Before you press play
Watch if
You want a thriller you can actually solve, and a lead who fills the doorway before he says a word.
Wait if
You need a thriller where killing people has consequences, or you want a mystery that stays three steps ahead of you.
Jack Reacher gets off a bus outside Margrave, Georgia, walks into town, orders coffee, and is arrested for murder before he finishes it. He does not resist. He barely speaks. Within the hour the police know he is ex-military police with an exceptional service record, and he has decided to stay in the town that just tried to put him away.
That is the season in miniature. A man who is always several steps ahead, in a place that keeps underestimating him.
Is Reacher Season 1 worth watching?
Yes, and for a more specific reason than good action, although the action is good.
This is a mystery built for someone paying attention but not taking notes. It is not so tangled that you give up, and not so obvious that you feel talked down to. Watch it properly and you will have most of it worked out before the finale confirms it.
The trap is over-thinking it. The show does its reasoning out loud every single time. When Reacher names a killer's nationality from a wound, he says which wound and why. Nothing arrives from nowhere. Start hunting for a hidden trick behind the deductions and you will build theories the show never planted, and miss the clue it actually left sitting in the open.
The Cumberbatch Sherlock stages deduction as a performance you are not meant to follow. Reacher does the opposite. It lets you keep up. That is a lower ceiling and a much better hit rate.
Margrave, Georgia and the case against Jack Reacher
The town is the first thing the show gets right, starting with the name. Margrave has grave sitting inside it, and the word itself is an old title for the governor of a border province. That is exactly what the place turns out to be: somewhere running on its own law, a long way outside anyone else's.
Margrave has a spotless main street, a wealthy family who rebuilt it after it had started dying, and no murders in twenty years. Then there are four in a week. Everything after that runs on one question: who here is bought, and who is only frightened.
The show answers slowly and fairly. Nobody turns out to be corrupt without something earlier having pointed at them.
Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher
The casting carries the show and Ritchson carries the casting. He is a very large man and the series never lets you forget it. He fills doorways. People make decisions about him based on his outline before he has said anything.
There is a cost and it is visible. He is not agile. Watch him run and you can see the weight he is carrying. The fights are built around it. They are short, he moves in straight lines, and almost nothing deflects him. He is not fast, he is unstoppable, and once you see the difference the body stops being a limitation and becomes the style.
It is a genuinely violent show, rated TV-MA and earning it. Limbs break on camera, throats get cut, and while it lingers on the aftermath more than the act, it does not look away.
The other thing Ritchson gets right is the comedy, which is entirely deadpan and easy to miss. The jokes come from a man who refuses to speak in anything but the literal. When Finlay says the dung has hit the fan, Reacher tells him to just curse. That is the register: an action thriller getting its laughs from someone who will not use a euphemism.
The supporting cast: Finlay, Roscoe and Neagley
Malcolm Goodwin's Oscar Finlay is the best-written adult in the show. A Boston detective in a Georgia town, in a tweed suit nobody asked for, carrying a grief he will not discuss. He and Reacher spend the season disliking each other into a partnership, and the writing never rushes it.
Willa Fitzgerald's Roscoe Conklin gets the sharpest introduction of anyone. Reacher treats her as frightened, so she tells him she scored in the 99th percentile for IQ and 80 per cent on the psychological evaluation, and that the evaluation marked her down for not tolerating condescension. Then she demonstrates it on him. It plays as a warning rather than a confession, and she holds that line for the rest of the season.
Maria Sten's Frances Neagley arrives late, served under Reacher years earlier, and immediately makes you wish she had turned up in episode two.
Kristin Kreuk, who a certain generation will place instantly from Smallville, plays the wife of a banker in far more trouble than he has admitted to her. She is written as either guilty or terrified and the show refuses to say which for a long time, which is the right choice.
The flashbacks and the Reacher brothers
Most episodes carry a short flashback to Okinawa in 1998, where Reacher is twelve and his brother Joe is a couple of years older. A group of older boys are tormenting a local child. Reacher beats one of them badly. That boy turns out to be a general's son, Joe takes the blame to protect his brother, and when Reacher refuses to apologise it is their father's career that pays for it and the family is moved to Germany.
That is where the character comes from and the show is patient about handing it over, a piece at a time, instead of explaining him in one speech.
One detail to watch for. Everybody calls him Reacher, and he corrects anyone who tries Jack. That is not an army habit picked up later. In the first episode he tells the town barber that everyone calls him Reacher, and that even his mother did. The flashbacks show her doing exactly that. The season eventually does something with it.
Where Reacher Season 1 falls short
The villains. This show writes its heroes carefully and its antagonists as types. There is a sneering rich boy and a corrupt official, both played well, and neither is given the interior life the show hands out freely everywhere else. You will remember Finlay's tweed suit longer than you remember either of their names.
The middle stretch also settles into a shape: a lead, an ambush, a fight Reacher wins. The fights are staged well, but three in a row flattens the tension the case had spent four episodes building.
And they are not all staged well. The worst of it is in episode seven, where Dawson gets a crowbar on Reacher at Hubble's house, beats him with it, and knocks him into the pool. Then, having already won the fight with the bar, he switches to drowning him instead, which gives Reacher exactly the time and the room he needs to come round and turn it. It is the one stretch of the season where you can see the writing instead of the character.
The nudity is incidental, too. No scene turns on it and no character is revealed by it. Cut it and the season is identical, which is the definition of a choice that has not earned its place.
Why nothing in Reacher has consequences
And nobody ever pays for any of it. Reacher is a civilian with no badge, no warrant and no standing, and he kills his way across two states. In episode six he lures a tail into a New York alley in daylight, strangles him with his own tie, drops off a fire escape and walks away to music. Nobody comes looking. Roscoe is thrown off the force and carries on shooting people. Finlay is taken off the case and carries on investigating. The one time the show remembers that this has a cost, when Finlay is arrested for breaking into a suspect's house, it drops the idea and never picks it up again.
It is not only the killing. In that same New York episode he gets into a police station by posing as a professor's lawyer, then persuades a sergeant he has just met to keep her under off-books protection. It takes about a minute.
That is the price of entry for the genre and this show is not unusual in charging it. What is unusual is how well it manages your attention while charging it. The season is careful to tell you exactly what to look at and why. This wound. This lawyer. This much cattle feed. That habit does two jobs at once: it makes the mystery followable, and it keeps you watching the thing being explained rather than the thing being skipped. You do not decide to overlook the body on the fire escape. You are simply never shown anybody who might care about it.
The release model does some of that work too. All eight episodes landed on the same day, and a contrivance that would nag at you over eight weeks does not survive contact with a binge. You are moving too fast to stop and ask.
That is a technique rather than a mistake, and it works on most people most of the time. But once you have seen it you cannot unsee it, and eight hours is a long time to spend wondering why nobody in either state ever looks up.
Who killed Joe Reacher. KJ Kliner. He killed the trucker Pete Jobling himself, had Molly Beth Gordon killed in the Atlanta subway, and hired Picard's partner to kill the agent in Memphis, sending Dawson along to make sure it was done properly. Dawson beat Joe's body after he was already dead. Chief Morrison hid it badly and got himself and his wife killed for the failure. KJ's summary of the family business is that his father had the brains to start it and he had the guts to protect it, which is also his explanation for killing his father.
The one deduction Reacher gets wrong. In episode six he studies Kliner Sr's neck, identifies a Venezuelan butterfly cut, and concludes the Venezuelans killed him. He is right about the method and wrong about the hand. KJ used that cut precisely so the trail would point overseas. It is the clearest time all season that the show lets its own reasoning lead somewhere false, and it is the cleverest thing it does with a character who is otherwise never wrong.
Picard. Finlay's FBI friend, brought in to protect the Hubble family, is on the payroll. The clue is handed over early and quietly. Picard says out loud that the arrangement is off the books, that he is burning personal days, that nobody official knows where that family is. The show tells you the safe house cannot be verified by anyone, and then invites you to feel safe about it.
The deduction that closes the loop. Standing over the body in episode one, before he knows it is his brother, Reacher works out that three men were involved. One precise and almost professional. One psychotic, who beat the corpse after death. One cautious, who hid it badly. KJ, Dawson and Morrison, sketched in the first hour and confirmed in the last.
The ending. Reacher burns the counterfeiting operation and kills KJ in the fire. Roscoe kills Teale, who had murdered Detective Gray, her mentor and the nearest thing she had to family, and got away with it until she had the head wound re-examined and matched to the top of his walking cane. Finlay kills Picard. Roscoe survives, and on his way out Reacher suggests she run for mayor. The season does know the bill exists. Roscoe warns him the state police and the feds are coming and will want him to stay and answer questions. He says he does not like answering questions and does not like sticking around. Then he hitchhikes out of town and the credits roll.
And the flashback the season has been building to. In the last one the brothers visit their dying mother. Before going in they remind each other that no matter what, they do not cry. She tells them she always knew it was Reacher who beat the Okinawa bully and that Joe took the blame to save him, and that neither she nor their father ever tried to stop them, because the child they were defending was being tormented. She tells Joe he does not have to solve all the world's problems, that solving some is enough. She gives Reacher his grandfather's French war medal, awarded for bravery in the face of danger, and tells him it takes bravery to do what is right.
Then they leave, and in the taxi Joe says: now you can cry. And he does.
That is the answer to the surname. Reacher does not use his first name and does not cry, and the only person who could ever release him from either was his brother, who is dead in the first hour of the series, before we have met him. At the end Reacher buries the medal where Joe was killed and tells him it takes bravery to solve the world's problems too.
Bright Bulbs
- Alan Ritchson's physical presence, and fight staging built around momentum rather than speed.
- A mystery pitched for an attentive viewer. It is solvable, and it shows its working every time.
- Malcolm Goodwin's Finlay and Willa Fitzgerald's Roscoe, both given interior lives the plot never required.
- Deadpan comedy that comes out of character rather than out of jokes.
- Flashbacks that quietly explain a habit you noticed in the first episode.
Dull Bulbs
- The middle stretch settles into lead, ambush, fight, and runs the pattern once too often.
- The romance works, but gets less care than the friendship sitting next to it.
- Nudity that serves nothing. Cut it and the season is identical.
Shattered Bulbs
- The villains are types. Both are played well and neither is written with the interior life the show hands out freely to everyone else.
- Nothing has consequences. A civilian and two officers thrown off the case kill their way through eight episodes, and the show is careful never to show you anyone who might ask about it.
Cast
- Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher
- Malcolm Goodwin as Oscar Finlay
- Willa Fitzgerald as Roscoe Conklin
- Chris Webster as KJ Kliner
- Maria Sten as Frances Neagley
- Bruce McGill as Grover Teale
- Kristin Kreuk as Charlie Hubble
- Currie Graham as Kliner Sr.
- Martin Roach as Picard
- Christopher Russell as Joe Reacher
- Marc Bendavid as Paul Hubble
- Laura Jean Chorostecki as Molly Beth Gordon
- Jonathan Koensgen as Officer Stevenson