Only a couple episodes left of Reacher Season 4 on Prime Video, and people are still dying over this goddamn flash drive. When we left him, the big fella was in a tight spot, cornered by Lila and Amisha inside the abandoned restaurant they’d transformed into a kill chamber. It really seemed like our large-format friend would be forced to give up the goods. Especially since Amisha had her karmabit poked into Jacob’s neck. But Season 4 has smoothed the contours of this series to make them even more malleable. Sure, it still delivers on the Reacher Stomps. But it has also hit on a fresh idea for its succession of ever-sillier boutique beatdowns. Oh, Reacher is up against it with an adversary? Just add more adversaries! They don’t even require names! Here in Episode 6, just as Reacher’s about to hand Lila the drive, another set of faceless armed goons smash their way in. Their smoke grenades wreath the latest round of deadly Reacher pandemonium in gloom.
You’ve gotta love a show with this much week-in, week-out commitment to its own ridiculous bit. Nobody can see anything in the smokey haze, but the goons are shooting, the Indonesian killers are slicing, and Reacher is hurling bodies through rotting drywall. Ultimately the nameless thugs end up in a pile of the vanquished, Lila absconds with the drive after grabbing it during the struggle, and the only proper noun casualty is Russell Plum. He took one in the lung, but the blogger-conspiracist is still in the fight. Before heading to the ER with Jacob, Russell wheezes to Reacher and Tamara the name of the chemist from the contested file photo. They lost the drive, but they gained a lead.
“We look like shit, and you’re covered in blood. That stands out, even in Philly.” As they depart the scene of their latest violent confrontation, Green pulls Reacher into an alley. They’ll rinse off with a hose and find some tossed-off replacement duds. Like a tent-sized promotional tee for King Tough – “get cracked in Philadelphia” – and for Tamara, a shirt supporting the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, her beloved Flyers’ minor-league affiliate. Considering her counterpart, bulging and shirtless, Tamara says “Conan” isn’t her type. But she also calls him out for sleeping with the enemy. Because there is only way Lila would know about the scar she mentioned, the prominent one roughly stitched across his belly. (It’s a character peg from the pages of Reacher, famously from terrorist bomber shrapnel.) “Lila sexed you up to get you to do what she wants,” Tamara says. Which isn’t exactly how it went down. Reacher and Lila sexed each other up.
And besides, that was technically before Lila was revealed as the karambit killer. And anyways, Reacher himself has always been a killer. He shrugs in the luggage hold of the tourist bus where they have stowed away. Consequences for his actions? Come on. That’s for some other show. The bus takes them ninety minutes outside of Philadelphia to the headquarters of a pharmaceutical company founded by Leo Ahlquist (Shawn Doyle), the chemist from the past.
With the flash drive secured, more of Lila and Amisha’s plan is revealed. They have a whole setup. It includes more gunmen on retainer, racks of beakers and burners and other chemistry equipment, and harried techies who bristle at these impatient, hovering blade-twirlers. The computer guys are using artificial intelligence to enhance the background of the photo on the flash drive, Lila and Amisha have lined up buyers for whatever they’re trying to recreate, and the whole process is taking too long. But they also receive a visitor. “Thank you for your act of selflessness,” they tell the man. This can only be Tomas Waberi (Talijah Levene), the mysterious traveler from Djibouti. Wherever he fits in, we can be sure it’s part of their psychopathic ideology. “I’ll walk through hell with you,” Lila tells Amisha, her eyes flashing like the glint of a blade.
And how about this for some boutique fight sequence silliness? Reacher and Green discover Leo Ahlquist in his company’s server room, where he’s desperately feeding hard drives into an industrial crusher. Destroying evidence. And with its hungry maw of churning metal teeth, the machine might as well be Chekov’s gun. “I knew you or someone like you would show up!” Ahlquist says. He was warned by Cahill, Sampson’s chief of staff who tried to raw dog gravity. What they did back in Indonesia during the ’90s would be found out one day, and that day is today. Ahlquist is frantic. Right up until his latest group of mercenaries enter the room.
So all season long, the nameless mercs who crashed Reacher’s stomping parties were hired by Ahlquist to cover his involvement. “At great expense,” he adds, which tees up Reacher’s comeback. “Shame I killed so many.” It also tees up the latest throwdown. Tamara Green beats one guy with a server blade while Reacher does indeed plunge an attacker’s hand into the server crusher. It’s as satisfying as the look on Alan Ritchson’s face when Reacher does it. But it does not end this battle. The Big Cheesesteak gets tased for his efforts, and Tamara is subdued. They wake up cuffed, in the back of a van, with a tarp spread beneath them. This is the end of the line. The latest tight spot. They are about to be killed. But this is also Reacher, so maybe — probably — not.
Pocket Items for Reacher Season 4 Episode 6 (“Plum Out of Luck”):
- Jacob called his “unc” for help. Bad idea. Marty Derosa (Nick Searcy), his father’s old partner from Episode 5, sells him out. Derosa shows up in Philly, but turns Jacob over to Docherty. We still don’t know what side he’s on!
- “You put your arm around Paul Bunyan, and called him your old friend in front of the media.” Elspeth Sampson worries about the ever-widening Reacher-sized hole being blown in her husband’s political campaign.
- NHL centers and wingers are well-represented among the childhood pet names of Detective Tamara “Don’t be shitty to my Gritty” Green. The lifelong Philadelphia Flyers fan remembers some guys — Eric Lindros, Bobby Clarke, Tim Kerr, Dave Shultz — as she’s trying to deflect her brain from tourist bus claustrophobia.
- “I once told a friend, we live and then we die — as long as we do both properly, we don’t have much to regret.” This is Reacher to Tamara as they anticipate being murdered by Ahlquist’s goons. But it’s also Reacher referencing Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), his old Army homie, de facto bff and longtime spiritual backstop. We can’t wait for Neagley to be the star of her own throwdown.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
