Summary
Action-packed and no-nonsense, Season 4 of Reacher kicks off in its typically bruising style with a fresh, lean mystery to solve.
There’s something refreshing about how lean and no-nonsense Reacher is. It works on the same basis the books do, by essentially soft-rebooting itself between seasons, so each new mystery is completely fresh-feeling and divorced from the last one. In that way, the Prime Video hit is the polar opposite of most shows these days, which want to peddle shared-universe storytelling that feels like homework to keep up with. You don’t need to brush up on your Reacher lore to get ready for Season 4. Episode 1, “City of Brotherly Love”, jumps right in like you’re meeting for the very first time.
Reacher is on the subway, which is not altogether unusual for a vagrant. He’s coming from one place and going to another. Just like seemingly every time he leaves the house, he trips and falls into a conspiracy. This one involves a woman named Anna Merrick, whom he spots on the subway car, exhibiting all of the telltale characteristics of a suicide bomber. Her hands are in a bag. She’s shifty and sweating, wearing the wrong kind of clothes for the weather. Reacher doesn’t explain what he was seeing until later, but it’s not exactly subtle.
But Anna doesn’t have a bomb — she has a gun. It’s a big revolver that doesn’t suit her, and when Reacher pretends to be a cop and claims he can help her, she says that nobody can and blows her own brains out over the carriage. Reacher isn’t arrested, but he is interviewed by Philadelphia cops Tamara Green and Shaun Docherty, the latter of whom can’t stand him. This is one of those classic scenes where Reacher shares some of his backstory — former Military Police turned wandering wrong-righter, very big — and shows off his Holmesian deductive reasoning. It takes Reacher all of five seconds to realise that one of the witnesses from the train is missing, and that Tamara and Docherty are deliberately stalling until some D.C. feds arrive. He orders a cheesesteak while he waits. When in Rome.
The suits that turn up don’t identify themselves, so Reacher names them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. They’re primarily interested in whether Anna gave Reacher anything, which she didn’t, but given Reacher’s inquisitive nature, he’s now curious what it might have been. After he leaves the station, he’s approached by two men in the street outside who ask him the same question, but clarify that the object was a flash drive. Reacher slaps them around a bit and goes to speak to Anna’s brother, a patrolman named Jacob, who’s in the diner the goons were camped outside. He isn’t much use either. He claims Anna, who worked in HR in the Army, wouldn’t have killed herself, and has a college-age son named Ben whom Jacob helped raise. Reacher pays an art student $50 for his flash drive full of his ropey sketches, and he takes it to the goons who have turned back up outside to organise a meeting with their boss, neither party really acknowledging the fact that they must have seen him buy the flash drive through the windows.
The boss of these guys is a pretty woman named Lila Hoth, who’s with her equally pretty and notably youthful-looking mother, Amisha. Lila’s deal is that she has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant, which is hard to come by when you’re mixed race. Her best chance of finding a match is her father, though she has never met him — he was a Delta Force operative named John who conceived her when he was stationed in Indonesia back in ’98 and then left Amisha to it. Through Anna, she learned that her father is a North Carolina congressman named John Sampson, and the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nominee, so she was planning to blackmail him with documents proving that he’s her father. Rejecting a request for bone marrow from a dying estranged daughter would be political suicide.
Lila gives Reacher her cell number and hotel room number in case he finds anything, which he spends the rest of Reacher Season 4, Episode 1 attempting to do. The investigation takes him to the library, of all places, where he and Jacob look up more information on John Sampson. Unsatisfied with the anodyne public-facing stuff, Reacher wants to comb through his military records, so he heads to the basement to root through the “old stuff” in the archives. There, he’s attacked by a knife-wielding martial arts assassin who also wants the thumb drive, and Reacher kills him by crushing him to death between two shelves, which is pretty gnarly.
With the body dumped in the basement coal bin, Reacher grabs Jacob and starts racing to Lila’s hotel, assuming she’s also in danger. And he’s right — there’s another assassin creeping into her room while she’s in the shower. Reacher manages to get there just in time to wrestle the guy across the room and eventually out of the window, though he survives thanks to a convenient fire escape and manages to make it to an escape vehicle full of armed goons on the street below, all of whom open fire at the building.
Reacher and Jacob, now with a broken nose, manage to get Lila out of there. Reacher gives her money for a motel and new clothes, while he goes to see Tamara, who doesn’t have any helpful information to provide beyond the fact that the D.C. feds were also looking for the flash drive. In other bad news, Jacob also learns that Anna’s son, Ben, hasn’t been seen by anyone for several days after disappearing somewhere with a girl. For some reason, he thinks this is just boys being boys and not a major cause for concern given everything else that’s going on.
At the end of the premiere, Reacher is ambushed by some suits in an alleyway while he’s on his way to meet Jacob at the train to D.C. that leaves from Penn Station. They have to tranquilize him twice with darts powerful enough to take down a gorilla, which is probably a point of pride for the big guy, but he ends the episode a captive either way.
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