Summary
Episode 4 really lays out the stakes of Reacher Season 3, showing interesting new sides to the title character that help to flesh out the story.
I’ve been thinking about Persuader a lot. That’s the book that Reacher Season 3 is based on, the seventh in Lee Child’s series and one that nobody really talks about. It seemed an odd choice to adapt, but as of Episode 4, “Dominique”, I’m starting to see the logic. This is a smart episode, almost entirely set in the past, which not only fleshes out the Big Bad of the season but shows a side to Reacher we don’t see often.
That’s the thing about Persuader, I think. The big hook is that there’s a guy in it bigger than Reacher himself who might present a genuine physical threat. But it also plays with the formula – Reacher’s working undercover off the books for the DEA – and gives him a more meaningful personal motivation than usual. It offers up a character he deeply respects and can’t protect and then kills her in a really grim way that fundamentally challenges who Reacher is as a person. That’s very rare for the knight-errant archetype. “Dominique” doesn’t just expose Reacher to a profound personal failing but an adversary who is frightening to him not because he’s massive, like Paulie, but because he has a capacity for cruelty that even Reacher can barely comprehend.
Thanks to these things Season 3 is beginning to feel like a progression of the first two seasons, which comes across in less-obvious ways too. This is the earliest we’ve seen of Reacher’s military career, for instance, introducing his mentor figure, Leon Garber, and making a couple of jokes about the formation of the Special Investigators unit that Season 2 was concerned with. Reacher’s a bit less weathered here, a bit less cynical. It’s because of what’s depicted in this episode that he became the taciturn extrajudicial killing machine badass he became. It feels like not just explanatory context for this season’s plot but for the character as a whole.
The flashback scenes are so good here that I found myself internally complaining a little every time we returned to the present day. It doesn’t help that every cut back to Reacher telling the story to Duffy and Villanueva is needless, mostly just reminding us that we’re supposed to care about the present-day story primarily. At the very end of the tale Duffy cuts in with her own personal trauma – she forced Teresa to go undercover by threatening her – that feels light in comparison and isn’t timed very well; it’s like she’s treating Reacher unburdening himself like a competition.
But this is where we are after the three-part premiere. Reacher, now Beck’s right-hand man, has managed to steal away an hour or so to regale his new compatriots with the story of Dominique Kohl and Xavier Quinn, the guy he recognized on the street who is now calling himself Julius McCabe, Beck’s boss. It goes a little something like this.
Kohl was assigned to Reacher back in the day to help him solve a case about selling state secrets that was proving confounding. Kohl impresses immediately by being a lot like Reacher; doesn’t need to be told anything twice, has near-superhuman deduction skills, and takes her coffee black. Part of Reacher’s appeal is that women tend to want to bang him, but Kohl clearly has no interest in him like that, so the relationship is purely platonic. It’s a bit like the Neagley dynamic but with a more fatherly, protective element (Neagley, as we know, can look after herself.)
Alan Ritchson in Reacher Season 3 | Image via Prime Video
The case leads Reacher and Kohl up a slippery chain to Quinn, who continues to outsmart them again and again. Through testimony from his associates, we can tell he’s a monster. This works well with how he has been talked about in previous episodes, very vaguely as though he might be listening. It has been reiterated time and again that this guy’s a proper psycho, but the flashbacks also highlight his intelligence. He’s a real threat, but since nobody stays ahead of Reacher forever, it eventually seems like he’s cornered.
Here, Reacher makes his crucial mistake. He sends Kohl to make the arrest alone so she can get all the credit, and when he uncharacteristically texts her to check on her progress, she calls him “Sir”, which he told her when they first met never to do. He knows something’s up. Racing out to Quinn’s isolated vacation home, he finds her strung up in the barn, having been tortured and killed. Reacher Season 3, Episode 4 makes a smart decision here, letting Ritchson’s expressions communicate the severity of what Quinn did to her. It’s a rare moment of restraint in a show that’s primarily about brute force, and it totally works.
Reacher’s second mistake comes shortly after. He finds Quinn nearby and marches him to the edge of a cliff. He knew he was going to kill him from the second he received that text, but because he’d rather not spend the rest of his life in prison, he elected not to use his service firearm. Instead, he used Quinn’s own gun, a paltry .22 which he now knows didn’t even penetrate his skull. Quinn survived.
This is about when we catch back up to the present day so Reacher can hurry back to Beck’s compound. Beck’s household staff are strangely happy to slag him off, but now that Reacher’s in Duke’s position, he can write his questions off as operational security. He has a bit more freedom to move around, too, so he can do fatherly things with Richard like teach him how to throw a punch (this scene is very funny because Reacher can’t give any advice without inadvertently insulting Richard about how skinny and weak he is.) There’s also clearly something brewing between him and Agnes.
As usual, things end on a cliffhanger. Beck has managed to track down Angel Doll’s laptop and has sent some goons there, and predictably Duffy and Villanueva have no signal to pick up Reacher’s warning call. “Dominique” ends with him racing there, but we’ll have to wait until the next episode to see whether or not he makes it.
