Now more than ever, it feels like the bullies are winning, that the weak and dispossessed are on the ropes and in need of a champion. Maybe that’s why this new season of “Reacher” feels so goddamned satisfying, warts and all because if two movies, three series, and over two dozen books have taught the world anything, it’s that Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) doesn’t like bullies.
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Season three finds the eponymous character in his natural state, adrift when a kidnapping in a sleepy New England college town pulls him into the orbit of a shady rug importer, Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall). Reacher’s kidnapping intervention saves Beck’s son, Richard (Johnny Berchtold), leading the father to offer the 6’5” brick shit-house drifter an in-house security job. Beck isn’t the only one looking to enlist Reacher’s services, though, as he is also working a side hustle for D.E.A. agent Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy), which is really just a pretext for Reacher to get info on an old adversary, Quinn (Brian Tee).
Reacher’s involvement with each side is a fun and engaging journey of discovery, and for the first half of the season, it holds mainly true to the Lee Child book (“Persuader”), on which Season Three is based. The opening minutes find the audience thrown into the middle of the action in progress, with layers of revelation coming over time to assemble a clear picture of what’s going on with Beck, Reacher, Duffy, and Quinn. To its credit, the series is quicker to reveal what’s going on with everything than the book, pulling the curtain most of the way back by the end of episode one, which allows the rest of the story to unfold without any rush in the subsequent seven installments.
Those unsatisfied with Reacher’s return to established friendships in Season Two will be happy to know that Season Three is very much a standalone story, with only fleeting references to other book/movie/T.V. installments. A flashback episode and the backdoor pilot-inspired Neagley (Maria Sten) appearances aside; this season stands very much on its own and hones in on what makes the titular Ronin-like character so fun. Indeed, Reacher’s existence as an unmoored agent of chaos keeps things unpredictable and bone-crunchingly eventful. Still, it also allows for fun dynamics and interactions with characters discovering him for the first time.
Nowhere is this more pronounced and electric than with Duffy, whose Boston attitude and temper inject a spark into a character whose book counterpart is nowhere near as fun. Although Season three introduces a freakishly large bad guy, Paulie (Olivier Richters), as the season’s primary black-hat antagonist, it is Cassidy who stands out as the one most capable of going toe-to-toe with Ritchson. This series is at its best when Reacher has a fun audience surrogate to bounce exposition off of, and Duffy/Cassidy is as good as it gets in this regard.
Because the novels dedicate so much time to internal monologues and detective work, this exposition can sometimes get a bit tedious in the trenches of Season Three’s mid-section, however. The bad guys also don’t have the same pop as previous outings, though Hall does admirable work alongside the more bruising (and admittedly cartoonish) Richters. That said, there’s no shortage of disposable baddies for Reacher to compound fracture into oblivion, and Season three’s kills live up to the standard set by its predecessors.
Which, again, is the point. This is a show about a friggin’ massive, mean, morally righteous drifter with nothing to lose dispensing frontier justice in 21st-century America. Each of the eight episodes is smart enough to let Reacher off the leash at least once to punish bullies, save the day, or otherwise kick a little ass so as to restore balance to not just the show but the universe as a whole.
Fans of the broader series will be tickled at a few Easter Eggs from the books and movies (the Major Turner name-drop was fun), though devotees of “Persuader” might have some qualms about how a few minor changes early on begin to stack up in the back half of the season. What starts out as character trimming and plot streamlining (no Mrs. Beck, a smaller Duffy team, the removal of an unnecessary sexual assault subplot) has a butterfly effect on the final few episodes, leaving the original story’s major developments intact, but with a few tenuous stretches of the imagination needed to do so. Even so, the blueprint of the novel keeps the show on its rails, and when it doubt, Season three leans on what works (bone-crunching bully justice) any time things start to wobble.
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The show can get away with all of this because of Ritchson, who carries the full weight of this world’s conceit on his freakishly large shoulders and never misses a beat doing so. A series about a loner genius the size of an NFL linebacker who fights crime and protects the oppressed shouldn’t work this well, or be this fun, or feel so easy to consume…but it is. Through Jack Reacher, the audience can feel the thrill of standing up to the biggest bad guy or shrugging off danger that would make most tremble. Sure, the title character is a cold-blooded killer who plays by his own rules and is accountable to no one, but unlike the real world, he’s one of the good guys. [B+]