what sort of contraband Beck ships inside his rolled-up rugs — Beck says Angel ran the plate of the pickup truck he and Reacher eyeballed last episode. It belonged to a gang Beck knows, though none of its members match Reacher’s description of Richard’s kidnapper. (We know that was scrawny DEA agent Eliot.) Beck also presses Reacher on his description of what type of firearm the kidnapper used. Reacher sticks to his story and warns his new boss that his rivals are upping their game, urging retaliation before they can regroup and attack again.
By phone, Neagley gives Reacher the dossiers he requested: Paulie was dishonorably discharged for “punching his captain’s eye clean out of its socket,” then pulled another guy’s finger off in prison. Angel served eight years for sexual assault, retroactively assuaging any guilt we might’ve felt for enjoying it when Reacher fatally head-desk’d him. Duke was a dirty cop turned full-time crook. Again, Reacher refuses Neagley’s help. That she intuits Reacher is up against Francis Xavier Quinn without Reacher even saying his — their? — old adversary’s name is just more proof Reacher should let his old squadmate help him out.
Recher’s next call is to Duffy. He asks her to leave a car and a set of clothes for him a mile down the road from Beck’s place at midnight, telling her plans to return to Bizarre Bazaar to clean up the Angel-shaped mess he left behind.
One of the literary Reacher’s canonical superpowers is an internal clock that allows him to sleep for exactly as long as he chooses. Useful! That’s why I was puzzled by the time-lapse shot of the clock that shows us Reacher hitting the hay a little before 9 p.m., then waking for what must be an extremely cold and unpleasant night swim in choppy waters … at 4 a.m. Did he oversleep?
No, because when he meets up with Duffy — who drinks in the sight of a wet, shirtless Reacher like she’s been in the desert for 40 days before muttering “fuck me” — her phone shows the time as 12:22. I can’t remember who’s always saying this, but In an Investigation, Details Matter. Anyway, Reacher asked for a car, not a companion. But Duffy insists that if he’s going to Bizaaah Bizaaaaah, she’s going too. Her girl Teresa could be there.
As they hop the fence, we see that the dry T-shirt Duffy has given Reacher reads “I [heart] Maine,” but with a lobster in place of the heart. Adorable. They dispose of Angel’s body, but not before Duffy uses the dead man’s thumbprint to unlock his laptop and change the password, and Reacher helps himself to Angel’s sidearm. But their search of the warehouse comes up empty. Again, Reacher gets to show how much smarter he is than Duffy by pointing out that none of the cargo containers Duffy frets Teresa might be locked up in are wired for oxygen. I’m begging the writers of this show to let someone other than Reacher know, like, anything.
Scrubbing the floor with Duffy, Reacher complains, like Lady Macbeth, how hard it is to remove blood stains. “How often do you do this?” Duffy asks. Two more of Beck’s truck-drivin’ men arrive. Reacher and Duffy can’t risk the evidence a firefight would leave, so they kill these goons using elbow grease. No, that’s not quite right: Reacher impales one of them on a crowbar! Presumably, that entrails — sorry, entails — more floor scrubbing.
Returning to the Beck compound, he had no trouble locating from choppy water in total darkness; Reacher neither succumbs to hypothermia nor slips on the rocks and cracks his SmartCar-size skull open but reports downstairs for work after what can’t be more than an hour or sleep. Beck is in a state of high dudgeon, because there’s a big shipment due and two of his drivers are AWOL. (Reacher and Duffy just crowbar’d them to death.) Reacher volunteers to take their place, but Beck orders him to escort Richard into town instead. Clearly, he wants the boy away from whatever will be going down at the house. On their way out of the gate, Reacher tries to clip Pauli with his car. Moved by this gesture, Richard tells Reacher who his dad’s boss is: Julius McCabe. We don’t know the name.
Richard visits a vintage-toy store, where he’s ordered a Roy Rogers cap gun just like one his father had as a boy for the old man’s 50th birthday. Richard speculates that Zachary Beck’s love of this toy pistol was where the old man’s obsession with firearms began. And yet neither Reacher nor Duffy has yet figured out what sort of contraband Beck is trafficking, somehow.
Conferring with Duffy via shoe-phone, Reacher complains that all details of Beck’s operation are closely held at the upper levels. He’ll have to kill Duke and take his place. To bait the trap, he tells Duffy to send an email from Angel’s laptop claiming to have the last known location for Richard’s kidnappers. In truth, the address is a DEA safe house near Hartford. Though they don’t yet know what Beck is bringing in, Duffy and Villanueva prepare to stake out the cargo dock. Their hostage, Richard’s bodyguard, threatens to call his congressman. “The only congressman you’ll get to talk to is Teddy Fucking Kennedy,” Duffy tells him. If Reacher were around, he’d probably point out that Ted Kennedy was a senator.
Reacher and Richard’s big day out finally, finally serves up what we’ve been craving: a gratuitous, unmotivated, highly entertaining hand-to-hand fight scene, much better than the crowbah melee at Bizaah Bizaah. I don’t buy that these three college kids would bully Richard and destroy the collectible he just bought for his dad since it’s clear they know Zachary Beck is wealthy and connected enough to return any suffering visited upon his kid tenfold.
But let’s break this down on the more primal, schoolyard level where Reacher, and Reacher, lives: I don’t buy that these three “college kids,” none of whom looks a day under 35, would pick a fight with a guy who looks like Reacher! But after two-and-a-half long episodes without a scene of Reacher bare-handing multiple assailants, I’ll take what I can get. The superb bar fight from the criminally underrated 2012 feature Jack Reacher — the one Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed before being promoted into the Impossible Mission Force — made sense: Five statistically ordinary humans could be forgiven for thinking they could take down one Tom Cruise–size guy. (The ritual exchange of insults that served as foreplay for the movie fight was much funnier than the one we get here, but McQ does have a screenwriting Oscar.)
Three normal-size guys against one Ritchson-size guy is a whole different ball of wax. But each of these puny humans comes at Reacher with the confidence of an un-superpowered Sam “Captain America” Wilson throwing down against the Red Hulk. It’s beautiful to watch Reacher dispatch them, even if this seems like the sort of business that would attract a lot of attention in a small town. So the two of them make tracks outta there, right?
Nope. They stick around for ice cream! Reacher wants to know what flavor Richard has brought him. “Lavender infusion,” the kid answers. The expression on Ritchson’s face as he tosses the cone in the trash should win him an Emmy. He promises the kid that his nomadic, no-bosses, no-entanglements lifestyle is “all it’s cracked up to be,” and says he can help Richard attain a similar state of freedom/sociopathy … if the boy will trust him.
Here at last Richard unburdens himself, telling Reacher that the Becks’ lives are not their own. This McCabe guy took over Zachary Beck’s shipping empire five years earlier, and he now keeps Zachary and Richard under constant surveillance. He also reveals that it was Paulie, acting on McCabe’s orders, who abducted him and cut off his ear.
Come again? This is where the plot unravels like an old sweater. If McCabe/Quinn — since Reacher is pretty sure they’re the same person — is the guy who kidnapped Richard five years ago as a way of keeping Zachary Beck in line, and McCabe/Quinn is the guy who installed Paulie and Duke in Beck’s home to keep tabs on him, then how was Beck allowed to bring Reacher into the fold on his own authority? McCabe/Quinn would recognize Reacher if he ever laid eyes on him, and certainly he would’ve heard about Richard Beck being targeted for another kidnapping in which he had no role. The fact that Reacher’s cover story has held up even this long requires us not so much to suspend our disbelief as to launch it into orbit.
Well, shit. I hereby agree to these terms.
I’ve read Lee Child’s novel Persuader; I know what happens to Agent Eliot in that story. (I’m not telling.) But this season of Reacher is an adaptation of that 22-year-old book, not a verbatim translation. By casting Daniel David Stewart as Eliot and doing everything they can to make him look like he’d lose a fight with a Trapper Keeper, the creative team really is setting us up — in the scene where Richard’s bodyguard intentionally injures himself in an attempt to manipulate his captor — to expect the rookie G-man to meet a bad end.
When Reacher and Richard return to the Beck compound, Zachary tells Reacher about the email he got from “Angel.” They have a location on Richard’s kidnappers, and he wants Reacher and Duke to go kill those bastards right now. Beck will tag along.
Inside the kidnappers’ den that we know is, in fact, an unoccupied DEA safe house, Reacher disarms Duke and asks him where Teresa Daniels is. When Duke tells him McCabe would kill him if he blabbed but a cop like Reacher can’t, Reacher secures his promotion by shooting Duke in the head. Reacher then puts on a good show for Beck, firing dozens of rounds into the floor, walls, and ceiling of the house, rigging the gas stove to explode, and finally clocking himself in the face using the pistol he confiscated from Angel at Bizarre Bazaar.
Running back through the woods to the waiting Beck, he claims to have survived an ambush but says that Duke wasn’t so lucky. Like Iago planting Desdemona’s handkerchief in Othello, he tells Duke he took this handgun off one of the men he killed inside, knowing Beck will recognize the exotic German pistol as Angel’s and conclude the motor-mouthed henchman betrayed him. With Angel and Duke both dead, Reacher has ascended two rungs. He’s Duke’s No. 2 now. With a bullet.
