Summary
A novel start gives way to familiar rhythms, but the Reacher Season 3 premiere proves that the show hasn’t lost a step.
Reacher is back, and mostly unchanged, at least as far as the premiere of Season 3 goes. Is this a bad thing? No, not at all. If nothing else, Episodes 1-3 provide an in medias res opening cribbed directly from the source material, Lee Child’s Persuader, that’s a welcome jolt of novelty before the Prime Video series settles into its familiar rhythms.
You’ll see most of those rhythms in “Persuader”, Truckin'”, and “Number 2 with a Bullet”, which have Jack going undercover at the behest of the DEA, killing a few people, and stripping to his undies with alarming regularity. Which is precisely what we all want to see, frankly.
Just me? Fair enough.
Beck and Call
The first episode of Reacher Season 3 is very much divided into two halves; in the first, Reacher infiltrates the inner circle of a rug mogul after saving his son from a kidnapping, and in the second, we wheel back in time a little to find out how (and more importantly why) he did it.
The would-be kidnapping victim is Richard Beck, who isn’t a stranger to being kidnapped and has already had one ear removed and sent as a warning to his mysteriously wealthy rug merchant father, Zachary. Even before Reacher gets involved it’s very obvious that Zachary’s business isn’t just limited to rugs, since he has extensive armed security guards around him at all times, and one of them is 7’2″.
Anyway, Reacher rescues Richard from mortal peril and takes him home to Dad, who’s grateful but reluctant to honor Reacher’s request for cash for a fake ID and a place to lay low for a while after accidentally shooting a cop dead during the rescue. To prove himself, Reacher has to play Russian Roulette, which he does with a worrying amount of enthusiasm (don’t worry, the latter half explains how he got away with it.)
When A Plan Comes Together
When Reacher gets a moment alone and pulls a phone from the heel of his boot to report that “he’s in”, “Persuader” wheels back to explain how he got there. As usual with Reacher, there’s a personal connection. After encountering a man in the street who he believed to be dead, he calls into the office of the 110th Special Investigators and asks the Warrant Officer on duty to run the dude’s plates (in a bit of a deep cut, he’s initially calling to speak to Major Susan Turner, who’s a character in some other Reacher stories). This earns him the attention of the DEA.
I’ll explain the connection. The guy Reacher recognized was Xavier Quinn, a corrupt military intelligence officer who was into some deeply unsavory stuff until he found himself shot in the head and tossed from a cliff into the sea (you can probably guess who by.) But he survived. And he now has something to do with Zachary Beck and his rug company, Bizarre Bazaar.
The DEA’s Susan Duffy is interested in Beck because she sent a well-liked CI named Teresa Daniels undercover in Beck’s operation to find out what he was really importing and exporting, and she hasn’t been seen since. Duffy’s essentially off the grid at this point and is willing to use Reacher to unofficially get inside, find out where Teresa is, and hopefully track down Quinn for his own satisfaction. Hence the plot to engineer Richard’s “kidnapping” and have Reacher play his knight in shining armor.
Sonya Cassidy and Alan Ritchson in Reacher Season 3 | Image via Prime Video
Keep the Receipts
Episode 2 of Reacher Season 3 is where things kick into gear with a few effectively tense sequences, including one where Reacher and Angel Doll, another of Beck’s associates, are sent to investigate the panel van from the “kidnapping” that has been taken to a police impound lot. The Audi used is there too, which will possess none of the hallmarks of a vehicle that recently had a grenade go off inside it, so Duffy has to race there to try and get it out before Reacher and Angel Doll arrive.
All of the tension comes from Reacher trying to maintain his cover. While transporting a truck full of God-knows-what he has to surreptitiously link up with Duffy to try and figure out what’s in the back without going off schedule and raising suspicion. But he doesn’t have to actually get his hands dirty until the evidence starts mounting up and Angel Doll directly confronts him, at which point Reacher kills him by slamming his head into a receipt spike and folds his corpse under a table.
This is a big uptick in drama and is a sudden, shocking bit of violence just as it seemed like things were getting a little predictable. It also creates a mess that Reacher will need to clean up.
Reacher’s Promotion
Episode 3 of Reacher Season 3 finds Jack cleaning up this mess with assistance from Duffy, but the key revelations and developments here involve the criminal chain that exists above Zachary Beck, and Reacher’s efforts to position himself as Beck’s right-hand man to get closer to the truth.
Reacher learns through Richard that his father is answerable to a man named Julius McCabe, who it turns out was the one who kidnapped Richard in the first place and sent Zachary his ear. This was to force him into sharing his well-oiled import/export network, an efficient system of bribes and shortcuts that he had cultivated over the years in the rug business. McCabe muscled in on the operation to transport his own goods, though nobody, perhaps even Zachary himself, seems to know what those goods are.
The only way Reacher is going to find out is by getting himself higher up the food chain, which means getting rid of Beck’s head of security, Duke. To this end, Duffy helps Reacher set up an ambush at a vacant DEA woodland safehouse, under the pretense of tracking down Richard’s attempted kidnappers. Reacher shoots Beck in the head, stages a firefight, and blows the place to kingdom come. Zachary is so terrified and impressed that he promotes Reacher on the spot, which he can’t help but smile about.
