Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. This episode opens with Reacher face-to-face at last with Xavier Quinn. He’s now going by Julius McCabe, but he’s still the same sick fuck who tortured and killed Reacher’s protégé, Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl, back in 2012, then miraculously survived Reacher’s good-faith effort to murder him.
Surprise! The dude has no idea who Reacher is. Evidently, the amnesia he claimed to suffer after Reacher shot him in the face 13 years ago was legit. Quinn/McCabe — whom I’ll just call Quinn for the remainder of this briefing — even interrupts his own reprimand of Beck for hiring an ATF agent as his housekeeper to praise him for bringing on the tall and equally wide drink of water standing next to him. He doesn’t even notice that Reacher is holding a pistol behind his back.
Quinn makes it clear to Beck and Reacher — and to Duffy and Villanueva, listening in via the super-secure government-issue cell phone Reacher is no longer even bothering to conceal in his shoe — that he’s been keeping Duffy’s informant Teresa Daniel alive because “the client has a thing for redheads.” Quinn deals weapons for profit but dabbles in human trafficking for free. He really is a far more despicable shit heel than his puppet Zachary Beck is. But he still needs Zachary alive to complete this big, pending sale, he says, because “the client” expects to close the deal with Zachary.
Meanwhile, a Russian mobster shows up to collect a debt from Quinn. Quinn evidently knows enough Russian to translate his lender’s reply to his request for more time as “Give a man a fingernail and he’ll take the whole arm.” This guy must be really bad news if Quinn is afraid of him.
Driving Pa Beck back to his mansion, Reacher takes an odd swerve into family counselor mode, telling the gunrunner that his son deserves to know that the reason he’s been made to suffer these last five years is because, welp, his old man is a gunrunner. Sure, Zachary Beck has had his business absorbed into that of a more violent and ruthless arms merchant, but his sins are far worse than just bribing customs officials to avoid import duties on rugs or whatever. He’s put weapons into the hands of killers. It doesn’t make much sense that Beck knows all about the deal Quinn made with the Russian mob when Quinn treats him as a lackey rather than a partner, but the writers need to shovel this exposition into our mouths somehow.
Reacher’s experimentation with human empathy continues as he finds Richard gazing at the sea and intuits the kid must be contemplating suicide. Richard doesn’t even deny it. Reacher suggests they head into town to find some glue to repair the vintage toy pistol Richard bought as a gift for Zachary’s imminent 50th birthday party, which was damaged by a trio of 35-year-old bullies before Reacher beat them in episode three.
Surely there’s a tube of glue somewhere in this massive house, but this is about the outing, not its ostensible purpose. Reacher, we learn, has suggested this so he can rendezvous with Duffy and return her badge. In what one really cannot call a rare breach of discipline, Duffy is so grateful that Reacher didn’t just kill Quinn when he had the chance, which would’ve doomed their chances of rescuing Teresa, that she plants a kiss on him. Her reaction to her own indiscretion — “What the shit!?” — actually made me laugh. Reacher is alarmed when Villanueva shows up, not because the old timer is cockblockin’, but because he fears Richard will recognize Villy as the plainclothes cop that Reacher “killed” in the first episode. Sure enough, when Richard finds his way into that alley mere seconds later, the jig is like a beloved 2009 Pixar film: up.
Reacher waits until he’s alone in the car with Richard to come clean: He’s infiltrated Zachary’s home and business to rescue Teresa and kill Quinn. The kid points out that the best case here is that his dad goes to prison. “He’s already in prison,” Reacher says. “So are you.”
Zachary Beck is doing some serious hand-biting in this episode, expressing his envy for the way Richard looks up to Reacher. When Reacher points out that he’s protecting both Becks, Zachary tells him, “People with that job description are prone to catching bullets. I wonder when yours is coming?” Zachary’s anger and jealousy towards Reacher is misplaced but — like so vanishingly few elements of Reacher — plausible and convincing.
It isn’t Richard who ultimately blows Reacher’s cover. It’s the fact that Quinn learns from some identified source that Warrant Officer Powell at the 110th Special Investigations Unit ran his license plate and that Reacher’s friend and frequent partner-in-vigilante-justice Frances Neagley, formerly of the 110th, pulled the military dossiers on Angel Doll, Winston Duke, and Paulie Van Hoven not long after that.
Powell, that Warrant Officer who was so chuffed to be speaking to the legendary Major Jack Reacher back in episode one, proves he’s no clay-footed fanboy, absorbing a brutal beating while refusing to give up Reacher’s name. (He did already name Reacher to Duffy after she threatened to charge him with obstruction of justice, which is how Duffy roped Reacher into her reckless undercover operation in the first place.) Convinced Powell won’t talk, Quinn orders the torturers to “gut him from tongue to taint and let him bleed out.” What a jerk!
Neagley fares better, dispatching two button men sent to kill her in her Windy City high-rise office. Evidently, she’s the only person present not just on this floor but in the whole damn building because the dozens of unsilenced gunshots she and the two hitmen exchange bring no response until Neagley herself dials 911. Piss-poor security for what we’ve been told is an elite private-investigation firm! When one of Neagley’s assailants, bleeding out from the abdomen, asks the woman he just tried to kill to call him an ambulance, Neagley replies, “You’re an ambulance.”
The dad jokes, more than any other single element, are what keep me watching Reacher. More! Of! These!
Anyway, the fact that both of the parties checking up on Quinn and his associates are current or former members of the 110th makes it a cinch for even a dummy like Beck to figure out that Reacher, who used his reputation as the founder of that unit to persuade Beck to hire him, is a traitor. Quinn orders Paulie upstairs to go shoot the (smaller) big man, but Reacher is already running for the garage. He’s smart enough to shoot out the tires of the other vehicles on his way to stealing the snowplow-equipped pickup truck to smash through the front gate.
Even that big, belt-fed machine gun in the guardhouse can’t stop him from making good his escape, though it does enough damage to the truck to force Reacher to dump it. He calls Duffy for help, but not before several ATV-riding henchmen pursue him into the woods. What begins as yet another gunfight morphs into a horror-movie scenario: Reacher covers his face in mud like Arnold at the end of Predator and kills the last of his assailants by strangling him using a winch mounted on one of the ATVs. MacGyver would never!
At the Beck house, Quinn muses that “nothing beats a serrated knife” while displaying some truly amateurish kitchen-knife handling skills. He proceeds to torture both Becks by making Zachary watch as he forces Richard to play Russian Roulette. Richard’s odds are lousier than Reacher’s were when Beck forced Reacher to play because this revolver is a five-shot model instead of a six-shooter. (Also, Richard doesn’t have a notch cut into the cylinder to help him see which chamber the bullet is in like Reacher did.) When Richard survives, Quinn demands “a matching set.” He’s got a fever, and the only prescription is more ear-severing.
You might’ve thought Reacher was too overcome with grief, confusion, physical pain, or some miserable cocktail of all those things while carrying out poor Annette’s corpse off for disposal last episode to pay attention while Harley yammered on about how this unplanned killing had shipwrecked his weekend plans. But no! Reacher heard Harley brag about his boat, the Sweet Marie, because in a flash of insight, Reacher now tells Duffy that the boat is where Teresa is being held. They swim out to investigate, finding evidence that Teresa was indeed kept there under sedation. They’re still aboard when Harley shows up. Convinced he’s telling the truth when he tells them he doesn’t know where Quinn moved the hostage, they leave him pinned to the deck of the Sweet Marie, which caught fire after he tried to shoot Duffy. Rather than attempt to extinguish the flames, Reacher tosses in more fuel. And that’s an explosive wrap for Harley, the loathsome little weasel.
Reacher chides Duffy for stealing looks at his presumably Reacher-size junk while they change out of their wetsuits, but she’s more upset about the fact their last lead for finding Teresa just blew up. But Reacher has another idea. “Pack your sunscreen,” he says. “We’re going to Los Angeles.”
I wonder what Canadian metropolis will play the City of Angels.
In an Investigation, Details Matter
• When Neagley kills the two hitters who attack her in her office, she’s wearing a T-shirt promoting Siren Records of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity is a fictional Doylestown landmark, but Siren Records is real!
• I’ve been waiting for three episodes now for Reacher’s daylight beatdown of Richard’s bullies in downtown Abbottsville to produce some consequences. Reacher’s strained relations with inept and/or corrupt local law enforcement is a recurring feature of Lee Child’s Reacher novels and their screen adaptations, but it appears there is no local law enforcement in Abbottsville.