The Season 4 Plot of 'Reacher' Could've Been an Email

I enjoy the hell out of the first two or three episodes of Reacher every season. Reacher is at its peak when Reacher is being all stoic as hell, acting like a badass detective, and figuring things out while knocking heads. Invariably, he makes some acquaintances who don’t particularly like him, but who ultimately work with him anyway to figure out the conspiracy at play and they all become friends.

But I also think maybe Tom Cruise had it right: Reacher works best as a two-hour movie. It’s not like the latter five episodes of each Reacher season aren’t entertaining, but they quickly devolve into a numbing cycle of repetition. Beat someone up, nearly get killed, end an episode on a cliffhanger, open an episode by escaping a near-death situation, and repeat the process all over again until the penultimate episode — which, especially this season, is basically one hour-long exposition dump where someone explains the entire conspiracy point by point before Reacher ends their life. Because that’s what Reacher does: He drops bodies. Sometimes in clever or gruesome ways, but usually as part of a fight sequence that lasts twice as long as it should.

Then the final episode rolls around. The mystery has already been resolved, and Reacher just has to kill the people responsible before they kill more people. It involves a lot of fighting, a lot of shootouts, and invariably, Reacher ending up near-dead or in a hospital bed before he wakes up and leaves against doctor’s orders before starting the whole saga all over again in the next season.

There’s nothing really wrong with this. It’s very on brand for the Shows-for-Guys-Who-Like-Shows vibe that Prime Video is exploiting when it’s not exploiting Shows-for-Teenage-Girls-Who-Like-Shows. It’s just that each season gets so long in the tooth that I begin to feel numb from all the action. Action should be dessert, not the main course.

The short version is this (and the season might have worked better if it had been a shorter version): Reacher finds a woman on a subway holding a bag with what looks like a bomb. Reacher approaches her in an attempt to calmly disarm her. It doesn’t work. She pulls a gun out of her bag and shoots herself dead. Detectives interrogate him. Meanwhile, it turns out that the woman who took her own life had a flash drive, because the MacGuffin is always a flash drive.

A lot of different agencies get involved because everyone wants to find this flash drive, though we have no idea what’s on it. A woman named Lila claims that the flash drive contains information proving that a politician running for President is her father, and she needs to prove that because she has cancer and he can provide bone marrow to save her life. Reacher believes her, and he eventually sleeps with her.

None of that is true. Lila and the woman she claims is her mother, Amisha, are actually the villains. Once you clear away five episodes of clutter and misdirect, Lila and Amisha are trying to build a chemical bomb and sell it for a lot of money. That’s it. Two women are trying to sell a chemical bomb for money, but there are like six layers of meaningless conspiracy and 100+ dead red shirts lying on top of that.

It is not a compelling mystery beyond the first two episodes. It is entertaining to watch Reacher beat up people. But there can be so much of a good thing that it gets kind of boring because of all that plot armor that Reacher and his season-long friends have. It’s great and all, but the plot could’ve been an email.