Plum Out of Luck
Season 4
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
While the Big Man and the Philly cop catch a bus, their reporter pal catches a bullet.
Photo: Prime
Three-quarters of the way through an all-in-all pretty thrilling Reacher season, a picaresque episode introduces still another villain and concludes on a particularly dire cliffhanger. In the more compressed idiom of three-act-movie storytelling, this chapter would represent the end of act two, when all hope appears lost.
The final moments of the episode find the Clue Gang scattered and imperiled: Plum is in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest, and his odds seem better than those of his comrades. Jacob and the Reacher-Green duo are once again captives, being (separately) driven to remote spots for execution. The end-credits needle drop is more like a guillotine drop: Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Ask not for whom the cowbell tolls.
Plum catches that bullet by having the rotten luck to return to the abandoned Philly restaurant that Anna Merrick’s phone sent the team to check out just as femmes fatale Lila and Amisha Hoth, with Jacob as their hostage, are staring down Reacher and Green, the latter trying to decide whether she can shoot Amisha without killing Jacob, too. Plum stumbles in muttering about how some guys who creeped him out at the library — where he was working to identify the mysterious fourth man in the old photo with now-Congressman John Sampson, his chief of staff Nolan Cahill, and war-criminal-in-waiting Reza Putra — “could’ve just been homeless, or they could’ve been assassins” when a round comes flying through the window, knocking him on his back. The goon squad Reacher & Co. have taken to calling the Reds arrive in force, throwing smoke grenades and armed with automatic rifles.
So begins a chaotic three-way fight between the Clue Gang, the Reds, and the Karmabits. Machine guns blast, and blades flash in a smoke-filled room in a crumbling building that wouldn’t be safe to walk around in even without the company of people trying to put aftermarket holes in you. It’s a wonder anyone gets out alive; in Reacher-world, the only casualties are the Reds and Plum. (Lila and Amisha escape via a noisy, slow-moving freight elevator, which is a reach, as it were, even for this show, but okay.) Jacob takes one of the dead Reds’ cars to drive Plum to the hospital himself. Cops are inbound, but Jacob risks his own freedom to give his ally a better chance at survival. Even Reacher is impressed.
Before Jacob drives him away, Plum is able to whisper that he identified the mystery man in the photo as a chemist named Ahlquist, CEO of Plutus Chemical in Dover, Delaware. Reacher wants to track him down right away, but Green points out that “we look like shit and you’re covered in blood. That stands out even in Philly.” Even in Toronto-as-Philly! Just then, they see their fugitive faces projected two stories tall on building-mounted LEDs in a public square.
It’s curious, then, that it’s not until Green gets an eyeful of shirtless Reacher as they swap out their bloodied clothes for newly sourced Philly swag in an alley that she concludes he’s too hulking to get lost in a crowd — “Get Cracked in Philadelphia” Liberty Bell T-shirt or no. Noticing the scar on his stomach Lila mentioned during their standoff moments earlier, she can’t help but needle Reacher for sleeping with the enemy.
“You were in a no-tell motel getting busy with a killer,” Green says.
“So was she,” Reacher retorts.
Reacher, in turn, points out the palpable affection between Green and Jacob Merrick, “the anti-Conan type. And a good guy.” I was glad to hear Jacob, whose utter normalcy makes him seem like a weakling in Reacher-world, get a vote of confidence from the big guy. They still need to find their way to Delaware to talk to the chemist in that photo without getting spotted. Reacher has a plan.
Our one scene in the Sampson camp this week finds the congressman’s wife, Elspeth, warning him that having embraced Major Reacher, who is now a fugitive, in front of the press is a crisis that could tank his presidential aspirations. Sampson orders Springfield, his security man, to find that same chemist Reacher is seeking and thus to find Reacher. And then? “Handle it,” Sampson says. The question of whether Sampson is an ethical man or merely a pragmatic one would appear to have been answered.
That Philly-to-Dover journey is a road trip of a little over 80 miles, but it probably feels a lot longer crammed into the baggage hold of a Peter Pan bus, where Green and Reacher stow away. Green seems to be talking gibberish; in fact, she’s running through the names of the pet fish she owned as a child. (They were all named after Philadelphia Flyers.) Reacher infers she’s trying to fight off claustrophobia.
“Phobias are emotional reactions to perceived but unreal threats,” he op-eds, showing that tender bedside manner we’ve come to love. “Focus your mind on something logical and your brain won’t have room for nonsense. Nothing more logical than math.” He helps his friend by throwing out some times tables for her to solve. My partner actually did this for me a few nights after we watched this episode, when I was freaking out about a medical procedure I’d scheduled for an unholy hour the next morning. It kinda worked!
Here at last, Green tells Reacher the much-teased backstory of how a detective as sharp as she is got benched. A few years prior, her superiors ordered her not to pursue an open-and-shut case against a college kid who assaulted a waitress because the brat’s parents were campaign contributors to the mayor. Instead, she made a big show of humiliating the kid by arresting him as publicly as possible. After that righteous indulgence got her stuck on a shit detail with do-nothing clock-puncher Shaun Docherty as a partner, she let Docherty’s ennui infect her, too. She laments the irony — or maybe it’s more like symmetry — that she’s now found a case that has reawakened her social conscience, and it’s likely to cost her her badge and land her in jail. At least she’s made some good friends along the way.
Having evaded the Philly cops who tried to arrest him when he dropped off Plum at the hospital, Jacob retreats to a baseball diamond to gather his thoughts. A banner for Little League sponsor Sal’s Water Ice does the noble work of convincing us this is still someplace adjacent to Philadelphia. Jacob calls his Uncle Monty for help. When Monty arrives, he’s acting squirrelly: asking where Jacob’s fellow-fugitive friends are; inviting Jacob to take a seat in the back of his cruiser; taking his sweet time driving away.
Sure enough, Jacob’s unc has ratted him out to the Philly cops. As Monty, Nick Searcy plays this scene tearfully, appearing genuinely agonized over how a (40-year-old) kid as good as Jacob could’ve gotten himself into so much trouble, and pledging to get Jacob a good lawyer. It’s Docherty, Green’s partner, who comes to collect Jacob, telling another Philly cop he plans to “take the long way” back to the precinct. The other cop warns him not to leave any bruises on Jacob’s face. Yikes.
In Delaware, Reacher and Green talk their way past Ahlquist’s receptionist. Apparently Green’s out-of-state badge speaks louder than their decidedly un-cop-like dress. (Green is wearing a T-shirt for the Philadelphia Phantoms, the city’s onetime American Hockey League franchise, since relocated upstate to Allentown.) They surprise Mr. Ahlquist at the very moment he is feeding hard drives into some kind of industrial thresher; evidently a super-shredder that pulps drives into tinsel. If they were still in Philly and they weren’t fugitives, Green might feel duty-bound to intervene when Reacher threatens to start breaking Ahlquist’s fingers until he reveals what incriminating material he’s destroying, but she’s past that. Reacher recognizes the goons Ahlquist summons as the gang he’s been referring to as the Reds; we now know they’re mercenaries working for Ahlquist. “They’re quite expensive,” the chemist says. “Shame I killed so many,” Reacher claps back.
Ahlquist may have been overpaying. The Reds demonstrate their incompetence once again by allowing Reacher and Green to disarm them and start swinging. The most puzzling beat of this beat-down comes when Green breaks a glass pane on a server bank with her bare fist so she can pull out a drive and use it as a weapon. Seems to me you’re more likely to slice your hand open punching through glass than to gain a meaningful advantage that way, but I have no doubt getting slapped in the head with a hard drive hurts.
This spirited counterattack is unsuccessful. The bad guys tase Reacher into submission, but not before he takes the guy whose hand he burned in the deep fryer at the bowling alley three episodes ago and feeds that same, now-bandaged paw into that drive-destruction device. Gnarly. You can’t blame the guy for leaving the task of driving Green and Reacher into the woods to shoot them to his subordinates. In fact, you really do have to … hand it to him?
In the back of Docherty’s police car, Jacob concludes he’s about to be not beaten but killed. He reads Docherty’s hesitation as a crisis of conscience, imploring him not to kill him because “I’m a good cop.” Jacob is good, if good means honest and ethical. If it means proficient or skillful, well, this season has been a steep learning curve for him.
At the same time, chained up in the back of a van, an uncharacteristic fatalism has overtaken Reacher. He tells Green they’ll be dead soon and there’s nothing they can do but face their fate honorably. “I once told a friend we live and then we die,” the big man philosophizes. “As long as we do both properly, there’s nothing much to regret.” He’s paraphrasing from Tripwire, Lee Child’s third “Jack Reacher” novel, published in 1999 and unadapted, as yet, for the screen. He tells his friend that when the van doors open, the two of them will look their killers in the eye to prove they’re unafraid.
Me? I’d be afraid.
• Reacher’s trick of relying on math to keep panic at bay has its limits. After a few times tables, he ups the degree of difficulty. “Long division? Fuck you,” Green tells him.
• Before condemning him to death, Ahlquist tells Reacher he could’ve saved himself by simply walking out of the Philly police station where Green and Docherty questioned him and getting a cheesesteak “three days ago.” The time stamp was helpful.
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