Josh Reviews Reacher Season Four

At the start of Reacher season four, the titular lone hero is riding on a subway in Philadelphia when he spots a woman on the train who checks all the boxes of a potential suicide bomber.  Reacher steps in to intervene, which starts a chain of events that winds up with him being pursued by all manner of vicious individuals, all on the hunt for a thumb drive containing some sort of secret, explosive information.  As the scale of the potential crisis widens into a potential chemical attack somewhere in Philadelphia, the on-the-run Reacher teams up with a disgraced detective (Tamara Green, played by Sydelle Noel), a small-town cop with a personal tie to the case (Jacob Merrick, played by Christopher Marquette), a conspiracy-obsessed writer living off the grid (Kevin Plum, played by Kevin Weisman), and an Indonesian journalist with leukemia who believes a key to her family history is on that drive (Lila Hoth, played by Agnez Mo).

I started reading the Reacher books back when the first season of the show came out.  I’ve read about nine of the books by now, I think, and I’ve enjoyed them all.  They’re formulaic, but I really dig the formula.  I like Lee Child’s writing and the way each novel sets up new challenges for the terse, violent but noble hero Reacher.  They’re fun reads.  Season four of Reacher is based on Mr. Child’s thirteenth Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow.  It’s not my favorite of the Reacher books I’ve read, but it was a fun, exciting read.

The Reacher TV show has been remarkably consistent since it began.  That’s good and bad.  I liked a lot about the show right from the beginning, but I thought it had two main weaknesses.  First was that I thought this eight-episode-per-season show was able to get about six episodes’ worth of story out of Mr. Child’s novel.  That meant they had to stretch things out to get to eight episodes, and time and again I thought the weakest parts of the show were those times they diverged from Mr. Child’s original story structure.  That’s when we got characters acting dumb for plot reasons, or twists that didn’t quite make sense.  Second was Alan Ritchson, who plays Reacher.  He’s an imposing physical presence, and so he for sure has the look that Mr. Child described for Reacher in his books.  But I thought Mr. Ritchson was the weakest actor in the ensemble.  He’s not able to bring any nuance or subtleties to his performance as Reacher.  His Reacher is stiff and dumb.  We don’t get the sense of the keen intellect that Reacher has in the books.  Mr. Ritchson delivers one-liners that land with a deadened weight.  (I hate criticizing Mr. Ritchson.  He seems like a good dude when I listen to him on podcasts, like this fun recent interview on Armchair Expert, and I’ve enjoyed him in other projects like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.  But I just don’t enjoy the way he plays Reacher on this show.  If you watch this season, just look at the very last scene, which is supposed to be an emotional moment on the subway.  But as Mr. Ritchson plays the moment, Reacher seems almost robotic to me; think about the way a truly great actor might have maintained Reacher’s silent demeanor but shown us so much more emotion behind his eyes.)

After watching each season of this show, I keep hoping that they’ll improve.  Because there is so much else that I enjoy about the show!  I liked these novels, as I just wrote above, and it’s fun to see them brought to life on screen.  Each season they’ve done a fine job of casting a strong supporting ensemble of good actors playing interesting characters.  And the show has a lot of fun, bone-crunching action.  This show is close to being a great show!  But after four seasons I have to make peace that this is the show it is.  As a fan of the Reacher books, I do get enjoyment out of watching each season and seeing these stories brought to visual life.  But I have to accept that this is just a sort of dumb action show and stop hoping for more.

As usual, I liked the supporting cast.  I was never a hard-core Alias fan, but I dipped in and out of that show, and I always enjoyed Kevin Weisman as Marshall, so it’s fun to see him again here (playing a similarly nerdy, tech-savvy character).  He brings some much-needed humor and lightness into this show where everyone is usually pretty serious and straight-laced.  Sydelle Noel does great work as Tamara, the down-and-out detective who, against her better instincts, starts helping Reacher.  I very much enjoyed Ms. Noel in this role; she’s immediately likable, and I was rooting for her character right from the start.  I like that Tamara is tough and street-smart, but she quickly shifts into the role of Reacher’s ally, as opposed to spending many episodes complaining about the way this big crazy lug just wades into violence.  I also liked the way Christopher Marquette plays Jacob, who is as close to an “every-man” as we get on this show.  Mr. Maquette brings emotion and innocence to Jacob, but he’s not too much of a bumpkin, and thankfully the writers allow Jacob to be less competent that Reacher or Tamara, but not a total idiot or buffoon.  Agnez Mo is beautiful (matching the way the character is described by Mr. Child in the book), and she brings a sharp intelligence and cunning to the role of Lila that is critical for this character.  The show leans into the “damsel in distress” aspects of this character too much in the early going, but thankfully that changes as we get deeper into the story, and Ms. Mo gets to be very tough and fierce in the back half of the season.  Marc Blucas and Kathleen Robertson are both perfect as Congressman John Sampson and his wife Elspeth.  We’re supposed to be unsure how on-the-level these two are (just like Reacher is unsure about them), and Mr. Blucas and Ms. Robertson play their scenes just right.  It’s fun to see Chris Owens (Jeffrey Spender on The X-Files) pop up as Congressman Sampson’s chief of staff, Nolan Cahill.

For the most part, this is a solid adaptation of the book.  They hit all the major beats of the novel, especially the tense opening (Reacher and the potential suicide bomber on the subway train) and the action-packed ending (Reacher’s violent assault on the villains’ hideout in an abandoned multi-story building).  There are a few aspects of the story that were somewhat surprisingly left un-developed in the novel, that I thought were ripe for further exploration on the show, and I was happy the writers picked up those threads.  For instance, in the book, Tamara’s partner Docherty is not given much to do, but here in the show they gave him more time in the spotlight and turned him into a fun supporting character.  Kevin Corrigan (a great character actor who has popped up in lots of projects, including The Departed, Superbad, Pineapple Express, and American Gangster) does a nice job making Docherty far more memorable than he is in the book.  (He’s still a bit cliche and one-dimensional, but Mr. Corrigan definitely makes him a memorable character, which is an improvement on the book!)  Also, the book strangely doesn’t give much of a clear answer to the mystery of the contents of the thumb drive by the end, which felt to me like a bit of a cop-out.  But here, they are much more specific in pinning that down and weaving that answer into the climax.  I also like that the writers made the ending of this story far larger than it was in the book (as the threat builds to a potential catastrophic chemical attack on civilians).

In the book, Reacher and Tamara have a bit of a romantic flirtation going on.  (Reacher usually has sparks with a female character in each of the books; at least all the ones I’ve read so far.)  I like that in the show they switched that up so that it’s Reacher and Lila who have flirtatious sparks, which then allowed the show to develop a sweet romance between Tamara and Jacob.  That worked very well.  I also liked that they moved up some key revelations about Lila that come at the end of the novel, but mid-season on the show.  That allows them to really explore how that plays out far more fully than in the book.  That was a good choice!

There are also, as usual, changes I didn’t like.  (I’ll try not to be too specific here, but beware some SPOILERS in this paragraph.)  This season once again felt stretched, and there was what I felt was the usual spinning of wheels in the middle.  Our gang seem to all go in and out of custody a LOT, and keep separating and reuniting in a way I found somewhat tiresome.  As I’ve already mentioned, I really rolled my eyes at the way they made Lila such a damsel in distress in the early episodes of the show, even giving her a ridiculous shower scene.  (What the heck is she doing taking a shower in the middle of the day, when so much craziness is going on around her??)  By having Nolan Cahill so publicly involved in a scandal, and having Reacher seen so publicly with Congressman Sampson (both changes from the book) it telegraphed to me the end-of-season developments.  (Because how could Sampson’s Presidential campaign possibly continue after those developments?)  There’s an exposition info-dump at the start of episode seven that I thought was extremely awkward; I wish the show had done a better job at answering more questions as the story unfolded, so the audience could have gotten those answers in a smoother, and clearer, fashion.  The most impactful change from the book is that, in the novel, a key piece of backstory in terms of Congressman Sampson and the mysterious thumb drive involved Osama bin Laden.  That worked for the 2009 novel, but the timeline was all wrong for this 2026 show.  So I can understand why the writers felt they had to make a change.  But substituting in a made-up Indonesian General Putra felt a million times less significant, and less impactful, than using bin Laden.  It took the wind out of the story for me at a critical point, when the bin Laden connection really ramped things up in the novel.

Other thoughts:

• All the previous seasons of Reacher had involved Neagley.  I really missed her this season!  I assume the actress was busy filming the Neagley spin-off show.  But it felt like a huge missed opportunity not to have Neagley appear this season and create that connection with her new show.  In some of the previous seasons I thought she was somewhat awkwardly wedged into the story, but here it seems like Neagley could have been a help to Reacher in identifying some of the mysterious figures chasing him.  (Had Neagley helped provide some of these answers mid-season, that might have also minimized the need for that rough episode seven info-dump I’d mentioned above.)
• I was impressed the show didn’t change the gruesome fate the novel gave to the innocent kid, Ben.  Wow!
• On the other hand, I was saddened — but not surprised — that the show removed the small connection to Israel that was in the novel.  In Lee Child’s book, it’s made clear that the list Reacher was taught of the signs of a potential suicide bomber was created by Israelis.  It’s sad to me that Israel is such a hot-button topic these days that the show wanted to avoid even such a small connection or reference to Israel.  But as a Jew and someone sensitive to the portrayal of Jews and Israel in the media, it’s disappointing to see yet another instance of erasing Jews from these sorts of stories.  (Also in the news recently are rumors that Marvel plans to erase Magneto’s backstory as a Holocaust survivor from the upcoming X-Men films.)  In the context of this story, it makes sense that this list was created by Israelis, and so I miss that detail.  I also think it’s important that American audiences understand that Israel has been dealing with attacks by terrorists on civilians for decades.  This context would help Americans better understand the threats Israel has been battling for decades, and even more so post October 7th.
• One positive change the show made, connected to that suicide bomber list, was bringing that list back at a critical moment in episode seven.  That was a great storytelling choice.
• I wish the show hadn’t so bone-headedly spoiled the development for Russell Plum by titling one of the episodes “Plum Out of Luck”.  Ugh.  Why spoil what should have been a surprise??
• The novel is very specifically set in New York City, with lots of specific references to subway lines and certain streets.  So I’m unsure why the writers shifted the action this season to Philadelphia.  Strangely, the show has done this before: the second season was adapted from the novel Bad Luck and Trouble, which was set in California, but the show moved the setting to New York City, for reasons that I did not understand.  I guess that because season two took place in NYC, they felt this season needed to be set in a different city?
• I liked seeing Reacher actually up against opponents who were a real threat to him in the finale.  Usually on this show, Reacher is clearly the toughest person in the room, but in the (very violent!) finale, I was happy to see Reacher seemingly in real danger.  The show needs more of that.

I enjoyed watching Reacher season four, though the show continues to be not at the level I wish it would be.  I am doing my best to make peace with this!!  I do like the show for what it is.

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