The most popular American TV show is back, and as the first three (plus!) episodes of the new season of Reacher recently dropped on Prime Video, it’s worth discussing why this show – the modern James Bond – has been such a smash hit.
The similarities with James Bond do not begin and end with the fact Reacher the show is based on a series of wildly successful thrillers, unread by me, by the British author Lee Child. But both Bond and Reacher, character and series, are romantic fantasies for men. They offer up an ideal lifestyle – suave globetrotting womanizer for Bond, strong America-traversing ‘vagrant’ for Reacher – with the backstory to enable it. Secret-government-assassin for Bond, former-military-intelligence for Reacher. In both cases, they are capable of literally anything: speaking any language, completing any physical task, using any piece of technology, seducing any woman, and defeating any opponent.
The movies built around the James Bond character have run for over fifty years, and despite being controlled by an American family have remained British at their core. Reacher is the opposite: despite being created by a Brit and filmed in Canada, they are American stories down to the toenails. And the reason for Reacher the show’s wild success is because Reacher the character is the rarest of creatures in the modern world: a man without fear.
As seen in series one, Reacher’s entire family is dead, meaning he is not burdened by the responsibilities that come with loving and being loved. His friends, as shown in series two, are also former military intelligence, meaning they are are more than capable of handling themselves. Since leaving the military, Reacher owns only the clothes on his body, a bank card, a passport, and a toothbrush, meaning that he has no things to lose. (He shops second-hand as needed, including underwear.) Without a cellphone, he cannot be physically tracked, meaning he has a freedom of movement unusual in the modern world. Thanks to his time in military intelligence Reacher is unusually observant, and thanks to his monthly military pension has enough money for the basics. Since he doesn’t need to work, he has the time to travel as the whim takes him, a luxury hard to imagine in scraping-by modern America. He’s also a clever and quick-witted problem-solver; comparisons to the wide-ranging intelligence of Sherlock Holmes, while just as preposterous, are not far off the mark.
Reacher is also someone both large enough and agile enough – especially as portrayed by Alan Ritchson – to make an impression on everyone he meets. Anyone foolish enough to challenge him physically is almost always defeated without his breaking a sweat, regardless of their weapon of choice. And above all Reacher has a very clear if idiosyncratic sense of right and wrong. Combined with his fighting abilities and his intelligence he is therefore prepared to take the law into his significant hands, and get incredibly violent if he feels it is the right thing to do. Thanks to his connections, his physical agility and his skills at disposing of corpses, he’s also usually capable of doing so without legal consequences. The moral ones are left to the audience to decide.
Therefore Reacher is as close to a superhero as it is possible for a person to be, but he has to go to an extraordinary amount of effort to maintain this life without fear. The physical effort needed to maintain a physique such as Ritchson’s is never shown, though in the first two series Reacher’s trash eating habits were the subject of some discussion. On the other hand, the social and mental effort of living without a fixed address, possessions or an easy way to maintain social ties are detailed in the extreme. Reacher chooses not to be burdened in any way, even by extra socks, a towel, or some toothpaste. If this means he spent years out of contact with his beloved brother before his death, or learns about another close friend’s death only years after the fact, so be it. In himself Reacher has all he needs. This is a charming fantasy for a lot of men, taken to the extreme. (And looking as Ritchson does, Reacher is a charming fantasy for a lot of women, too.) The wild success of the show means it’s tapped a very raw nerve.
When Reacher comes into some money at the end of season two, his only expenditure for himself was an annual cross-country bus pass. This is never mentioned in season three, the first episodes dropped in February, and which gets even more explicit about fulfilling romantic fantasies for men. (An important sidebar here is that homosexuality barely exists in this show. Perhaps the man without fear has a mild concern after all.) Season one of Reacher was about introducing the man. Season two was about putting the man in the context of his military intelligence background. Season three is about the man in action on his own terms.
In both previous seasons, Reacher’s most important ally was Neagley (Maria Sten), a former colleague now a private investigator in Chicago. They have a solid mutual understanding and respect based on their willingness to kill a lot of people without hesitation for each other. We know very little about her on a personal level except that she hates to be touched and is possibly asexual. She is the only person who Reacher allows anywhere close to him, probably because of this unusual way their life choices mirror each other.
Though in fairness to Reacher, he is a respecter of women generally, especially if they are work colleagues who meet his impossibly difficult standards. And it’s clear from this season of Reacher that this respect extends to “Mare of Easttown,” because the law enforcement official Reacher pairs up with this season has a very strong local accent. Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy), a DEA agent based in Maine, knows her baseball, meaning Reacher likes her right away. One of her confidential informants, a young woman named Theresa, is missing. It’s believed the location of this MacGuffin, I mean Theresa, might be known by import-exporter Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall, a profoundly interesting casting choice), who lives in well-guarded splendor on the coastline with his son Richard (Johnny Berchtold), a freshman at the nearby college. The guards include Chapman Duke (Donald Sales) and Paulie Van Hoeven (Olivier Richters), an enormous Dutchman who is quite literally double Reacher’s size. Of course the big scary men hate each other on sight, and the show is so confident we’ll agree with Reacher on this they put some jokes about steroids into Reacher’s mouth.
After a series of machinations reviewers have been specifically instructed not to spoil, including the least professional job interview of all time, Reacher ends up inside Beck’s compound with a teeny cellphone containing Duffy’s number hidden in the heel of his boot. Beck’s company, the perfectly irritatingly named Bizarre Bazaar, imports rugs to a warehouse in coastal Maine for national distribution, but that doesn’t explain why his home office is wallpapered with machine guns. Nor does it quite make sense that a place so thoroughly secured from the outside world, not least by Paulie in the guardhouse, would fail to have motion sensors on the building itself. Though let’s not be churlish: Reacher needs to be able to sneak out of the window onto the roof and clamber down four stories in silence like any self-respecting teenage boy dodging curfew, or there’s not much of a plot.
Who installed such robust guttering? Where is Theresa? Will Duffy assist with Reacher’s agenda, a search for “the worst man I’ve ever met” named Xavier Quinn (Brian Tee) who is somehow connected to Beck? How is Beck able to maintain such a discreetly frightening lifestyle? What is Beck and Quinn’s connection to a drug dealer from Los Angeles named Darien Prado (Greg Bryk)? What happened to Richard’s ear? How can rookie DEA agent Steven Eliot (Daniel David Stewart) ever gain Duffy’s respect? Will Reacher ever get to enjoy good lobster as opposed to the “subpar” lobster he ate in Cape May that was so disappointing he went north to Maine? And will Duffy’s colleague Billy Villanueva (Roberto Montesinos) ever get his Ethel Merman disco record back?
There’s only one way to find out…
Credit needle drop: “All My Feelings Denied” by Thee Headcoats
Season 3 of Reacher is now streaming on Prime Video.
Learn more about the show, including how to watch, at the official site for the title.
You might also like…
