Reacher season 1, episode 2 recap – “First Dance”

This recap of Amazon’s Reacher season 1, episode 2, “First Dance,” contains spoilers.

Read the season 1 review. 

Reacher season 1, episode 2 recap

As soon as Finley, Roscoe, and Reacher reach the police station, the new visitor to Margrave gets out of the back seat immediately. He walks away looking determined, angry, and ready to squash anything that gets in his way. Finley tells his deputy to follow him as they watch him walk away. “Why?” she asks. Because he listened to her before. And most importantly, when he was upset.

Roscoe catches up to Reacher, and he jumps in her police cruiser. They head over to Hubble’s house. The pair find that he isn’t there, but they find his wife, Charlie (Kristen Kreuk), and their children. While Roscoe plays the good cop and the carrot, Reachers plays the bad cop and the wandering stick. He goes upstairs and looks through Hubble’s personal belongings. He finds an oddly pointed pair of shoes.

When they leave, this is where Reacher tells his new partner about the mixup at the prison and how they mistook him for the one with glasses to kill. He now believes Hubble is on the run or was already snatched up. He also shows her a strange seed he found on his dress shoes. Roscoe tells him they call them “hitchhiker” seeds because they are located on the tall grass around the highway. They then stick to you quickly and don’t come off for miles.

Later, after scouting the kill zone and putting himself in the head of the killer, Reacher walks to the nearest hotel while Roscoe follows him. He encounters local twenty-somethings sitting in the back of a pickup truck drinking beer. They want to talk to Reacher because KJ put a $100 bill in each of their pockets to beat the former MP senseless. One of them hits Reacher in the back of the head when he turns his back to open up his motel room door.

Big mistake. Reacher turns to break two of the punk’s hands with the pure blunt force of his wrists. In a fantastic scene, Reacher headbutts the third one’s fist, shattering it. He lets the fourth one go to drive the other three to the hospital.

When Reacher arrives at the police station the following day, he finds Roscoe heading out and tells him there has been another murder. The Police Chief Morrison has been killed. He is the third person murdered this week in the small Georgia town. They find him nailed to the wall like the big JC himself. Naked, blood everywhere, and two out of his three essential pieces of manhood are now gone. Reacher knows precisely where it went. He tells the medical examiner they’ll find it in his stomach.

Reacher and Roscoe head over to Hubble’s house to gather Charlie and her kids. Finley is arranging for an old friend in the FBI to take them into protective custody. Unfortunately, Reacher starts talking about Charlie’s husband in the past tense. She catches it and confronts him. He does the only thing he knows how — be bluntly honest. Most likely, her husband is dead, and she needs to concentrate on protecting her kids right now. 

When Reacher heads out on his own to “interview” the prison guard Taylor Spivey, he encounters assassins at this house. Reacher manages to fend them off, but not as easy as you might think. Later, he tells Roscoe and Finley that they had to be special forces from South America. Why? Because if they weren’t, they would have been killed in seconds. Second, they had been trained in rarely used martial arts used by soldiers in that part of the world.

Yeah, he just took off a non-twist beer cap with his forearm. How can a girl resist? They dance to some Patsy Cline at a bar on the Georgia/Alabama border. They drive back and are told they have to turn around due to flooding in the area and the road being closed. They find a local motel, shower, and start to eat some vending machine snacks. Reacher is walking around in his jeans, shirtless, while Roscoe is in a Margrave police t-shirt and her underwear.

She laughs at his preference for a Clark Bar, but we know it really wasn’t that funny. Chiseled abs, stomach, and scars make you funny. However, Reacher is nothing but chivalrous. He takes the floor, she is on the bed laying on top of the covers, with one knee pointed in the air. She then asks him if he is comfortable down there. Despite her attempts to let him know she is awake, alert, and not sleepy, he doesn’t make a move. (The only other thing she could have done was hang up a florescent open for business sign on the headboard).

But he gets to know her a little bit. He lays there like a cement sidewalk, just listening. We find out her backstory on why she became a cop, the man who influenced her, and how that person committed suicide. She asks him about the rest of this family and he tells her Joe was the last one. If he didn’t come down to Margrave after hearing the blues song he may have never found out Joe was killed for years.

The ending

The last scene has Reacher and Roscoe stopping by her place to change before they head out to breakfast. The newly minted, “will-they, won’t-they,” couple finds her home has been broken into and tossed. Reacher has a chilling thought that they may have been there to kill them. As they close the door, carved on the back are the words, “See You Soon.”

“I’m going to need a gun,” Reacher says.

What did you think of Amazon’s Reacher season 1, episode 2? Let us know in the comments below!