Summary
Reacher sustains Season 4’s breakneck pace in “Cage Fight”, with Reacher, Tamara, and Jacob all pursuing their own leads in a rapidly complicating case.
I knew Reacher would mention that it took two tranquilizer darts to take him down! It’s one of the first things he says in Episode 2 of Season 4, after he wakes up shackled to a gurney and locked in a cage, with Tamara and Jacob in the two neighboring cells. It takes him all of five seconds to deduce they’ve all been kidnapped by the CIA, which is, like, the fourth group of interested parties the premiere introduced, all looking for a missing flash drive connected to a dead Pentagon clerk, a sitting congressman, and a woman with leukemia. I’d say the fourth run-around of Reacher is off to a roaring start.
For the second time in as many episodes, Reacher gives his unidentified interrogators names — Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, characters from Eugene Field’s Dutch Lullaby, but relevant in this instance because Reacher claims he’s going to put them all to sleep before he leaves the room. And he keeps his word. To be fair, he might as well, since everyone keeps asking him the same question, and he hasn’t been able to answer it since the first instance. Still, it’s pretty impressive how agilely Alan Ritchson can move for a guy his size. And in handcuffs, too!
Reacher borrows a car jack from outside to free his new pals from their cells, but by the time he has bent the bars enough, backup has arrived, prompting a foot chase and a sudden rescue from an interloper with cats on his van who turns out to be a freelance journalist named Russell Plum. He had a suspicion the basement was being used as a CIA black site and, well, he was right. He seems to have been right about a lot of things and is clearly capable, but he also has that very cliched vibe of a tinfoil hat conspiracist, which is a weird mix. Are we supposed to be taking this guy seriously or not?
With this brief stopoff apparently constituting sufficient escape and evasion, the group splits up. Reacher goes to see John Sampson in his office, leaving him a very provocative note in the hopes he’ll meet him at a food truck, while Tamara and Jacob go to Anna’s place, which has been ransacked, in the hope of finding a vehicle. But the car’s missing, which is suspicious, as is the half-eaten, still-warm meal. Naturally, a giant dude is using the bathroom who seems to have been staying in the house for a while. Tamara manages to knock him out while he’s strangling Jacob to death. While they’re there, they also get a phone call from one of Ben’s football coaches informing them — Tamara pretends to be Anna — that Ben never turned up for practice. Finally, the penny drops that he might be in some kind of danger.
Meanwhile, Elspeth Sampson and her security, Springfield, arrive to meet Reacher. They give him the address of the hotel John’s staying at and offer him five minutes of his time, but won’t give him a lift there, which is pretty unreasonable. Then again, Reacher did imply that he had probably been going behind Elspeth’s back for one reason or another, so fair’s probably fair. Reacher gets there either way, but it isn’t Sampson waiting for him, but Snap, Crackle, and Pop, who once again try to warn him off the case. He’s not listening, though, obviously. Instead, he calls Tamara and Jacob so they can fill him in on the latest. For some reason, Anna drove her car to Philadelphia before she got on a subway and killed herself. So, that’s a mystery to solve, but not in Reacher Season 4, Episode 2, which has more pressing concerns. In the meantime, they need a car, so Reacher goes and steals Russell’s.
The first port of call is Ben’s frat house, which is in a state of serious disarray, as frat houses are wont to be. Nobody there knows anything, except perhaps a guy named Colin, who slips out of the house on the sly and has to be wrangled by Reacher before he talks. Whatever he has to say, though, he won’t say it in front of Tamara, which turns out to be because the girl Ben left with the other night was an OnlyFans model. Colin was a subscriber for feet-related reasons, so he recognised her. You can understand why he didn’t want to reveal that information in front of the boys.
With help from Docherty — who calls Jacob and Reacher “Deputy Dog” and “Hobocop”, which made me laugh because I’m clearly a child — the gang is able to track the OnlyFans model to her apartment, where she’s very, very dead. We’re talking extensive, precise, knife-based torture, so Reacher thinks it might have been the assassins who came after him and Lila with knives. He directs Tamara to the coal bin in the library basement to retrieve his assailant’s weapon for comparison purposes while Jacob has an existential crisis. They also take the dead girl’s cute cat with them, which is a weird comedic beat considering the circumstances.
At a loss for leads, Reacher goes to ambush Sampson in front of the press outside of the talk he’s giving at that hotel. This gets him up to his private suite, but it doesn’t give him any actionable intelligence, since Sampson doesn’t seem to know anything. He’d never heard of Anna until she killed herself, and she couldn’t have accessed his classified Delta Force mission details even if she wanted to. He strongly rejects the idea of having conceived a child in Indonesia, and even spits in a glass to prove it, but Reacher believes him anyway. Something about the details already wasn’t adding up, and the CIA doesn’t tend to kidnap American citizens over political sex scandals, which are pretty unremarkable these days. Whatever was going on with Anna, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Sampson.
It might, however, have something to do with his chief of staff, Nolan Cahill, whom Reacher recognises outside as the missing witness from the night Anna killed herself. It’s as good a lead as any.
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