The two seasons of Reacher, Amazon’s most-watched series, have been a veritable catalogue of the many ways a person might have their life hastened toward a premature finale. But what is it with amoral New Age Technologies security chief Shane Langton’s penchant for throwing his enemies out of helicopters? As a mode of dispatch, it has all the impracticality and unreliability of a Bond-villain death trap without any of the imagination or glamour.
Reacher’s season finale underscores this problem by daring to title itself “Fly Boy.” As the episode commences, Langston has two of the former 110th Special Investigators — David O’Donnell and Karla Dixon — strapped to gurneys, which is how he prefers to prep victims for helo-dropping. We know this because he has already killed three other former members of the 110th using this method. Reacher, who has surrendered himself to Langston and his minions as part of a desperate plan to free O’Donnell and Dixon, is relatively mobile: Only his hands are restrained. “Surveillance photos don’t do you justice!” Langston growls, drinking in the man-mountain with his naked eye at last.
Reacher’s bound hands don’t stop him from taking down a half-dozen henchmen with head butts, kicks, and, most importantly, his all-American can-do attitude. Before Reacher has finished beating these clowns with both hands tied behind his back, Langston receives word that only one body arrived at the morgue after the last episode’s hospital brawl, and it’s the corpse of Langston’s goon. Which means Reacher lied to Langston when he told him that Neagly had been killed at the hospital, too.
We know that Neagly is just outside the fence, with two New Age security guards’ heads in her crosshairs. Let us extend Neagly the courtesy of believing the two guards she kills with rifle shots — and the one she drops with a pistol shot a moment later — are full partners in the murderous conspiracy to sell New Age’s missile guidance chips to terrorists and not just regular joes earning $19 an hour to watch parking lots overnight while saving for their kids’ tuition.
Langston fires into the air to stop Reacher from whaling on his goons, but Reacher points out that if Langston kills him, he’ll have no way of finding out where Neagly is. This is where the show seems to forget that Calvin Franz, whose murder was the emergency that caused Neagly to summon Reacher for backup in the first place, was subjected to days of torture before he was dropped, including having both his legs broken. That Langston would spare Reacher this treatment, opting instead to try to punch Neagly’s location out of Reacher’s impassive, if increasingly bloodied face, makes no sense.
It makes some sense that Langston would choose to indulge Reacher when the big man asks where Swan is, if only because we at last must know if Swan, in his post-Army life as the No. 2 security man at New Age, intentionally betrayed his old squadmates or not. Reacher was the only member of the Special Investigators who refused to believe Swan would do this, even as the evidence of Swan’s guilt grew convincing enough to persuade everyone else.
Reacher’s faith is validated when Langston pulls what remains of Swan from a desk drawer: It’s a jar with a severed fingertip and a dug-out eyeball floating in formaldehyde. Everything Langton needs to fool the biometric safeguards he himself installed and to forge Swan’s fingerprint/retinal scan “signature” on various incriminating documents long after he’s killed Swan. Ingenious! Also, gross.
Langston next tries to coerce Reacher’s cooperation by shooting O’Donnell in the leg instead and then ordering one of his yegs to dig the bullet out so “there’s nothing for forensics to find.” Yeah, that way, whoever investigates O’Donnell, Dixon, and Reacher’s deaths will infer they fell from a helicopter due to natural causes. The pressure of trying to hold an international arms-dealing conspiracy together is starting to get to Mr. Langston, I think.
Neagly’s backup arrives via parachute in the form of the three nameless private guards that Senator LaVoy promised to lend to Team Reacher in the last episode. “Two SEALS, one Ranger,” as LaVoy identified them. These are the people who escorted Reacher to an unconvincing stand-in for the National Zoo three episodes ago.
Coordinating their efforts with Neagly — who, despite her demonstrated preference for ’90s rock, chooses Jefferson Airplane’s drug anthem “White Rabbit” as the song track to their assault on the building — these three former soldiers go in shooting, prompting Langston to abandon his fellows and flee aboard the helicopter into which Dixon and O’Donnell have already been loaded for dropping. Reacher frees himself from his cuffs using a brad — yes, the little office supply thing that 20th-century civilizations once used to bind pages together in a way that allowed for easier removal than stapling would permit — he secreted into the sole of his boot. (Those bracelets must’ve been a special order, as the first season clearly established that standard police-issue handcuffs are too puny for Reacher’s tree-trunk wrists.) After burnishing his already impressive kill count, he makes for that chopper, leaping up to catch one wheel of the landing gear as it takes off.
Reacher’s budgetary limitations have generally expressed themselves through the palpable Canadianity of a season supposedly taking place in New York; Denver; Washington, D.C.; and other American cities. But the helicopter stunts in this episode (and in the season’s first) are where the penny-pinching becomes impossible to overlook. It doesn’t help that the first screen Jack Reacher, some sub-six-foot Scientologist guy, actually did leap up, seize, and finally climb a rope-net suspended from a helicopter in 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Watching a blotchy digital double of Alan Ritchson cling to a digital helicopter just doesn’t have the same visceral effect.
But cling “he” does, pulling himself aboard and even managing to hold the gurney with Dixon strapped to it with one arm after it rolls out the back of the chopper — while the one henchman Langtston brought along continues to pummel Reacher’s skull. The digitally-animated derring-do continues as Dixon frees herself from the gurney, climbs it and Reacher like a pair of ladders, removes a knife that was embedded in the arm Reacher was using to keep her from plummeting to her death, and uses it to kill the henchman easy-peasy.
Reacher throws Langston out of the chopper, as he’d promised he would, with a B-minus recontextualization of one of his bromides: “In an investigation, assumptions kill!”
Our big bad is dead and gone with 23 minutes left in the season.
Ignoring their many grievous injuries, Reacher, Dixon, and O’Donnell order the helicopter pilot to take them to the site where Langston was due to meet arms dealer Azhari Mahmoud. It’s a farmhouse. Mahmoud arrives, accompanied by the truck driver who ambushed Neagly and Dixon back in episode five. Neagly shoots the driver in the head as soon as the team answers the door, but the four surviving Special Investigators order Mahmoud inside and let him live long enough to begin monologuing about how he’s just a supplier; he doesn’t know or care how the missiles he was there to peddle will be used. Actor Ferdinand Kingsley has failed so completely to make Mahmoud even remotely interesting that it’s a relief when our four homicidal heroes collectively play him permanently offstage, firing squad style.
Our secondary malefactor is dead and gone with 19 minutes left in the season, somehow!
Team Reacher has the helicopter pilot and the New Age engineer Langston had brought along to show Mahmoud how to install the pilfered guidance chips into his cache of shoulder-fired missiles confined to a barn on the grounds. Reacher seems to accept their pleas of innocence, allowing them to leave in that helicopter — so that Neagly, who is really racking up an impressive/sociopathic kill-count this episode, can demonstrate that New Age’s chips really do work. Only after she’s blown up that chopper while her teammates pass around a can of beer do the three ex-soldiers LaVoy sent along show their true colors, helpfully informing us that LaVoy ordered them to kill all the remaining Special Investigators once the New Age goons were dead.
But Reacher was ahead of them the whole time! It’s at this point the Homeland Security agents Reacher and O’Donnell met with (also in episode five) show up with a SWAT team in tow. The two-SEALs-and-one-Ranger surrender immediately instead of trying to escape in another shootout. Everyone is tired, apparently.
That Homeland Security guy tells the foursome that has just murdered four admittedly very bad guys in cold blood in that very place that they’re free to go. When he asks Reacher what became of the $65 million in bearer bonds that were supposed to change hands at that farmhouse, Reacher replies, “What money?” and walks away conspicuously holding a briefcase. It occurred to me I have no idea what $65 million worth of bearer bonds look like. That sum could just be one sheet of paper, for all I know.
But it would not look badass for our bloodied-but-unbowed foursome to walk into a diner in slow motion as a song I can’t pretend I knew was “Keep on Risin’” by the Crutch plays while carrying a single sheet of paper. The briefcase is better. The four agree over their breakfast and over Reacher’s unconvincing protests that Reacher should decide how to disperse the $65 million they’ve just appropriated. By way of accepting this responsibility, Reacher asks Neagly, his usual gravy train, for two bits because “jukeboxes don’t take bearer bonds.” Evidently, there are places where they still take small change. Canada, for one.
Reacher dials up another unfamiliar needle drop, “Beat the Machine” by Quaker City Nighthawks, to cue the montage of the various beneficiaries of his free-spirited vigilante hobo largesse — all people who lost loved ones in this bloody affair — opening their giant boxes of cash: Franz’s widow, Orozco’s girlfriend (seen leaving her bar job in a pricey-looking new convertible), Detective Russo’s brother. We see the employees of an animal shelter looking puzzled as to how to handle an unaccountably large cash influx from an anonymous donor.
That night, at Rockaway Beach (or so claims a sign), Reacher’s acolytes gather to learn what spoils he arranged for each of them. O’Donnell’s children have fat accounts established in their names to pay for private school tuition and college. For Neagly’s ailing father, Reacher has arranged round-the-clock at-home medical care. For Dixon, his recent bedmate, “a Delaware LLC” that will fund whatever business she chooses to pursue: private investigation, forensic accounting, paint-your-own pottery, whatever.
They bring the episode to a close by taking another photo of the Special Investigators, their numbers now much reduced, once again drinking happily around a campfire. They’ve all got beers except for a O’Donnell, who’s taking straight pulls from a fifth of Jim Beam. Give the guy a break; he was shot just a day or two ago.
The two remaining bits of business for the emotionally challenged Reacher are more rewarding. As they say their goodbyes in bed the morning after their final night together, Dixon asks him, “Come home with me. I really want you to meet my parents.” She lets a cruel interval pass before telling him, “I’m fucking with you.” Reacher suggests another tryst before she shares a cab to the airport with O’Donnell. Reacher may have a chest of granite, but it’s not like he’s got a heart of stone.
The season-ender finally finds its footing, needle-drop wise, by choosing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” to underscore its final farewell between Reacher and Neagly, always the closest of his old pals. She teases him for refusing to buy himself anything more with their windfall than a $1,980 Trailways bus pass offering unlimited rides for a year. Neagly, who has grown more emotionally available after killing so very many people, finds the courage to tell Reacher she’s realized she’s no longer comfortable seeing him only once every few years when one of them is in danger. She asks him if she understands that she and the other former Special Investigators are more than merely his team or his friends.
Reacher says nothing. It’s only when a nosy fellow traveler on that Trailways bus asks him what he’s been doing that the big man answers, “Visiting family.”
It seems that even a guy who stands six-foot-five and weighs 250 lean pounds can still grow. Bring on the already-announced season three!