Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
All the action scenes in the world can’t save Reacher from itself. The fourth season of Amazon’s beat-em-up crime thriller ended with a bang, sure, but it was the kind of bang that’s used to hide the whimpering underneath. Spoilers ahead.
Two things might have cheered me up this episode. First, when Reacher (Alan Ritchson) encounters Lila and Amisha Hoth, also known as the Karambit Sisters, if he’d just pulled out a pistol and shot them dead on the spot, like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Second, when Reacher is taking the train out of town he sees an old homeless lady sit right where Anna Merrick killed herself at the start of the season. This was the inciting incident that sets everything else into motion. At the time, he was worried she had a bomb and was going to blow up the train.
Well, when he sees the sad old homeless lady, Reacher goes and sits next to her and rips off part of his Philly Cheesesteak and gives it to her. My ending? This old lady is the suicide bomber, and when he sits down next to her she detonates, blowing up the train, killing Jack Reacher and putting us all out of our misery.
Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
Alas, this shambling corpse of a show will continue, and after this season I have given up hope that it will ever return to its glory days. And by “glory days” I mean Season 1, because nothing after Season 1 has been even remotely as good (even if Season 3 was okay).
Most of this episode is just a big action set-piece. After congressman Sampson foiled the suicide bomber last week, our heroes rush off to find the Hoth sisters. A security guard just shoots at them for no reason, but they get away. None of the good guys die this season, though I sure was hoping Jacob would eat one in the end. No such luck!
Our heroes are so smart and our villains are so stupid, that everyone returns to the old abandoned restaurant that really ought to be a cordoned off police zone at this point, with actual police stationed there. But hey, details don’t matter. That’s the lesson Season 4 hammers into our skulls. Season 2 they said “Details matter” about 14 trillion times, but in Season 4 they throw all detail to the wind. So the Hoth sisters and their never-ending supply of goons go back to where they were mixing up chemical weapons and murdering people because there is literally nowhere else in Philadelphia for them to go. Or something.
Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
The good guys show up and a big fight ensues. Some of the action is pretty decent. Reacher’s fight with three of the hired thugs has some fun moments, like Reacher leaping down the stairs into a door that snaps a guy’s neck, some nail-gun action and one very useful elevator shaft. But the problem here, once again, is that it takes Reacher forever to beat these guys. Reacher is supposed to be this ultra-violent, ultra-competent fighter. He should have mowed through a dozen goons in this fight, not just the same three for so long.
Worse, there’s no plan. One of the great things about Season 1 is all the careful planning that gives Reacher an edge. He sets up ambushes. He’s meticulous. Here, they all just run in guns blazing. Tamara and Jacob get in a tediously long gunfight with some goons that takes place in the room with the chemical weapon. At one point somebody mentions not shooting it since they’d all die, but that doesn’t stop either side. Through miraculous divine intervention, somehow they don’t ever shoot the jars of chemicals or knock them over. What luck!
Tamara runs out of ammo 86 times during this gunfight. That’s her secret power. She runs out of ammo over and over again and still gets the upper hand. Put her in a Resident Evil movie, ASAP!
Cut Me Deep
Reacher
Credit: Prime Video
After Reacher finishes off the thugs, the Karambit Sisters show up. Now I like nothing better than watching my super-tough badass protagonist get his butt kicked by two tiny women, so this was a great scene. They cut him everywhere except the throat, where they normally cut people. Reacher loses roughly 98% of his blood and several important appendages but still manages to throw Amisha out the window. Don’t worry, she’s no Hans Gruber. She lives.
At one point Lila, drunk with bloodlust as Reacher bleeds from 18 billion million infinity cuts, growls, “I don’t know what I like better, bleeping you or killing you!” Reacher stabs her with a syringe full of the chemical weapon and replies, “I know what I like better.”
But then he doesn’t tell us what! It’s one of those great moments where you, the viewer, have to decide what the deeper meaning is. Like that scene in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray whispers something in Scarlett Johansson’s ear and we never hear it. Pretty deep, man. Pretty deep. Though not nearly as deep as the karambit cuts criss-crossing Reacher from head to toe as he exsanguinates all over East Philly.
Outside, the Bad CIA Guy shows up and he’s about to kill Reacher after some monologuing when Amisha appears – very much not dead! – and kills Bad CIA Guy. Then Amisha is about to kill Reacher when BANG – down she goes, shot by ace sniper and overall hero, Jacob, who should get his own spinoff now. It can join the Extended Reacher Universe along with Neagley and Details Matter: The Game Show! and The Bachelor: Reacher Edition (too soon?) and some Tamara spinoff where she’s just running out of ammo in every scene. Literally every scene, even scenes where she has no business even carrying a gun.
Like tears in the rain.
Credit: Prime Video
In the end, all the good guys survive except for Sampson who very much died when the suicide bomber exploded. His super sus wife, who I still think was behind the entire operation, gets away with it and Reacher is none the wiser. He gives the thumb drive to Plum (so now it’s a Plum drive, eh? eh?) along with the cat, because now he likes Plum even though before he mostly treated the intrepid blogger like a nuisance. “Get that Pulitzer,” he says, tearing off half a sandwich and stuffing it in Plum’s face before flicking just a crumb, past Plum and the thumb drive, to the cat.
Tamara gets a Medal of Actually Good Detective Work and Reacher gives her part of his sandwich and a pat on the back. Jacob scatters his sister’s ashes and Tamara holds his hand but he has to let go because Reacher gives him a moldy old Philly Cheesesteak he’s had since that first episode. “You earned it, buddy,” Reacher tells him, and Jacob says “It’s not about getting revenge on my sister and nephew’s killers, it’s about the friends we made along the way.”
Aw, what a wholesome show. I sure hope they keep up this level of writing quality for Season 5. Or at least just stuff it with so much violence and explosions and blood and gore that we don’t notice what an insipid, increasingly ridiculous insult to our intelligence this show truly is.
Watch my latest Reacher video below (I have a finale video incoming, so be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel):
Read the rest of my Reacher Season 4 coverage below:
The 5 Biggest Problems With Reacher Season 4
Reacher Season 4, Episode 7 Review: This Isn’t Even A Jack Reacher Show Anymore
Reacher Season 4, Episode 6 Review: Can This Show Get Any Worse?
What did you think of the Season 4 finale? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
Leave a comment