Thanks to Elspeth (Kathleen Richardson) and her henchman Springfield (Aaron Poole), Reacher (Alan Ritchson) and Tamara (Sydelle Noel) live another afternoon. This is good, because Reacher’s concern for manners and proper behaviour is such that he is willing to break every finger belonging to pharmaceutical billionaire Ahlquist (Shawn Doyle) to get to the truth. And we can handle the truth, but boy howdy is it a bad one. We get confirmation at last that the American government did do some terrible things in Indonesia under the code name Operation Mongoose. And even though he was there, ‘boy scout’ Sampson (Marc Blucas finally getting to stretch his legs) was deliberately kept from knowing the whole truth.
But there’s no time for these revelations to sink in as “Vote for Sampson” gallops through flashbacks to Operation Mongoose, just how deeply Sampson was involved in it, and just how villainous our villains really are. There’s less action in this episode than usual for Reacher, but we are revving up for the big finale and all the implications of the season’s varying plot strands must be tied together. For a show more normally focused on action instead of words, the talking here is paced just as expertly. Editor Sang Han makes the whole episode flow so the runtime isn’t felt at all.
There’s no sex stuff either, but there is a minor moment of comedy that proves I was right when I said last year that Reacher is the new James Bond. But that is also the only moment of comedy in a very, very bleak episode. Docherty (Kevin Corrigan also getting to stretch his legs at last) is angry with everybody for their ineptitude and willingness to conceal the full truth from him. At least it’s finally clear that while he’s maybe not perfect police, he’s ride or die for Tamara. The things Jacob (Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette) learned on his adventures on his own in the previous episode are essential to saving the day, too. And yet something more interesting happens again that no one directly addresses: Reacher leaps to conclusions, with consequences. For someone who believes in behaving properly, with exceptional attention to detail and keen intuition about other people, he sure is terrible at predicting strategy. All his attempts to outwit the villains here are wrong, and those mistakes cost people’s lives. So the man without fear has at least one flaw.
On the other hand this is where Reacher’s experience of military training is very clearly part of his character. Soldiers are taught to act in moments of crisis, and that doing the wrong thing is better than freezing and doing nothing. You can always pivot away from the wrong decision into something better, but inaction is the only unacceptable choice. That means Reacher’s frantic brainstorming at least has some excuse, but it’s hard to know if it helped as much as it ought. The unasked and unanswered question is: if Tamara and Jacob were handling this without him, would they have been able to act so decisively? Or would they have lacked confidence in their judgement, meaning that they risked allowing the terrible thing to happen? Or would they even have gotten this far?
Signs point to maybe. When you are working within the law you absolutely have to work within the rules. Reacher has no such guiderails, other than his own conscience. Normally he is very happy to trust his good intentions, as his actions here make brutally clear, but there is a trail of corpses behind him this series that are not all justifiable. To stop the villains some of this might be necessary, but clearer heads and calmer hearts might have done better. Of course, the villains are so villainous here that stopping them without violence is just wishful thinking.
Let’s be clear: Reacher is not the villain here, and the unbelievable time pressure they are under makes some unvoiced panic understandable. But the man without fear is supposed to be above making mistakes, and it is always a shame when he is not. And yet violent cathartic fantasy can still hold space for someone learning from their mistakes, even if the learning arrives in the very last moment of their life. As the big finale demonstrates, if you don’t act at the decisive moment, all is lost. But no one, not even Reacher, has a licence to kill without consequence.
Credit needle drop: “One More F*cking Time” by Motörhead.
Reacher is now streaming on Prime Video.
Learn more about the show at the IMDB site for the title.
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