Reacher has found its footing in Season 4. In the opening season Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) was like an alien: so different from everyone around him that they all wanted to know what he was doing. This season captures that magic very well, even though the scale is much bigger.
Adapted from Lee Child's Gone Tomorrow, it starts on a Philadelphia subway train, where Reacher watches a stranger shoot herself. She is Anna Merrick (Karen Kwong-Chip), a Pentagon clerk. Her brother, Jacob Merrick (Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette), a small-town cop from New Jersey, wants to know why. The suicide is shown on screen.
Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel) is the Philadelphia detective on the case. Then Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo) turns up, saying she has leukaemia and needs bone marrow from her father, Congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas), a man she has never met.
Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher
Alan Ritchson is amazing in the part. When the Philadelphia police question Reacher after the death on the train, they get a man who has a passport but no driver's licence and no home. He tells them a stranger was a Balkan immigrant from his colouring and the charity shirt he had on, and one of them ends up calling him "Sherlock Has-No-Holmes".
In the first two seasons the case was personal: his brother was murdered in the first, and a friend from his old army unit was killed in the second. This time a stranger dies in front of him, and he gets involved out of nowhere. After three seasons with him, you understand exactly why.
He is on his own again, too, and Reacher shines when he is the only one being Reacher. In Season 2 there were four of them, all good at the same things and all behaving the same way, so no one character stood out. Here there is one, and you watch the people helping him fail and struggle, because none of them is him.
Sydelle Noel as Tamara Green
Sydelle Noel is brilliant as Tamara Green. When we meet her, her career has stalled: she is stuck on the night shift with the suicides after she would not let an old case go. She tells Reacher she plans to "run out five years and collect my pension". She has a lot of strength, though, and once she agrees to help, she goes all out.
Her expertise is the investigation: working out the case and calling in favours for Reacher. She has her partner, Detective Shaun Docherty (Kevin Corrigan), put out an alert for Anna's missing car, and when they need a car, she takes them to a contact who has one. She is not the lead on the mystery or the action, and she does not try to do what Reacher or Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) would do. That works really well, because it sets her apart as the other lead.
Jacob Merrick and Lila Hoth
Jacob makes some stupid calls, but grief explains them. He will not accept that his sister killed herself, even from the man who watched her do it. Someone dealing with that much trauma might well act the same way.
Agnez Mo does what she can with Lila, and Amisha Hoth (Anggun), who travels with her, feels a lot more grounded and sympathetic. Reacher does not run a proper background check before trusting Lila. That lack of caution is so unlike him that it is strange to watch.
Where is Neagley in Reacher Season 4?
The surprising thing about this season is that Neagley is nowhere to be found. She has been Reacher's ride-or-die for three seasons.
His mugshot ends up on billboards across Philadelphia, yet she never reaches out to help, and neither does anyone else who survived the second season. Their silence is somewhat weird. Maria Sten has her own series now, Neagley, which arrived the day this season ended, but inside the show nobody explains where she is.
Those billboards also leave Season 5 something to deal with. Prime Video has already renewed the show for a fifth season and a sixth. Does the next one acknowledge that his face was all over Philadelphia, or does he turn up in the next town as an anonymous stranger again?
Fights, pacing and humour
The fights are done well, and at this point a Reacher season without good fights would not be worth watching. Two of the best are in the opening three episodes: Reacher turning the moving shelves of a library basement on an attacker, and a brawl in a neon-lit bowling alley. Like most seasons before it, this one is gory, with a lot of blood splatter. With a show like this, you do not really mind.
The pacing is uneven at first, fast in some stretches and slow in others, but it picks up significantly towards the end.
There are some jokes, but this is not a season you will remember for its humour. The scenes played for laughs fall flat.
Is Reacher Season 4 worth watching?
Yes, even though the mystery lets it down.
By midseason you know who the villain is and what is going on, so it is not a mystery that keeps you guessing. The stakes also do not hit as hard as they did in seasons one and three.
Reacher himself makes up for that, back to being the outsider everyone is trying to work out. The story and the characters hold up too, and the plot builds well as one death on a train turns into a conspiracy that pulls in a congressman and the CIA. With fights this good, it gets three and a half bulbs, Glowing.
The CIA. They are made dumb for no apparent reason. In episode 2 they are holding Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson), Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel) and Jacob Merrick (Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette) captive, but with Reacher in cuffs nobody keeps a gun to hand, and all three get away.
Lila's second story. Her first story does not convince for a second, so the next part is strange. In episode 3 Reacher catches Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo) lying about Congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas) being her father, and she switches to a second story: she is a journalist, and the two men with her are hired protection. He takes that on trust and does not find out who she writes for before he gets involved with her. Skipping the background check is so not Reacher.
The Hoths. Halfway through the season it is pretty clear who the villains are: Lila and Amisha Hoth (Anggun) are the killers, and the leukaemia and the journalism were both cover. They took Ben Merrick (Denis Wong), the son of Anna Merrick (Karen Kwong-Chip), to force her hand, then killed him.
Lila's betrayal. You can see it coming, and it is still very well executed, because of the way she takes advantage of Reacher. She sleeps with him and lets him believe she needs protecting, so when men come after her, he races back to her hotel and the police find him there among the bodies. Lila and Amisha had cut down the men waiting for them and run, and Reacher has to admit to Tamara, "I got it wrong." She makes a fool of Reacher.
Jacob and his uncle. Stupid, but it is grief. Jacob goes alone to the Hoths' hideout, an abandoned restaurant, after Reacher tells him not to, and they take him. Later he trusts his uncle, Lieutenant Monty DeRosa (Nick Searcy), who hands him over to the Philadelphia police. Detective Shaun Docherty (Kevin Corrigan) then takes him away at gunpoint, and Jacob thinks he is about to be killed, until Docherty lets him go and joins their side.
The weapon. As a threat it is fine, but it has less impact than the counterfeit money in season one or the smuggling ring in season three. The Hoths want to rebuild and sell a chemical weapon from a buried CIA programme, built on abrin, a biotoxin from the rosary pea.
Sampson. He looks like he could be the villain at first, and he turns out to be on the right side. At his wife's fundraiser on the Delaware, he tackles the bomber into the river and dies saving the crowd.
The final fight. The Hoths plainly know they are no match for Reacher, and that if he gets hold of them they are done for. So they stay quick and cut him up badly. You keep asking why he does not smash their heads on the floor, until you see he cannot catch them, because they are so much smaller and faster. When he finally does, it takes one or two moves.
Lila's death. The scene is really well done, and she has it coming. When a character is this bad, you want to see them get what they deserve. Reacher turns her own syringe of the toxin on her and gives her a taste of her own medicine.
Amisha. She is good in the action and is shown commanding their team, but neither she nor Lila ever feels in control. She survives being thrown through a window and kills Foster (Dean Armstrong), the CIA officer, before Jacob shoots her.
Jacob's ending. His arc works out well. His sister trusted him with everything when she mailed him the flash drive the Hoths were after, and at the end he arrests Amisha instead of killing her. Then he scatters the ashes of Anna and Ben and starts his life again from scratch.
Tamara's redemption. Her arc is really great, and it turns a detective whose career had stalled into a heroine. She and Jacob stop a man about to release the toxin in a crowded nightclub, and she ends the season with a Medal of Valor and a move to homicide.
The ending. It ends happily, with everyone lining up to help everyone, and Elspeth Sampson (Kathleen Robertson) makes sure Reacher faces no charges.
Bright Bulbs
- Next to Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson), Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel) has to struggle in her fights, and you see all of it.
- The knife fights turn a little comic in the middle of the season, then grow on you until they are great.
- Tamara's partner, Detective Shaun Docherty (Kevin Corrigan), gets a decent arc of his own.
Dull Bulbs
- Elspeth Sampson (Kathleen Robertson) is shown as a power player, but she never convinces as one and comes off as really stiff.
- The CIA agents after Reacher are written as the stupidest bunch in the season, and he gets past them far too easily.
Cast
- Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher
- Sydelle Noel as Tamara Green
- Agnez Mo as Lila Hoth
- Anggun as Amisha Hoth
- Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette as Jacob Merrick
- Kevin Corrigan as Shaun Docherty
- Marc Blucas as John Sampson
- Kathleen Robertson as Elspeth Sampson
- Kevin Weisman as Russell Plum
- Dean Armstrong as Foster
- Aaron Poole as Springfield
- Shawn Doyle as Leo Ahlquist
- Nick Searcy as Monty DeRosa
- Chris Owens as Nolan Cahill
- Karen Kwong-Chip as Anna Merrick
- Denis Wong as Ben Merrick
- Manon Ens-Lapointe as Mary Ellen Daniels
More from Reacher
Reacher Season 1
Reacher Season 2
Reacher Season 3
Reacher Season 4