O’Donnell’s self-described “sleazy adjacent†private-dick business has been good to him. The brick single-family home his wife and three rug rats are preparing to leave as “Burial†opens is awfully nice. He and Reacher are drinking Michelob Ultras — the show’s only nod to the kind of dietary restraint its principal cast members look as though they observe in off-camera life — while O’Donnell reminds his first-nameless wife of the rules while the family is in hiding: Don’t talk to your parents or sister, use cash or the prepaid debit card he has given her.
Asheville, North Carolina, is where he’s sending them until he and his comrades have eliminated the threat. “It’s touristy,†he reasons. “You’ll blend in.†When the missus wants a one-to-ten evaluation of how much danger they’re in, O’Donnell puts it at a “four … tops.†You’d expect a show as dad-centric as this one to pay that off with a needle drop of “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)†or one of the seminal Motown quartet’s other hits, but no. Maybe the licensing fee was too damn high for this visibly budget-conscious Amazon Studios production.
Reacher is impressed by Mrs. O’Donnell’s calm resolve. “If someone asked me back in the day where I thought you’d wind up, I’d have predicted a slow death from gonorrhea and a half-dozen girlfriends fighting over an ’04 Miata,†he tells his teammate. The compliment that sounds like an insult is just Reacher’s way. Even as he keeps vulnerability at bay by cracking wise, he’s bobbing in the choppy sea of domestic bliss with an expression somewhere between bewilderment and envy. More evidence that Alan Ritchson didn’t win this plum part only because he has the dimensions of … well, he’s bigger than an ’04 Miata, anyway.
In this episode’s second-most-implausible development, Neagly and Dixon have conned their way into the New Age Technology manufacturing plant near Denver by claiming to be Defense Contract Management Agency officials on a surprise inspection. When a receptionist objects that DCMA paid a site visit only a month ago, Neagly says, “We’re the cold sores of government oversight.†There’s a nice character beat where Neagly, still feeling the effects of having fought off a biker gang while dressed in formalwear at the end of the prior episode, tells Dixon she had never worn heels until the prior night.
Formidable though these two ex-MPs are, they’re too late to intercept the shipment of Little Wing–enhanced shoulder-fired missiles — all 650 of them rolled out of the factory on a semitruck minutes before they arrived.
One thousand six hundred and fifty miles east, Reacher and O’Donnell are wearing suits again in a conference room at a Homeland Security facility in Washington, D.C. Two G-men we haven’t met before are giving our guys — who are, let us recall, a PI specializing in the dirty laundry of politicos and a decorated U.S. Army veteran who has done everything he can to fall off the grid entirety — everything they’ve got on the arms dealer using the various “A.M.†aliases. His real name, as far as they’ve been able to determine, is Azhari Mahmoud. His ideology? “His only god is money,†one of the G-men says.
This is the hardest-to-swallow part of the season thus far. The first season made clear that Reacher and his brother, Joe, who held a high post at Homeland Security, had fallen out of contact for several years prior to Joe’s murder. Sure, he spoke highly of his brother to his colleagues — you know, the brother he has no way of lowercase reaching, even in an emergency — but it really ought to take more than that to convince these two G-men to hand over presumably classified intel regarding an international fugitive they’ve been after for six years to a pair of civilians they just met.
If these two think they’re bending the rules (or committing a felony) in the hope of getting a break in the case, they’re mistaken: When they ask, in turn, for any information the two former special investigators have uncovered, our guys stiff them! The G-men seem not the least bit troubled by this, reassuring Reacher and O’Donnell that they’ll prosecute everyone involved in the conspiracy that got their former squad mates killed. “Unless we kill them all,â€Â Reacher says. The two G-men just shake their heads at how much the big guy resembles their former colleague. Ha ha ha ha, premeditated murder. That’s sooooooo Reacher!
Back in Colorado, Dixon and Neagly find that catching up to a big rig driving cautiously along a winding, mountainous stretch of two-lane blacktop is easy enough, but they’re still too far behind to do anything for the unlucky trucker behind the wheel. He comes upon another truck that appears to have been headed in the opposite direction when it ran into trouble. This, we immediately intuit, is the ambush we saw dapper arms dealer Mahmoud arranging several episodes ago. The truck driver hops out to offer his assistance and is rewarded with a bullet to the face. The shooter plus three accomplices transfer the dead trucker’s payload of missiles to their truck, this one absent the telltale New Age logo on the cab.
As Dixon and Neagly roll up, Neagly recognizes this “road accident†for the trap that it is. The guy who shot the New Age truck driver gets behind the wheel and starts hauling those missiles toward New York, leaving his three accomplices behind to kill those meddling kids Neagly and Dixon.
The two special investigators are outgunned but resourceful. They crawl through the flip-down back seat of their sedan into the trunk, waiting for the shooters to cease fire long enough for the two of them to pop out and shoot the trio of would-be assassins in the head. Would the trunk of a rented Ford adequately shelter two adult humans from machine-gun fire? Shut up!
The gunfight has disabled both the New Age–branded semi truck and their own ride, so Dixon and Neagly flee the scene on foot. Reaching the boy half of the D.C. team by phone, Neagly reports a heartbreaking discovery: The bill of lading for the shipment of missiles she and Dixon were chasing was signed by Tony Swan, formerly of the Army’s 110th Special Investigations Unit. A list of biometric safeguards she reels off makes forgery impossible. This would seem to obviate any remaining doubt that Swan is alive and is one of the bad guys. Absorbing this, Reacher announces he’s taking a walk.
This cues a flashback to a drug bust that went bad because one of the suspects recognized the undercover Swan as the MP to whom he sold his guitar. (Swan tells the guy he’s confused, but the guy insists, “Craigslist, dude!â€) With Swan’s cover blown, the buy turns into a shoot-out wherein Swan swan dives in front of a bullet meant for Reacher.
“Who don’t you mess with?†the big man asks his wounded comrade gratefully. Sure, okay, yes, good: This, at last, is sufficient motivation for one of the special investigators to speak their dumb slogan aloud.
“Teamsters?†Swan replies.
Back in the present, Reacher is still trying to reconcile that the man who saved his life has more recently made several attempts upon it. These are the dark thoughts swimming in his eyes when a pair of black SUVs pulls up and a pair of suit-wearing aides invites him in. Reacher insists on a please before he’ll budge.
He’s brought to the monkey house of D.C.’s National Zoo, a spot Senator Malcolm Lavoy — the empty suit we learned in the last episode had accepted a bribe to help get Little Wing funded — has chosen for a discreet tête-à -tête. After Reacher and his teammates entrapped Lavoy’s legislative director into confessing his involvement in L’affaire Petite Aile, Lavoy read up on Reacher and learned all about the late unpleasantness down in Georgia last saison.
“I want you to do the same thing for the situation we have here,†Lavoy tells him. The Senator (who refers to himself, oddly, as a “U.S. congressmanâ€) claims that while he did sell his vote in favor of funding Little Wing, he was ignorant of a conspiracy to sell the missiles to terrorists. He wants Reacher to smash the operation, ending both the terrorist threat and the evidence of Lavoy’s misdeeds. “I’m not asking for your help,†he tells Reacher. “I’m offering you mine.â€
O’Donnell calls with the news that Franz, the first ex–special investigator to turn up dead, will be buried tomorrow. The team must return to New York for his funeral. (Again, the Amazon of it all means that, in reality, they’ll be trucking from Ontario to Ontario.)
Reunited to pay their respects, the team members run through some exposition. Dixon has discovered that the missiles she and Neagly were chasing had most likely been flown out of Colorado after the truck chase. Neagly suspects they’ll land at a small airstrip in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, or some other state within easy driving distance of New York. The U.S. base in South Korea where the missiles were supposed to go will be receiving crates equal in weight to the missiles; not until a container ship reaches the peninsula will the Army learn it has been robbed. This strikes me as exactly the sort of urgent intel O’Donnell and Reacher promised to share with those two loose-lipped Homeland Security guys, but there’s no discussion of alerting anyone.
O’Donnell points out that Detective Russo, the team’s reluctant ally in the NYPD, is speaking tenderly to Franz’s young son. Russo gives the kid a “Shock Ranger†toy and a prayer card with an illustration of Saint Jerome, telling the boy he can keep his father close by reciting the prayer printed on the card each night.
Reacher interprets this gesture cynically, accusing Russo of trying to cozy up to Franz’s widow. He’s pissed because the team was attacked in Boston after telling Russo they would be there. Russo disarms Reacher, slightly, by revealing that his own father was a cop who was killed for refusing a payoff — and by providing some new insight: He ran the names of the New Age security personnel Reacher gave him. Every one of them, including their boss, Shane Langston, is a former NYPD officer who took early retirement while under investigation for corruption. Russo points out, again, what Reacher’s own team has reluctantly accepted — that all evidence points to Swan being part of the conspiracy.
As a decorated veteran, Franz is getting a 21-gun salute. Two snipers take advantage of these scripted rifle shots to try to kill the special investigators during the ceremony. Russo immediately shelters Franz’s widow and child once the shooting starts, buying him more credibility with Reacher. After Neagly, the unit’s crack shot, kills one of the two snipers, Russo further ingratiates himself by picking up Reacher in his car and helping him chase down the second sharpshooter. The ensuing Murtaugh and Riggs–style bickering about Russo’s insufficiently high-speed approach to a high-speed pursuit is the final phase of the courtship, and when Reacher stomps his foot on top of Russo’s on the accelerator, the marriage is consummated. For a honeymoon, Russo, a mostly law-abiding NYPD guy, grants Reacher’s request that he look the other way while Reacher squeezes information out of the captured sharpshooter. He’s expecting the shooter to say he was hired by Langston, but the yegg gives up the name that Reacher (still!) least wants to hear: Swan.
The shooter has instructions to collect the remaining half of his kill fee, as it were, at “an abandoned building in some shitty neighborhood in Queens.†The special investigators set up a stakeout on the building, promising the killer that if he simply tells them who’s inside and how heavily armed they are once he goes in to collect his money, they’ll cut him loose and even let him keep his ill-gotten gains. Given that the man just opened fire at a funeral, I hope and expect that our righteous and honorable special investigators are lying about this. But we don’t get a chance to find out because as soon as he sets foot inside that Queens, Ontario, warehouse, the place explodes.
In an Investigation, Details Matter
• Driving east from Colorado, Mahmoud squints at the sign for French Lick, which Langston — whom Mahmoud is on the phone with — knows without looking is in Indiana. “Fucking Americans,†Mahmoud sighs. “Fuck your king,†Langston says to himself after hanging up. All the Anglo-U.S. antagonism seems intended to obscure the fundamental Canadian-ness of this enterprise.
• Sure, I’m writing this less than half a mile from the real National Zoo, but Reacher, adapted from an English author’s novels imagining the ultimate American badass, has never been more palpably Canadian than when giving us an establishing shot of what in no way resembles the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, no matter how hard a title card insists that it is.