Reacher’s third and, to date, weakest season deviates further from its source novel, 2003’s Persuader, as it heads into the home stretch. There’s no literary felony to prosecute here; it’s not as though the showrunners have changed the ending to The Scarlet Letter. Some of the changes to Lee Child’s book have been improvements: losing the Elizabeth Beck character, for one, who in the novel is yet another woman whose only role in the story is to be victimized.
The Los Angeles side quest that occupies a big chunk of this penultimate episode is a new-to-the-series element. With Reacher’s cover blown, he and Duffy need a new way to stay on Beck and Quinn’s scent long enough to rescue Teresa Daniel — the informant and recovering addict Duffy strong-armed into taking a secretarial job at Bizarre Bazaar, Beck’s rug-importing/gun-running business with the Bob’s Burgers–esque name. Even though it was Duffy’s surveillance of West Coast drug kingpin Darien Prado that put her onto Quinn’s trail, thus leading to her entanglement with Reacher — who was separately pursuing Quinn after randomly catching sight of the man he thought he killed 13 years earlier on the street, sure, whatever — it’s Reacher who remembers all of this and suggests the pair of them go see Mr. Prado.
Of course, it’s Reacher’s idea. While it remains irritating that no characters not named Reacher are allowed to be resourceful or even competent on Reacher — with the eternal exception of Neagley, whose spinoff series has already been announced, and the onetime exception of Kohl, who paid for her efficiency by being tortured to death back in 2012 — the show’s treatment of Susan Duffy is confounding. In the novel, she’s a step or two behind Reacher. On TV, she’s the least effective federal law enforcement officer since Robert Hanssen.
This penultimate episode of the season underlines this by having Duffy bring Reacher along to look in on Teresa’s grandma before they head to Logan Airport. It turns out Duffy is on a first-name basis with the woman whose granddaughter she placed in mortal danger after Teresa had kicked the habit and cleaned up her life. Naturally, this poor woman is ignorant of her friend Susan’s role in her granddaughter’s disappearance. But Nicky Guadagni gives a charming performance in this role, picking up on what she says is the palpable sexual tension between Reacher and Duffy. (“I know a thing or two about a thing or two.”) After protesting that their relationship is strictly professional, Reacher confides to Ms. Daniel that Duffy “just wants me for my body.” That’s the best laugh we get this week.
A snapshot of Teresa Ms. Daniel has stuck to her fridge reminds us of the human MacGuffin that’s been driving this entire season. “She’s a good shit,” her grandma says. Sweet-talker.
There follows a scene wherein Neagley sneaks up on a Chicago crook named Costopoulos as he’s collecting his morning paper. I hate to see anyone who’s still paying for daily newspaper delivery treated this way, but this is the guy who sent the two button men to Neagley’s office in the prior episode. He’s also the most loose-tongued character we’ve met all season, immediately spilling his guts when all Neagley has done is threaten to shoot him. Somehow, he knows that Julius McCabe, the man who ordered him to send the hitters, is also Xavier Quinn. “There are only a few people left alive who know that name,” he says.
“He’s not my boss anymore, but I was Quinn’s fixer back when he set up here,” Costopoulos continues. He tells Neagley the sad story of a Chicago-based family import-export operation that Quinn took over and eventually killed all the principals of, the exact playbook he’s now using with the Beck family and Bizarre Bazaar.
So how the Wrigley Field fuck is Costopoulos still walking around Chicago, Ontario intact, going out in his bathrobe to collect his own newspaper in his own hometown, when he knows all about the guy Reacher has described as “the most evil man I’ve ever known?” Not addressed! If Quinn were a tenth as dangerous as we’re been repeatedly told he is, Costopoulos wouldn’t be alive to tell Neagley any of this.
In a Los Angeles hotel room, Duffy is showing Reacher the surveillance video of Prado that turned out to be inadmissible because poor, dead Agent Eliot misread a map and shot the video from a place he wasn’t supposed to be. When Reacher asks her to make a part of the frame bigger, Duffy hits him with a “that’s what she said.” Her flirtation game is as sharp as her law enforcement game.
They still fuck, of course, because this is Reacher and Duffy packed a very nice bra. But it feels obligatory, even if it’s fun to see Duffy climb Reacher like a jungle gym. Each Reacher season has given our abnormally large vigilante hobo an statistically ordinary, human-size paramour. I’d like to see him coupled with a partner of commensurate tectonic stature in subsequent seasons. Is Gwendoline Christie available?
Because I made a whole thing out of Alan Ritchson’s mispronunciation of McLean, Virginia in episode four, and a far bigger thing about Sonya Cassidy’s war crime of a Boston accent all season, I should acknowledge that she pronounces Worcester, Massachusetts, properly in the scene in which she and Reacher accost Prado. Cheers.
Like Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop all those decades ago, Prado is hiding his drug operation behind the front of an art gallery. Reacher and Duffy’s purpose in flying across the country turns out to get Prado to place a phony firearms order with Zachary Beck. I loved that their point of leverage against this drug kingpin is that he’s using a disabled parking placard. Reacher and Duffy tell him they will claim in court Prado threatened his doctor to get it, which would constitute his third strike, earning him a life sentence. Al Capone went down for tax evasion, so whatever works. The button on this scene comes when a throng of DEA agents arrive to search Prado’s gallery. Duffy already told us, way back in episode one, that she was handling this investigation unofficially after that blown surveillance warrant got her ordered off the Prado case, but who remembers these things? Maybe all these other DEA agents are working off the books, too.
Back in Maine, Beck meets up with who he thinks is Prado’s representative — Neagley — while Reacher, Duffy, and Villanueva observe. Villanueva asks Duffy if a visible injury on her arm is the result of her fight with Harley last episode; she dismisses it as a “rug burn.” Villanueva, his instincts honed by his decades of service as a lawman, intuits that the only way a human being can reasonably incur a rug burn is via high-friction hotel room coitus with a 250-pound man. “You were supposed to be working!” he protests.
Zachary Beck is now sporting a bandage where his right ear used to be. When Quinn demanded a “matching set” in the last episode, he might’ve meant he was going to cut off Richard’s other one, but it turns out he wanted a father-and-son set. Neagley reveals to Beck that she’s speaking for Reacher, not Prado, and tells him his only chance of surviving this ordeal is to find out where and when Quinn’s big gun deal is happening so Reacher can kill Quinn. The green-screen work behind Maria Sten and Anthony Michael Hall in this “quarry” scene is laughable, Weather Channel–grade. Beck tells Neagley the buyers are flying in from Yemen, but that’s all he knows. After letting not one but two spies infiltrate his house, he’s understandably been cut out of the loop.
Now, at last, we see Teresa Daniel handcuffed to a pipe in some dingy basement. Quinn might be a fourth-rate international criminal mastermind, but he’s a first-rate sadist. He laments to his hostage that he’ll soon have to deliver her to his customers. “I could’ve had you all to myself,” he tells her. “Use you up, then cut off all your pretty pieces. Throw you in the riptide like chum when the fun’s over.” Then he forcibly injects her with heroin. There’s no part of this that isn’t gross. The actor’s name is Storm Steenson, and she doesn’t even get a line. I hope she’s bound for better things.
Anthony Michael Hall’s best scene of the season comes when Zachary catches Richard trying to repair the broken toy revolver he bought his dad as a 50th birthday gift. When he discovers what his son has done to try to reconnect with him, he confesses that he withdrew from Richard intentionally after Quinn invaded their lives. He expected to be killed eventually, and he didn’t want his death to be as painful for Richard as the passing of his mother, years prior, already was. “No one gets training on how to be a dad unless you get it from your own dad,” Zachary says, “I didn’t.” Hall is so good in these few moments that I wonder if this scene was the reason he took what has often been a thankless part.
Neagley, now fully integrated into the Reacher-Duffy-Villanueva camp, tails Quinn’s customers after they land at a private airfield that Villanueva tells us the Bushes use when they fly into Kennebunkport. It’s jarring to hear a real-world political family name-checked in a show this divorced from reality. Duffy and Villanueva, meanwhile, tell Reacher they’ll need the ATF to back them up when they bust Quinn. Reacher objects on the grounds that the ATF, being a law enforcement outfit, will not allow him to execute Quinn — which he already tried to do once! “I don’t want justice,” Reacher says. “I want vengeance.” You’re not Batman, man!
When Duffy brings word of this massive gun deal to the ATF, Sears, the senior ATF man in the room, quite reasonably tries to cut her and Villanueva out, pointing out that it’s a gun case, not a drug case, and that all the evidence they’ve gathered has been obtained illegally. He finally agrees to let her and Villanueva watch the bust from the van. My favorite part of the scene is that Sears never asks who Reacher is until the big man who’s been standing in the corner looking pissed off opens his mouth. This Honda Fit–size dude dressed in jeans and a T-shirt made it into a conference room inside a secure government building where an imminent law enforcement operation is being discussed without having to identify himself. Maybe you are Batman, man!
That’s actually less plausible than the fact that Reacher is able to dip out of the ATF van to grab a sniper rifle that he says he bought from a pawn shop (!), then stashed in the trunk of Duffy’s car, I guess? He’s still hell-bent on killing Quinn, even after Duffy reminds him that this will mean spending the rest of his life on the run. Reacher says this wouldn’t change his lifestyle much, though we know he lives off of his Army pension. Instead of trying to arrest him, Duffy sulks back to the van.
Taking up a shooting position, Reacher calls Neagley to warn her to get rid of all evidence they’ve been in contact for the last week so she won’t be implicated in his murder of Quinn, who’s due any minute now. When Neagley tells Reacher he must be wrong because she’s still tailing the gun buyers, Reacher infers that the deal will be happening at Beck’s house and that he and the ATF have been lured into a trap.
Only one episode remains, and Reacher still needs to settle up with Paulie!