Mary Poppins knew her audience — children — well enough to serve them a spoonful of sugar with their medicine. Reacher knows its audience — dads — well enough to serve them exposition with a fistful of violence.
The second episode of Reacher’s sophomore season, “Atlantic City,†picks up right where the first ended, with Reacher and allies Neagly and O’Donnell learning that a second member of their old unit, Tony Swan, has likely been murdered. Outside the probably-dead man’s house, Reacher again spots the black SUV he’d suspected was tailing them and decides to “introduce myself,†sauntering over in plain view of the man behind the wheel. “What’s he think he’s gonna do?†the guy asks himself.
Kick your car’s front bumper so hard its airbag goes off is the delightful answer. Reacher has knocked the man unconscious before he can get to the weapon he was, uh, reaching for, except that the weapon turns out to be an NYPD detective’s shield. Neagly recognizes the name on the bloodied cop’s ID from the police report she showed Reacher last episode and realizes Reacher has just coldcocked the lawman investigating Sanchez’s death. Oops.
An Assaulting an Officer charge is not going to help Reacher & Co. find out who’s been dropping their former colleagues out of helicopters, so the newly incorporated firm of Reacher, Neagly, and O’Donnell, LLC decide to change cars and hightail it to Atlantic City to try to find the other members of the 110th they’d learned were doing security work for the casinos. The two guys they’re looking up now are Sanchez and Orozoco, I think? Already the names are becoming too thick on the ground to parse — a problem that only grows more acute with the arrival of another of the old gang, Karla Dixon. Dixon is played by Serinda Swan, whose real-life last name is the same as that of one of the fictional characters in the 110th. Come on, show. This is just needlessly complicated.
Dixon is just back from an undercover gig that kept her “stuck in Texas so long I started to think I actually liked cowboy boots and high-school football.†It’s a bit rich for her to be talking smack about the Lone Star State when it and her old unit are in lockstep on the question of being Messed With. Because no one has said this in several minutes, she responds to the news of Franz’s and Swan’s deaths by intoning, “You do not mess with the special investigators.â€
Reacher is a show so in love with its catchphrases that it pauses here to give one of them its own origin story, as though it were Indiana Jones’s hat or Han Solo’s last name. In another flashback to their Army days, Dixon points out something fishy she’d noticed about missing aviation fuel. “It’s a minor detail,†she tells her boss, “but in an investigation, details matter.â€
“I like that. I’m gonna use it,†Reacher says, underlining what need not be underlined.
“What’s mine is yours,†Dixon coos, making clear that the purpose of this scene is to establish that Dixon has been trying to fuck her boss since back when it would likely have gotten one or both of them demoted. Reacher considers her offer but demurs.
Back in the present day, on the drive to Atlantic City, Reacher asks Dixon if the names and numbers he and Neagly pulled from the flash drive in Franz’s post office box last episode are telling a story. “Yes, and it’s a David Lynch film,†she says. “Incomprehensible!†So you know she isn’t talking about 1999’s The Straight Story, though Reacher would surely respond to this gentle tale of an elderly World War II vet with failing eyesight traversing the Midwest on a riding lawn mower to make amends with his dying brother. She probably means Inland Empire. Or Eraserhead.
The team finds Sanchez’s Atlantic City office trashed, but a framed photograph of their old buddy with a woman at a place called the Lucky Lounge leads them to that bar. As soon as we see the place is empty but for a bartender and two (!) bouncers, we know we’re about to be rewarded for all this investigatory shoe leather with another fight scene. Reacher and Neagly ask the bartender if he knows the woman in the photo; he invites them to speak with her in the back room, where she’s doing the books. When the woman they’ve asked after comes in a moment later, the bartender warns her off.
One of the most delightful features of the Reacher universe is the bizarre preponderance of doughy guys who eyeball the ambulatory mountain range that is Alan Ritchson and think to themselves, I could take that guy. This is one part of the character that actually did make more sense when he was embodied by two-fisted Tommy Cruise. Anyway, I laughed out loud when the Lucky Lounge bouncer who tells Reacher to leave his friends alone before taking a sloppy swing at him was rewarded with a slap — not a punch but a slap, like he’d just insulted Jada Pinkett Smith at the Oscars — from Reacher, as though hitting the poor fool with a closed fist might end his life.Â
Reacher and Neagly take down the bouncers while Dixon and O’Donnell corner the fleeing waitress, whose name is Malina. It’s apologies and beers on the house when she and her boss realize that despite Reacher’s grim appearance, he and his pals are not leg breakers but Sanchez’s old Army pals from the 110th. Her boyfriend Sanchez talked about them constantly, Malina says. Though shaken, she’s good for one solid clue: She clearly remembers Sanchez getting a phone call and repeating the phrase six-fifty at a hundred K each.
“You remember the last words someone you love said to you,†Malina says.
The team’s next stop is a casino for which Sanchez and Orozco had been doing consulting work. The casino’s security chief, just a little too friendly, speaks warmly of Sanchez and Orozco, whom he says both he and other casinos relied upon for investigatory work. He offers his unwavering assistance — nothing is more suspicious! — and agrees to run the list of names the 110 has from Franz’s flash drive. Understanding implicitly that the special investigators are not to be messed with, he comps them a high-roller suite. Reacher protests, but his former subordinates overrule him. “We’ll have them send you up a park bench to sleep on,†O’Donnell quips.
This season, like the novel from which it’s derived, wants Reacher to reexamine his wandering ways, so we get a lot of scenes of him silently responding to his friends’ prosperity in civilian life. As they all down beers in their five-star suite, Dixon shares that she’s ended her engagement to a decent but boring man, desiring excitement. We already knew Neagly was flourishing, but she tells us why she needs those fat corporate checks: To set up her elderly father in an assisted-living facility.
Dixon asks Reacher where he eats (diners) and where he sleeps (cheap motels, unattended boats, on top of parked trucks). When we cut to a funny time-lapse shot of Reacher loading up his tray at the casino’s all-you-can-eat buffet, I was grateful she didn’t ask him where he uses the bathroom. When O’Donnell suggests that Reacher should get himself a stick and a bindle, the man-mountain replies, “Too much luggage.â€
Later, Reacher finds Dixon cleaning up at the blackjack tables, where a floor manager offers her free tickets to a “Ladies of the ’80s†concert because, he adds confidentially, he knows she’s counting cards. She points out that counting cards in your head is not illegal, but agrees to cash out anyway.
On a moonlit stroll, Dixon tells Reacher she’d like to curtail corruption and wasteful government spending, sounding like a Republican, because “we could fix roads and bridges and schools and help people who need help,†sounding like a Democrat. Then, sounding like she’s had a few drinks, she asks Reacher why he never took her up on any of her advances back in the day. He tells her what he told Neagly when she asked this question: “I was your boss. It wouldn’t have been right.â€
It seems like foreplay, and it is: They spot two goons on their tail and another up ahead, escaping the ambush by leaping a fence into a construction site. For a guy who looks like he wears tires instead of shoes, Ritchson is admirably nimble! As Reacher is already wanted by the NYPD, Dixon suggests they eliminate their pursuers quietly. No guns.
Our third throwdown of this 46-minute hour is the most satisfying, with Reacher taking out one guy by throwing him into a pile of cinder blocks, and another by drowning him in freshly poured concrete. Was he consciously avenging Franz by breaking this man’s leg seconds before killing him? Also, would concrete still be wet enough to drown in in the middle of the night?
Reacher and Dixon bury all three of the fresh corpses they’ve just created in the concrete before adjourning to their suite to dress one another’s wounds, which means they’re definitely, finally going to fuck. Our first glimpse of Ritchson shirtless this season does not disappoint. In the striation-defining light of a high roller’s Atlantic City bathroom, the man-mountain is glowing. “You’re not my boss anymore,†Dixon says, pulling herself into his ample, diamond-hard bosom.
The next morning, that friendly casino security chief stops by their suite to report that his inquiries to his counterparts at other casino have turned up nothing to indicate what Sanchez and Orozco were working on when they disappeared. He also drops the bombshell that their bodies have been found with injuries similar to Franz’s — they, too, were tortured, tossed, and left to fertilize the earth.
Reacher doesn’t like this at all. “We’re gonna need more guns,†he says, walking out of frame to end the episode.
In an Investigation, Details Matter
• There’s an Easter Egg for the Reacher real ones when O’Donnell suggests James Barr, a sniper the 110th once investigated, could be responsible for killing their friends. Reacher ain’t buying. “I ran into him in Indiana last year. He owes me now,†Reacher says. That’s a shout-out to One Shot, the novel from which Christopher McQuarrie adapted his 2012 film, Jack Reacher, consummating the creative marriage of McQ and Tom Cruise. Indianapolis is the setting for the book, but the film was set and shot in Pittsburgh. Even Reacherwold is doing multiverses now!
• On their short road trip from New York to Atlantic City, Reacher gripes about the music Neagly has chosen, asking “There’s no blues station?†Informed that the song — the Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom,†inescapable during the Clinton administration — was one of Franz’s favorites, he says, “Leave it.â€
• Reacher’s total lack of possessions are a part of his fantasy appeal to men who feel burdened by their mortgage payments and minivans and such, but also the source of some of the show’s best gags. When Dixon asks Reacher if he’s unpacked, he pulls a toothbrush from his pocket and sets it on the hotel sink before answering, “Yep.â€