Tom Ley: Wow, I can’t believe this. After having been separated for more than a year, the Reacher Creatures have once again come back together to help each other in our time of need. The mission: Try to find something that any of us actually liked about Season 3 of Reacher.
Roth, I believe you are the only one among us who had a good time watching this season. Perhaps you could explain to us your values? Now?
David Roth: I was way higher on this season than any of you all, although I should clarify that this means mostly I laughed a few times and said “hell yeah” a couple times and was kind of enjoyably perplexed by much of what was going on—the simultaneous overstatement and understatement and general tonal psychosis, the janky settings that managed to look like no actual existing place while simultaneously being instantly identifiable as Canada, the berserk register of the broader Reacherverse and the absolute size of the big fella himself. I went in already having established that I will Keep Drinking That Garbage, and while I can identify that this was not quite as fizzy or flavorful a vintage of the garbage as the first season, it left me feeling, I wouldn’t say refreshed, but not thirsty. Less thirsty. (I will admit here that I worry that my time spent watching Hallmark movies for my Hallmark podcast has permanently damaged my brain vis-a-vis expectation-setting and an unhealthy capacity for being satisfied by what are on the merits hilariously unsatisfying filmed entertainments.)
Brandy Jensen: I’ll be the first to say it: Reacher is too big. Obviously, the first season arrived as a revelation to Reacher fans like myself who had long been annoyed by his sole cinematic representation coming in the notoriously small package that is Tom Cruise. Season 1 Reacher was beautifully, finally, appropriately enormous. Here was the large man we know and love. But the key thing there is that “man” is as important and “large,” and this time around his size approached inhuman territory. He is experiencing The Rock problems.
Chris Thompson: I had the impression that Reacher might actually have gotten a little bit smaller from Season 2? Or maybe I’m just used to this ultra-swollen Reacher. Anyway he did not seem to be in as much physical pain this season as last. Our boy could barely stand up last time. Maybe he and I both have adapted to his outrageous, manifestly unhealthy hugeness.
Tom: I think poor Reacher was definitely larger and more swollen in Season 3 than he was in 1 and 2. Chris, perhaps your perspective was thrown off by the inclusion of Mean Reacher in this season’s cast, the huge French guy who is like 7-foot-2 or something. Every scene in which Reacher was not in close proximity to Mean Reacher, particularly when he was striding down a dark road wearing nothing but his boxers, looking like a shaved Wendigo, was vaguely horrifying.
Chris: Yeah, there was the huge Dutch anti-Reacher this time. They tried to make Mean Reacher super scary, and were basically successful, but it was hard to miss that he was basically immobile and mostly sat at a guard station behind a huge gun all season, making scary faces.
David: I salute Alan Ritchson for being open about having to gear up to achieve his current dimensions but I also question whether those dimensions are necessary, let alone “practical” or “healthy.” He seems like an admirable and interesting enough dude, and I like his performance pretty well. But I also agree that Reacher Is Too Big, in ways that make other stuff harder to take. For instance one of the more amusing little Reacher things, for me, is that Reacher is capable of horniness and does fuck—once per season, and always a woman who is involved with law enforcement in some way and Has A Code, and I respect that Reacher can only become horny for someone who Has A Code. But he is also so big at this point that anything but kind striding through a doorway seems impractical and a little difficult for him. Ritchson looked like a hot large man in the first (and still best) season of the show. Now he looks like a Rob Liefeld drawing of that same character, just with normal hands and feet.
Tom: OK, beyond Reacher’s too-bigness, what else did we not like about this season, the plot of which I am still not super clear on. Reacher went undercover to bust up some kind of gun-running operation, and also to get revenge on a guy he shot in the head once and who is still alive but (maybe) has amnesia, and also to save a DEA agent’s criminal informant, and also to teach a one-eared rich kid important life lessons.
If I had to pick one thing I didn’t like about this season, I guess it would be the fact that Reacher never really kicked anyone’s ass in a particularly funny or creative way—where was the flying charcoal grill?—and then after that I would say I had very little tolerance for the DEA agents, who were his two main buddies in this one. Agent Duffy felt like a character that was cooked up sometime around 2004, when movie and TV writers were still under the impression that giving a character a ridiculous New England accent and making them say stuff like, “Nomah Forevah” and “I know you like to eat chowdah for breakfast” counted as character development. As for Agent Villanueva, why did they make that poor man wear nothing but a white tank top throughout the climax of the finale?
Brandy: I have to say I was impressed that the DEA offers its agents both a generous discretionary budget to spend on various motel rooms, as well as ample time off to pursue their outside interests. But Tom, I agree that as sidekicks they fell so short of the mark. Mostly because they are incompetent (we are supposed to find Agent Duffy heroic for her dedication to saving a young former drug addict who is only in danger of being human trafficked because she got fucked over by… Agent Duffy!) but also because that accent was so irritating I kept hoping she wouldn’t make it through any of the gunfights.
Chris: I wouldn’t say that I was hoping Duffy would eat it, but I felt certain at various points that Villanueva was gonna die. Like there were at least four different times when I was sure he was a goner. Eventually I started to be annoyed that they were creating this expectation and then leaving it unfulfilled.
My big gripe with this season is that they decided they needed Reacher to be in danger all the time. A nice thing about the first season was that Reacher was basically invincible. It was nice, in a way; it made for a relatively breezy watch, especially given the dark shit going on around Margrave. You just never felt that Reacher personally was in any danger, which went well with the presentation of the character as superhumanly large, superhumanly strong, and also much, much smarter than everyone else. This time they kept trying to make me worry about whether Reacher would be able to get out of this or that pickle, and I found it sort of exhausting. What is the point of giving me this huge monster of a hero if I then have to spend every episode worrying about his safety?
David: I have a theory about this season’s shortcomings that comes back to Chris’s point about how invincible (despite being smaller) Reacher was in that first season, which took place in a small town that seemed to exist within the same county as Dukes Of Hazard. I have my own preferences, but Big City/Operator Reacher is my least favorite so far—they will not shoot these things in New York, or as this season demonstrated in Maine, and the substitutes are all kind of stilted and fake-looking. But with Margrave, the setting was so totally fake-o from conception right through to execution that it fit—the tropiness of it flowed smoothly in both directions, and the vibe, while still completely batshit on the merits, was consistent.
I also think the success or failure of a season, for me, is a question of how you deploy Reacher, and in the first season he was just kind of doing his Extremely Violent Drifter thing, whereas in Season 2 he was a gun-toting paramilitary guy and in Season 3 he was supposed to be undercover. It’s not that Ritchson can’t pull all that stuff off so much as it is that the character of Reacher can’t do it—the idea of him sneaking around, for instance, is absurd on its face. It’s like watching an industrial refrigerator sneaking around. Same goes for “being in great danger.”
Tom: Yeah, Reacher is not the kind of character that should be saying, “Sorry, I had to go take a leak,” three times an episode as a way of explaining his absence to the criminals that he is working beside while undercover. Reacher should not have to trouble himself with such elementary subterfuge! Reacher doesn’t “take leaks” so that he can use his stupid little cell phone to call his idiot DEA compatriots and relay information to them; Reacher kicks a lot of ass until the world is remade to his liking.
Chris: I liked how many times he would shut a flimsy interior door and like turn on a bathroom faucet so that he could then have a full-voice phone conversation with his DEA handlers, in a house full of gun-runners who we were supposed to worry would simply shoot his ass full of bullets.
David: I laughed at those moments and I think that I was supposed to. The physical absurdity of having a man the size of an armoire tiptoeing around or having a whispered conversation did sort of register in a funny way on the screen for me. Like I was kind of hooting—not fully hooting, but sort of whooting softly—whenever they made him shimmy out of the manor house by sliding around and dangling from eaves. I wanted to see the big boy get on the roof.
Chris: I loved the part where Reacher snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, dangled from the eaves, hoofed it to the waterfront, climbed down a cliff, disrobed, and then swam through the ocean for a while, and then got out of the ocean, walked for a while, got dressed, drove for a while, completed some complicated task, and then did the whole shit in reverse, and was home like one hour later. Errands are the worst.
Tom: I do kind of get the sense that the whole point of this season was just making Reacher fight Mean Reacher, which, fair. I will admit that I really wanted to see that shit. I will further admit that once the big fight actually did arrive, I found myself pretty pleased. I thought it was appropriately goofy, and I really enjoyed how drawn out it was, with both Reacher and Mean Reacher continuing to revive themselves and stalk the other like horror-movie villains. They did a great job getting the Big Ominous Gun involved, too.
David: Yeah that was shot and paced in a fun way. Like the big alley fight scene from They Live but unfolding across a mile of Southern Maine waterfront, and also both people in the fight are Jason Voorhees.
Brandy: I understand the instinct of watching everyone cheer that we finally have a Big Reacher and deciding to tee up the book where he has to face a guy who is even bigger. What I want is for them to adapt the one where his foe is a murderous narco trafficker who is like 4-foot-11. There is a big final fight where circumstances demand that Reacher has to be kneeling the whole time. Please do that next.
Chris: Wait, Brandy, is that real? That’s a real thing??
Brandy: Chris I would never lie to you about something so important.
Chris: Holy shit, they have gotta do that. I would pay anything.
This season had some interesting Guys in there, now that I think about it. I liked that Angel Doll guy who Reacher murdered in the office during one of his midnight escapades. I wish they’d kept that guy around, he was fun. I liked his whole deal, I was even hoping he’d become a good guy.
David: Yeah this is another area where I thought the season more or less delivered. Lots of nasty motormouthed little minor bad guys for Reacher to get upset with and eventually fold in half. Angel Doll, gone too soon. Ponytail henchman who instantly barfed when Reacher punched him in the stomach, also gone pretty quickly in retrospect.
Chris: They owned that guy pretty hard, at the end of his arc. Duffy had complicated emotions about his demise. On the one hand, can’t be gloating about your evil deeds all the time. On the other, HE WAS OWAH ONE GOOD LEED ‘N NOW HE’S FACKIN’ DEAD.
David: Brandy, as the person who has actually read (some/many) of the Lee Child Reacher books, can you situate this season as a specific Type Of Reacher? Not just like Gun Reacher vs. Fist Reacher, or City Reacher vs. Country Reacher.
Brandy: So, I do remember liking the book much more than I liked this season, and I think the reason is that the book has a nice balance of Reacher Doing Reacher Shit and flashback-type stuff where you learn more about his backstory as a Special Investigator. Season 2 of the show did a lot of that work in ways the books tend to dole out a bit more sparingly, so you lose some of the appeal of it here. I think also the book was trying to be more of a psychological thriller than a straight “beat up some goons in an alley” with the villain? Xavier Quinn was meant to be sort of a genius sociopath, which you get here but mainly the sociopath bit.
David: That makes sense, and fits with something I struggled with in assessing the season. There’s a part of me that is very resistant to the idea of like huffily sending back the slop I ordered because it “tastes like slop,” and I like this dumb show on its own dumb terms. But also we know that there’s another way to go with all this, which is less cartoonish and a little bit more like the first and best of the McQuarrie/Cruise Jack Reacher movies, where it’s all very overstated but also kind of serious and scary; you lose the weird whimsy and verve in that process, but it is easier to know what you’re watching. The actual menace from Werner Herzog or Jai Courtney in Jack Reacher wouldn’t fit with the more A-Team-ish tone of the show, and so the villain couldn’t really have been appropriately big within those parameters. The result is just a sneering guy with a fetish for ear-play and Russian roulette. This isn’t to fault Brian Tee, who plays Quinn; I thought he was fine, and that the performances overall were good, including Sonya Cassidy, an actress I think gave one of the better TV performances I’ve seen in Lodge 49 but who was given a very annoying character and as Tom pointed out some truly impossible lines as Duffy. You just have to be in the thing that you’re in, and I am talking about very different things.
Chris: I’m hearing, bring back own-finger-eating Werner Herzog.
David: The people are saying, “You gotta give us more Zek, the whispering Euro-sadist!”
Tom: Yeah, I think we have hit on an easy two-step process for revitalizing the Reacher television franchise: Make him fight the 4-foot-11 guy in a crawlspace and bring back the bad guy who makes people eat their own fingers.
Brandy: I expect our invitation to join the writers’ room will be arriving shortly.
