Josh Reviews Reacher Season Three

The third season of Reacher is based on Persuader, the seventh Reacher novel by Lee Child.  In this story, Reacher winds up agreeing to go undercover in a gun-smuggling business in an effort to help Boston DEA agent Susan Duffy and hopefully rescue her missing agent — who also went undercover, and then vanished without a trace.  But Reacher’s real goal is the death of Xavier Quinn, a very bad dude who killed Reacher’s protege back in his Army days…

Persuader is a great book, and a great choice as the basis for this season.  I enjoyed this third season, and I feel very much the same way as I did about the first two seasons of this show (click here for my review of season one and here for my review of season two): I think the bones of this story are strong, though I think the novel probably gave only six episodes’ worth of story; to get it to eight episodes, they have to stretch the story, and I found most of the deviations from the source material to be bad.  The show looks good and has fun action and an interesting array of characters gathered around Reacher.  Once again, while Reacher actor Alan Ritchson looks the part, I continue to feel that he’s the show’s weakest link.  I wish he was able to bring a little more nuance to the character; he comes off as too stiff for my taste (his one-liners tend to land like dead weights), and sometimes this Reacher feels a little smarmy in a way I didn’t feel from Reacher in the books.  (There’s a strange scene in this season that wasn’t in the novel, in which Reacher, after swimming to sneak away from the bad guys’ big house, just takes his underpants off right in front of Susan Duffy.  That felt like a dick move to me (no pun intended) and sort of encapsulates how I continue to feel this Reacher isn’t quite what I wanted him to be, as a fan of the novels.)

That being said, I enjoyed watching this new season, and at only eight episodes long the story zips along at a compelling pace.  I liked how the cliffhanger ending of each episode propelled me nicely into the next episode.  These eight episodes flew by quickly, and when they were over I was sad to think I’d probably have to wait a year or more for more episodes!

Once again, the show has assembled a strong new ensemble to surround Reacher.  I really enjoyed Sonya Cassidy as Susan Duffy, the tough, smart Boston DEA agent with whom Reacher winds up working on this case.  Does Ms. Cassidy lay on her Bahstahn accent a little thick?  She does, but I loved her energy.  She’s got great charisma; the show was always better whenever she was on-screen.  (The show has done a very good job with each of Reacher’s main female romantic interests in these first three seasons.)  I also really enjoyed Roberto Montesinos as Guillermo Villanueva, Duffy’s loyal fellow DEA agent.  Mr. Montesinos has a fun everyman energy that was an enjoyable contrast to the superhuman Reacher.  I loved seeing Anthony Michael Hall (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, The Dead Zone) as Zachary Beck, the head of the gun-running enterprise.  Mr. Hall was very strong — he was menacing and dangerous, but also well-rounded as a character and someone I was able to have some empathy for, as his story unfolded.  Johnny Berchtold did strong work as Zachary’s son Richard, who is stuck between his criminal father and the far more dangerous Xavier Quinn.  I liked the way Mr. Berchtold was able to portray Richard as something of a wimp and a loser, without becoming too cliche or pathetic.  Richard always felt like a real character to me, and Mr. Berchtold’s performance helped keep Richard as someone I was rooting for.  Brian Tee was OK as Francis Xavier Quinn (now calling himself Julius McCabe); Mr. Tee did nice work as a sneering villain, though the character was rather one-dimensional.  (This has been an issue with all of the big-bad villains on all three seasons of the show so far, in my opinion.)  Olivier Richters was solid as Paulie, the mountainous goon who guards the Beck family compound.  I liked that the show (following the novel) tried to find a true physical challenge for Reacher.  Their eventual fight to the finish at the end of the season was fantastic, a gruesome highlight of the season for me.

I really appreciate how faithful each season of this show has been to the original novels.  This is smart, because the books are great!  As I’d noted above, for the most part I was unhappy whenever the show diverged from the books.  For example, the ridiculous bit of business in which the otherwise super-confident Susan Duffy somehow lost her badge in episode five?  Ugh.  Episode six introduces a complication with the Russian Mob, which felt to me like a rather thin way of stretching out the story.  Though that wasn’t as bad as episode seven, which makes the strange choice of having Reacher travel to California before the finale in episode eight, which for me totally disrupts the tension of Reacher’s being trapped in the Beck house, surrounded by enemies closing in around him, which made for such potent drama in the book (and earlier in the show).  The only good result of that diversion to California was that it involved Neagley (Maria Sten), who I love on the show.  I’ve been happy they wrote Neagley into seasons one and three even though she wasn’t in those books.  Another example of a dumb-to-me complication added into the show to stretch things out was Reacher and co.’s idiotically allowing Richard Beck to discover they’re working together when they all meet up in an alley in episode six.  This just makes them all look stupid.

Some of the deviations they made this season did make sense to me, though.  In the book, Reacher uses a tiny email device to communicate with Duffy while he’s undercover in Beck’s house.  They’ve changed that to a cell phone, which makes sense for 2025 and is also more visually interesting.  (Watching someone type is almost always pretty boring on-screen.)  But the down-side was that this opens up a plot problem, in that wouldn’t Reacher be overheard pretty easily??  Alan Ritchson doesn’t even try to talk softly in those scenes when he’s on the phone; that seemed silly to me.  Also, they show us that Reacher checks his room for bugs before talking on his secret cell-phone, but not the car the bag guys give him; that seems like a mistake!  

I liked the different explanation the show gives us for how Reacher survives the game of Russian roulette that Beck makes him play before accepting him into his employ.  Reacher’s strategy on the show makes sense, although it doesn’t seem like he ever takes a split second to check the gun barrel, which he’d have needed to do for this to work.  The show also gives Reacher a different way to get the better of Paulie in their early encounter.  In the book, Reacher just squeezes Paulie’s hand really hard; having Reacher trick Paulie into punching himself works much better visually and results in a funny moment; this was a good change.

I missed the character of Beck’s wife from the book.  She’s completely absent here; her role was combined with that of Beck’s son, Richard.  The narrative streamlining makes sense to me, but I miss having another female character in this male-heavy story.  (Maybe they wanted to avoid the way the novel depicts Paulie as taking sexual advantage of Beck’s wife?  I’d expected that the TV show would adjust that; they could have done that and kept the character on the show.)

In the books, the flashbacks as to what happened in the past between Xavier and Reacher’s protege Dominique Kohl stretched out throughout the novel.  I was glad that, on the show, they gave us all the flashbacks together in one episode.  I thought that was actually an improvement on the book — and in my opinion it worked much better than the way the flashbacks were handled in season two.  Speaking of season two, though, I thought the show missed an opportunity here to incorporate other members of Reacher’s Army “Special Investigators” team into those flashbacks!  Persuader was written before Bad Luck and Trouble, which was adapted into season two.  So the characters created for that novel didn’t exist when Lee Child wrote Persuader.  But because the show adapted Bad Luck and Trouble first (in season two), and introduced us to Reacher’s great group of Special Investigators, I’d have loved to have seen some of them brought back here in these season three flashbacks.  Oh well.

I liked that the show allows the villainous Quinn/McCabe to meet up with the under-cover Reacher earlier than in the book.  I think it was a smart choice to get the villain involved in the story sooner than happened in the book, but of course it’s crazy that Quinn wouldn’t recognize Reacher’s face or name.  Amnesia is a dumb workaround.  Is this the first season of 24??

I also have to highlight the very badly-staged insert shots of Reacher’s reaching for his gun tucked into the back of his jeans when meeting Xavier/McCabe for the first time (since their encounter in their Army days) at the start of episode six.  McCabe and every goon in the place would have seen that!!!  There are guys standing behind Reacher!!  This was so badly staged it was comical.  Oops!

I continue to enjoy Reacher, even though I do still wish the show was just a little bit better, with a little sharper writing and fewer changes to the novels.  I am excited for the in-the-works Neagley spin-off show, and I hope the main Reacher show continues for many years.  There are still quite a lot of Reacher novels waiting to be adapted…!

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