Reacher Season 2 Reaches Back into Reacher’s Past

By

Scott D. Parker

I’ve now watched the second season of Amazon’s “Reacher” and not only am I caught up, I’m all in.

Let’s be fair: I was all in back in the first fifteen minutes of the pilot episode, when Reacher did the Sherlock Holmes thing to the local police detective. Alan Ritchson’s portrayal of Reacher is fantastic. He has the brawn to take on anyone and be scared of no one. He has the brain to outthink any opponent, usually before they even realize it. But it’s Ritchson’s gentle demeanor that is probably my favorite part of the character on screen.

Season 1 is Reacher the Wanderer, the guy who literally walks the earth (a modern day version of David Carradine’s “Kung Fu”?). In this season, we get strangers who question Reacher’s lifestyle choice. In Season 2, we get Reacher’s backstory in the form of his old army unit.

Getting Most of the Band Back Together

The main plot of Season 2–based on the novel Bad Luck and Trouble—involves a mysterious group taking out the members of Reacher’s old army unit, the 110th Special Investigations Unit. Reacher’s ally from Season 1, Neagley, sends Reacher an SOS (in the form of a particular dollar amount on an ATM receipt). Fearing that the entire 110th is on someone’s hit list, they join forces to figure out who’s behind it all.

As a Reacher newbie, I really enjoy this season specifically because we get backstory. Interspersed with the main plot, we get flashbacks to when Reacher commanded the military police unit. We get to see the big man actually be part of a team of people he can rely on to have his back just as he has theirs.

Particularly funny are all the comments his former soldiers give him in the present. Other than Neagley, we are introduced to David O’Donnell who is now a lawyer with a family and Karla Dixon, a forensic accountant and one who pined for Reacher back in the day. I particularly liked O’Donnell because he’s a smaller guy, married (in direct opposition to his earlier life), and who is perfectly willing to stick his neck out for the team, but knows he cannot withstand all the punishment that Reacher can…but still does it.

O’Donnell and Dixon both haven’t seen Reacher in years and they pepper him with questions about his current life, why, and what his future plans are. His calm replies typically broach no follow-up and they just find it odd. As most of us do, to be honest. 

Seeing these four operate together is fantastic. They’ve each acquired new skills since leaving the army, but they remain steadfastly loyal to each other. That kind of camaraderie is something we all would like in our lives. 

Taking No Prisoners

As you can imagine, as Reacher and his team learn more and get closer to the bad guys—lead by Robert Patrick, a guy who can do smarmy with ease—there are numerous set pieces where the bad guys send out ruffians to take out Reacher and his friends. Love every one of them! It’s great to see the different fighting styles of the four former army cops as they dispatch the bad guy, but not always without injuries. 

A New Ally

Season 2 also features an NYC detective, Gaitano Russo, who initially thinks Reacher and his pals are up to no good but, ultimately, comes around to helping them. Russo is played by Dominick Lombardozzi, an actor I know from “The Wire.” The way Lombardozzi reveals what kind of cop he is and why is wonderful and is a great part of this season.

What’s Next?

I know that Reacher Season 3 has been greenlit so when it debuts, I’ll be there on Day One. Both seasons of Reacher are great and I recommend them.

In the meantime, however, I’ll be doing two things. One, I’ll revisit the two Tom Cruise movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know they’re not like the books, but I’ve already seen them and enjoyed both. Now I just want to rewatch in light of Ritchson’s portrayal of the character that’s more in line with the books.

And the second thing I plan on doing is the thing Lee Child wished I did twenty-eight books ago: read a Reacher novel or two. Anyone got a Top 5 they’d like to share?

When Reacher Did the Sherlock Holmes Thing, I Was Hooked

By

Scott D. Parker

It took a pair of podcast hosts and Sherlock Holmes to finally get me to watch Season 1 of Reacher. By the time I finished the first episode, I wondered why it had taken so long.

Setting the Hook

Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin host the Fatman Beyond podcast and in the first episode of this year, Smith discusses Season 2 of Reacher. He was his usual ecstatic self when he loves something and that finally tipped the needle. Granted, when Bernardin mentioned it last year, that should have been my cue to watch because Bernardin is one of the brightest guys I listen to, and his understanding of story and structure is deep and I constantly learn when he talks.

So I tuned into episode 1 of Season 1 on Amazon Prime. All I knew about Reacher going in was a pretty short list. He was a drifter (a “hobo” as he says on the show); he was in the army but now wasn’t. He kills people. Lee Child wrote the books. And Tom Cruise played the character in two movies that I enjoyed.

Cut to an early segment in the TV show. After Reacher has been arrested and then released, he’s walking out of the police station, ready to get the hell out of dodge, when the lead detective, Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) makes a challenge to Reacher, our hulking hobo turns around and does the Sherlock Holmes thing. He says all the things he’s learned about Finley just by observation and deduction.

My reaction? A huge grin on my face. A guy who is super smart and can kick your ass? Sold!

The Plot

As the last minute or so of any pilot episode does, the cliffhanger gives Reacher the situation where he chooses to remain in Margrave, Georgia, and help Finlay and patrol cop Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald) figure out what’s really going on in the small town. 

I’m always a fan of stories where a seemingly small thing is actually just a single layer of a wider, larger plan by the bad guys and this season is certainly that. In fact, I actively kept processing the clues and how they relate as I watched each of the eight episodes. This was because I was curious how original author Child and the folks that adapted the first book, Killing Fields, into this season’s storyline into a coherent thread. 

And there are multiple threads. It’s all well laid out and explained a few times but as I watched the show, a fact I know about Child’s writing process returned to my mind. Unless he changed, he writes every Reacher story without an outline. He just goes and trusts his creative mind to figure it all out. If that’s how he did it, more power to him.

The Actor and the Character

Alan Ritchson plays Reacher and he’s a giant. I think he mentioned he was six, five at least one time in the season. What I found fascinating was how Ritchson could, with barely changing his face, have Reacher go from kind to determined in a heartbeat. 

His size is intimidating and I appreciated how he would give his opponents the chance to walk away. Few did, but all believed after the fight. Reacher moved with precision. It wasn’t necessarily graceful. It was quite brutal, but his fighting style was efficient. 

There were a few times in which I saw how Ritchson played Reacher and I wondered if the character was somewhere on the spectrum. When a character asked Reacher what took him so long to meet up, Reacher was direct. “I killed five men.” Indeed, as I searched for the IMDB page to verify how to spell actors’ names, one of the top searched phrases was that very same thing. So I wasn’t the only one.

But I’ve come around to thinking that, no, Reacher isn’t autistic. He just takes no BS from anyone. The direct approach was his only approach. Why bother speaking extra words with the exact number will suffice. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Season 1 of Reacher and will start Season 2 soon. What are your thoughts on Reacher?

Review: Reacher

 

By Claire Booth

Finally. After 26 books and a short (ahem) feature film career, Jack Reacher is finally getting the proper treatment. The new TV series, Reacher, premiered Friday on Amazon Prime and after watching a few episodes, I can say it has several things things going for it.

The first is arguably the most important—the physicality of the lead actor. Reacher is a huge guy. It’s not an incidental attribute to the character. As anyone who’s read one of the books knows, it’s key to everything. And the hulking actor Alan Ritchson fits. He also gets the deadpan element of Reacher’s personality: analytical but capable of cracking a joke—if he wants to.

“We were very lucky to find Alan. He nails it on every level,” Child said in an interview with Denver’s ABC 7 (he lives part time in Fort Collins).

Second, it’s a TV series and not a movie. The TV format is just better for crime fiction series. Remember the different beloved series that tried to for successful runs as movies? Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski, and Lee Child’s Reacher are some. Then think about the TV shows, where the characters have time to develop into an ensemble and the plots have time to twist and turn. Think Craig Johnson’s Longmire or Justified (yeah, I know that one was based on just a Elmore Leonard short story, but let’s not quibble when the end product turned out to be genius).

This season of Reacher gives us just one book (the first in the series, The Killing Floor), not an inexplicable mish-mash of several books and a resulting choppy narrative like the movies did. This isn’t to say that the show is a deep and profound look at loss or corrupt law enforcement or small town politics. It’s not. But it’s a head-butting, leg-breaking, no-middle-name good time. Just like the books.

 

The Comfort of Familiarity

By Claire Booth

It’s the middle of winter. There’ve been snowstorms in the Northeast, downpours in California, and plenty of gray sky most everyplace else. So today, I feel like hunkering down under a blanket and ignoring the world for as many hours as I can. Comfort food in the Crockpot, comfort blaze in the fireplace, comfort book in my hand.

And what makes a book the written equivalent of homemade chicken noodle soup? For me, it’s familiarity. Give me a series character, someone I know from previous books, and I’m happy.

I know what I’m going to get when I sit down to read, and I’m not disappointed. I might be shocked, or saddened, or horrified by what happens in the story. But I’m not let down because my old friend the character is there, just as I’ve come to expect.

When I open up a Miss Marple novel, I know exactly what I’ll get – a nosy old lady who isn’t taken seriously until she solves the murder. Same with a Jack Reacher thriller – he’s a loner with a strong moral code who constantly finds himself in dangerous situations. Marple doesn’t start bare-knuckle street brawls, and Reacher doesn’t go sniffing around garden parties. And I know that, because I know them as characters.

What characters do you know well and have followed from book to book? Who's your favorite?

Some I would wholeheartedly recommend are, in no particular order:

Wounded WWI vet Ian Rutledge, by Charles Todd

Forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway, by Elly Griffiths

Ghanaian police Inspector Darko Dawson, by Kwei Quartey

Kick-ass P.I. Tess Monaghan, by Laura Lippman

Quebec chief of homicide (ret.) Armand Gamache, by Louise Penny

LAPD detective Elouise “Lou” Norton, by Rachel Howzell Hall

Twelfth-century British monk Brother Cadfael, by Ellis Peters

Newspaper police reporter Gabriella Giovanni, by Kristi Belcamino

Ex-special forces trainee and close-protection agent Charlie Fox, by Zoe Sharp