Time flies. So do people, briefly, when thrown from a helicopter.
While the first season of Reacher, Amazon’s hit adaptation of Lee Child’s adventure novels, quite sensibly adapted/updated 1997’s Killing Floor — the inaugural tome in the 28-volume Reacher — season two skips way up to the 11th book, Bad Luck and Trouble. The novel opens with a harrowing account of a man whom we shall learn is a member of Major Reacher’s former Army unit trying to fight his way free, on broken legs, from his abductors aboard a Bell helicopter. It’s a valiant effort, but gravity is against him. Out the door he goes, 3,000 feet down into the Nevada desert.
While the original adaptation of Reacher would have spared no effort to capture this plunge for real, the Amazon series is, like Reacher himself, on a budget. So the man-tossed-from-chopper cold open is accomplished via some not-terribly-convincing CGI. If Reacher were to question this CGI, he would know instantly that it was lying. This aerial assassination also relocated to the Catskills, which a title card claims is “two hours north of Manhattan.â€Â Reacher’s title cards are more optimistic than Reacher, evidently.
Now we get what we’re here for: Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stanger†playing as we say: Hello, Reacher. Our favorite hypercompetent ex-military vigilante hobo is hitting up a Murfreesboro, Arkansas (20 hours southwest of Manhattan, not that you’d know that from this pithy title card), thrift shop for new-to-him threads! A bored cashier tells him his new wardrobe will set him back $22.
Mere seconds after making his grand re-entrance into our lives after 22 months’ absence, Alan Ritchson’s Reacher reminds why he’s beloved by dads, granddads, stepdads, and dads-in-waiting alike: Even though he’s the guy Sherlock Holmes would be if Holmes had been a drug-free U.S. Army brat, born in the ’80s, who can palm a VW Beetle like it’s a basketball, the mightiest of his superpowers is his super-pedantry. He insists that per the 50-percent-off sign on the wall, his tab should be $11. When the cashier says the sign was supposed to come down weeks ago, Reacher asks why, if that’s so, she didn’t remove it herself. Male seahorses can spawn thousands of offspring at once and they don’t come close to radiating this kind of paternal energy.
Twenty-two dollars is more cheddar than Ramblin’ Jack Reacher ever has on him, so he offers his passport, which he always has on him, as collateral while he visits the ATM across the street. There he finds a woman, visibly shaken and bruised. Surveying their surroundings, he asks her to confirm that she’s been carjacked. The perp is in her minivan, holding her son at gunpoint. “This won’t take long,†Reacher promises. Wrapping an arm the size of a gorilla’s leg inside his just-purchased jacket, Reacher strides up to the minivan, punches the perp through the glass, then slams the perp’s body in the car door like he’s Joe Pesci in Raging Bull.
In a fun detail pulled straight from Child’s novel, he instantly recognizes the unexpected $110 and $1,030 deposits in his account as a distress call from one of his old Army pals — 110 being the 110th and 1,030 being the military police radio code for “officer needs assistance.†(MPs use a different code than civilian cops, I guess, as this glossary of 10-codes says “1030†stands for “unnecessary use of the radio.â€) Because we already met Maria Sten’s Frances Neagly last season, Reacher skips the deductive part of figuring out who sent him a message via his bank account and simply borrows the cashier’s phone to call Neagly. (Reacher will pick up a burner when necessary, but he’d never shackle himself with his own phone.) She tells him their former colleague Calvin Franz, the chopper-diver, has been murdered. She needs him in New York.
Flashback time now: Rock Creek, Virginia, “several years ago.†This is not a real place, making its travel time from Manhattan impossible to determine, but it’s an Army base. This is our introduction to the 110th Special Investigations Unit, Reacher’s handpicked crew of Army cops. It’s also their introduction to one another. “Isn’t there a CBS drama you’re missing?†one of them teases an elder. It’s cheeky, given that this show is basically NCIS with swearing and headshots. Reacher may be a mountain, but no man is an island, and it’s odd to see our solitary man in uniform heading up a team.
Back in the present, Reacher meets Neagly at a Williamsburg greasy spoon. When she says, “It’s been a minute†since their season-one adventure in Margrave, Georgia, Reacher corrects her: It’s been two years, seven months, and 19 days — super-pedantry, but also an indication that more time has passed in Reacher’s world than in ours. He appears stirred, if not shaken, to learn that Franz has become a husband and father since leaving the Army. Neagly has the police report about his death, but she needs Reacher to tell her what it means: Franz was starved and tortured for days before he got tossed from that chopper. As they leave the diner to visit Franz’s wife and child, we see they’re being watched by two different parties.
Franz’s widow makes clear that she’d thought he’d given up dangerous cases since becoming a family man. It’s their son who coos the 110th too-oft-repeated motto: You do not mess with the special investigators.
Nagly tells the boy something we already learned in that flashback to Rock Creek: That his dad earned his place on the team when Reacher saw him make peace between two soldiers who were fighting over a cookie. As endlessly reiterated origin stories go, this is not exactly Thomas and Martha Wayne being gunned down in Crime Alley.
And now, a joke that one needn’t be a licensed Cameronologist to spot. One of the yegs we saw tailing Racher and Neagly phones in a report of their lodgings to his boss, who turns out to be Robert Patrick! His liquid-metal waistline no longer snaps back the way it did back in 1991. Pseudonyms are big in Reacherworld; it’s canonical that Reacher likes to use the New York Yankees, and he’s shown a knack for guessing what sort of fake names the people he’s tracking might use. “Starlin Castro†— Reacher’s pseudonym — â€played for the Yankees,†Patrick explains.
“And who’s Sarah Connor?†the yeg asks.
“I don’t give a shit,†the former T-1000 replies. There was a time when he did.
Finding Franz’s office trashed, Reacher and Neagly figure he must’ve kept a box at the post office across the street, but it’s closed. Later, drinking in Neagly’s hotel room over cards, Reacher teases her about how she’s prospered in civilian life. And Reacher? He “saw a minor-league game in Sioux Falls a while back.†Neagly presses him on his nomadic lifestyle, asking if he and Karla Dixon — another former squad-mate — slept together. Reacher says it would’ve been inappropriate despite their equivalent rank because he “ran the team.â€
And we’re back in the “several years ago†past, with Reacher bringing Neagly — a master sergeant — into an officers’ club and picking a fight with the guy who tries to kick her out. The newly formed 110th Special Investigators kick some ass and celebrate with a drunken campfire sing-along of “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting.†Aren’t MPs supposed to stop brawls at military outposts? Anyway, the Army looks fun!
Franz figures out that Reacher provoked the melee to test how the MPs he’d chosen would function as a team. Trust-falls are for simps! They appear bonded by the experience, posing for a photo after spending their first day working together, getting blitzed, and chanting — all together now — “You! Do! Not! Mess! With the Special Investigators!†(It doesn’t even rhyme.) Suddenly, Franz, face bloodied but legs intact, asks Reacher what he’s going to do about his murder, unmasking this nostalgic recollection as a traumatic nightmare!
Ritchson has done a good job of conveying that the reason for Reacher’s vagabond ways might be something less romantic and more pathological than mere wanderlust, but this is the first hint we’ve had that the man is actually haunted. He’s splashing water on his face in the bathroom, for God’s sake! If a mountain cracks, only an avalanche can result! Or an earthquake? (I’m not a geologist, though I have read several Jack Reacher novels.)
At the post office, Reacher deduces that Franz must’ve asked for a box to the right because he was right-handed — huh? — and asks Neagly to distract the clerk while he tries Franz’s key in various boxes. “I am a hard-core philatelist and have been fully aflutter about this new batch of stamps that were recently issued,†Neagly tells the clerk. Maria Sten deserves an Emmy nomination for this line reading. Franz’s box turns out to contain a cache of flash drives. In the most realistic moment of the series, Neagly announces she needs an adapter because her laptop doesn’t have a USB port.
Reacher, meanwhile, discerns where he can find some drug dealers to rob by asking a priest where the members of the church-outreach program score. He keeps what he came for — a pistol — throws the drugs into a sewer and returns to the church to give that padre a large, freshly confiscated cash contribution to the outreach program.
Returning to their hotel, Reacher and Neagly find their rooms trashed and another member of their old squad, David O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos), waiting. But Neagly got her adapter, introducing a suspenseful sequence where the trio must guess Franz’s password before his flash drive erases itself. The winning entry, to Reacher’s embarrassment, is “Reacher.â€
At LAX, a dapper European gent we’ve seen destroy his passport after clearing customs, then fillet two men from whom he’s purchased a new one, tells a little boy he loves comics “because the good guys always win.†The name he’s using, Andrew McBride, appears on a list decoded from Franz’s flash drive, but the reunited 110th hasn’t puzzled out what that list means yet. Seeking backup, they visit the home of another of their number, Swan. When he doesn’t answer his door, our heroes break in and find Swan’s dog dead of dehydration, which means Swan must be history too. It’s official: The special investigators are being messed with. I thought their position on this matter was clear!