I used to describe the sublime FX series Justified as Walker, Texas Ranger for Smart People. At its worst, Reacher can feel like Walker, Texas Ranger for People Who Think or at Least Hope They’re Getting Justified.
This wheels-spinning episode is the latter. After a warehouse shootout that further depletes Beck and Quinn’s stock of unmemorable henchmen — Reacher deliberately spares the last of them, a bearded-and-ponytailed troll named Harley (Brendan Fletcher), because, he tells Duffy, “it’ll look suspicious” if Reacher is the sole survivor of another gunfight — this chapter tries to raise the stakes by killing off two characters we’ve had little chance to get to know or care about: rookie DEA Agent Eliot, Misreader of Maps and Denier of Cigarettes, and mildly flirtatious French maid Annette, Baker of Pies and Changer of Sheets. Eliot’s gruesome boot-stomp killing has been foreshadowed so heavily that it’s more like five-shadowing. The poor kid was just too dumb for this cruel world, but Duffy still bears full responsibility for his death. She even lies to Eliot’s father about how he died!
The episode also plants a red herring for a handful of scenes by having Reacher hold on to Duffy’s DEA badge after she loses it ducking for cover during that warehouse battle. Upon returning to Manse Beck, Reacher hides the badge in his pillowcase, which seems infinitely riskier than just concealing it on his Land Cruiser-sized person. (We haven’t seen Paulie pat him down in a few episodes — maybe that’s a perk of Reacher’s promotion to Head of Security.) Did Reacher plant the badge there with the expectation Annette would find it since he had already caught her searching his room once before? Certainly the revelation Annette was an ATF spy seems to come out of nowhere. In fact, it’s straight outta Persuader, the Lee Child Reacher novel from which this season has been adapted.
What’s not in the book is the scene wherein Agnes, Zachary Beck’s household cook, tells Reacher the coffee she’s just served him — “Hot as hell, black as pitch!” — is “some posh brand” that’s been processed through a cat’s digestive tract. “It tastes like coffee,” is Reacher’s initial assessment. But a moment later, after he’s swatted down one of the two new toadies at Beck’s kitchen table for making a lewd remark about Annette, his senses seem newly awakened. “A cat’s asshole,” Reacher muses. This is the episode’s highlight.
The biggest problem with Reacher’s now more-than-half-over third season is that it hasn’t figured out how to make its Big Bad, Xavier Quinn, scary. When he coerces lesser crooks into working for him, he gets easily duped clowns like Zachary Beck. When he hires directly, he gets self-sabotaging goofballs like Angel Doll and meatheads like Paulie. Harley is the most frightening and loathsome foe we’ve met, boasting as he and Reacher dispose of one of the victims of the warehouse shootout that he once let a crippled man drown while the guy begged Harley to shoot him. “The Neptune Society” is Harley’s euphemism for waterborne body disposal. It seems too clever for him.
The two new legbreakers introduced in the cat-butt coffee scene are emblematic of Reacher’s villain problem. They’re supposed to be the reinforcements, the heavies, personally recruited by Quinn — a fugitive Army Intelligence Colonel! — and installed at Beck’s place, just like Paulie. But when we meet them they’re sitting around making cracks about the help like a pair of jabronis. Reacher knocks one of them out and suffers no consequences for it. (Annette even thanks him for defending her honor by delivering a slice of pie to his bedroom.) The guy Reacher confronted appears unscathed, too. In the fight scene, it sure looks like Reacher destroys the dude’s knee, but the next time we see this bald baddie, he’s up and walking with no visible difficulty. The long-tail effect of all this is to make Quinn and all his many lackeys seem as toothless a threat as Zachary Beck is.
Richard Beck, Zachary’s impressionable college-age son, has already revealed to Reacher that Cooper — the bodyguard the DEA fake-killed and has been holding captive illegally — was, in fact, less a bodyguard than a minder, charged with keeping tabs on Richard at all times lest Zachary dare disobey Quinn. So why Cooper’s first instinct after stomping poor Elioit’s skull in and escaping is to report to Beck instead of Quinn is a mystery. Also, Reacher assures Duffy — in another one of these tension-deflating, full-volume phone conversations happening while Reacher is meant to be undercover and constantly under threat — Cooper will have to come to the house in person since he doesn’t have his phone and there’s no reasonable possibility, says Reacher, that this guy could remember Beck’s unlisted number if he got his hands on another one. This is, in fact, the most plausible plot point in this shaggy-ass episode.
In Persuader, Duffy manages to pull some strings to have phone service to the Beck compound interrupted long enough for Reacher to prepare an ambush for the returning bodyguards, plural. Here, Duffy triggers a blackout at the Beck residence and the surrounding community by … firing a few rounds from her service weapon into an electrical transformer, like a bored seventh-grader shooting out street lights with a BB gun. Beck doesn’t have motion detectors or cameras on his seaside property, so why would he invest in a generator to keep the lights on in the event of a storm or an unsanctioned DEA undercover operation? It really seems like Beck might find a backup system that prevents his front gate from swinging open when the power is cut to be more useful than the belt-fed machine gun mounted in his guard house, but we’ve established that this man loves firearms and isn’t all that sharp, knifewise. (Anyway, the machine gun is Paulie’s.)
Reacher takes advantage of the blackout to set up an ambush to stop Cooper from reaching the Beck house. He gets away by telling Beck he’s going to check the road for threats. “It’s the only way in or out of here,” the houseguest who got here a few days ago tells the homeowner who’s lived here for years. Always with the Reachersplaining, this guy! Intercepting Villanueva, Reacher tells the DEA man they’re going to turn his car over to create a roadblock. He assures Villanueva that Cooper will almost certainly have enough distance to stop his own car after rounding the corner before it collides with Villanueva’s. “Math is never wrong,” Reacher declares. Why does Villanueva have to remain inside the overturned vehicle for this diversion to work? Shut up, that’s why.
Returning to the blacked-out Beck house after killing Cooper, Reacher is told that a search has uncovered a traitor in their midst. He thinks someone found Duffy’s badge, but no — Annette turns out to have been in possession of a secure government texting device. (This is what Reacher was equipped with in Persuader, instead of a regular-ass, talking-out-loud phone.) Reacher manages to cover his revulsion at Annette’s death, claiming he’s just mad because Paulie killed her before he could interrogate the spy. Paulie is blasé about the murder, claiming it was an accident — the 400-lb. ogre just slapped this petite young woman a little too hard. “Oops,” he says.
This, again, seems like something Paulie would have to answer to Quinn for. The fact that he’s not the least bit worried about it makes Quinn less scary! It also amounts to a double-fridging: Reacher isn’t just avenging U.S. Army SFC Dominique Kohl now. He’s avenging ATF informer Annette, too. How many beautiful and dead young women does one plus-sized vigilante hobo need to activate his campaign of righteous retribution? More than one, evidently.
Giving in to his frustration, Reacher hits Paulie with an uppercut to the body, which Paulie answers with a slap that puts Reacher on all fours, his face contorted like he’s suffering an aneurysm. In the closeup that follows the blow, Ritchson does an admirable job of making it look like Reacher is experiencing a degree of shock, pain, and fear to which he is wholly unaccustomed. For a few seconds, it actually feels like something’s at stake.
Once he can stand again, he’s given the grim chore of carrying Annette’s body out and throwing it into the water. Harley accompanies him, complaining all the while about how he’ll have to figure out how to post an online ad for a new maid — “I’m not Steve Jobs!” We’re still thinking about how little sense it makes that Beck would delegate this task to him, or indeed that Quinn would permit Beck to hire another housekeeper, when Reacher shuts him up with the same punch he gave Paulie. It has more effect on the guy half his size than it did on the guy twice his size.
Richard comes to Reacher’s room to tell him he knows that Reacher disposed of Annette’s corpse. So much for his replacement father figure! He also tells Reacher it’s okay that he’s afraid of Paulie, which Reacher denies. “I just haven’t solved him yet,” he says. Reacher is becoming more Dexter-like as this bloody season wears on.
The fact that Reacher and Duffy learn exactly what illicit business Beck is in from the fact Annette was ATF is another dumb plot point that comes straight from the book. “They’re running guns, not drugs!” is not exactly a Keyser Söze–grade reveal, given that Zachary’s office is essentially a firearms museum and that the guy has evinced an unusual degree of interest in exactly what make and model of heat his rivals are packing. I’m certain there are orthodontists and accountants in this country — by which I mean the one in which Reacher is set, not the one where it’s principally shot — who also decorate their homes with guns. But it still seems like the sort of clue The World’s Smartest Ex-Military Cop might’ve intuited before now.
In that same loud speakerphone (!) conference with Duffy, Reacher now concludes — based on how quickly Paulie murdered Annette — that Duffy’s missing informant, Teresa Daniels, must already be dead. In any case, now that Quinn has summoned Beck and Reacher to face a reprimand and possibly a firing squad, Reacher has resolved to kill Quinn for good this time. Beck asks Reacher if he’s ready to meet the boss.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment for some time now,” Reacher replies, in a line reading that sounds like he’s been drugged. Why is his speech so stilted and formal? Is he a Terminator? A Skrull? A Scientologist? Tune in next week to find out!
In an Investigation, Details Matter
• In one of her calls with Reacher, Duffy is wearing a pair of PJ shorts that match the striped pattern of the sofa she’s sitting on. Interior-decoration-as-camouflage? Are the production-design and costume departments determined to let nothing, not even a scrap of fabric, go to waste?
• Villanueva suffers every kind of discriminatory insult imaginable in this episode. “I’d raahthah nawt be cawstantly held up by your mango-size prostate,” Duffy gripes while waiting for him to finish up another trip to the can. Later, Reacher fat-shames him with a crack about doughnuts. In a scene where Villanueva is driving alone, he’s singing along to “La Bamba,” which feels like the show itself reducing him to an ethnic stereotype. Microaggressions these are not.