Reacher<\/a><\/p>\nPlum Out of Luck<\/p>\n
\n Season 4<\/p>\n
Episode 6\n <\/p>\n
\n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n
3 stars<\/p>\n
***\n <\/p>\n
\n While the Big Man and the Philly cop catch a bus, their reporter pal catches a bullet.
\n Photo: Prime\n <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00d6yster Cult\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Fear the Reaper.\u201d Ask not for whom the cowbell tolls.<\/p>\n
Plum catches that bullet by having the rotten luck to return to the abandoned Philly restaurant that Anna Merrick\u2019s 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 \u201ccould\u2019ve just been homeless, or they could\u2019ve been assassins\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t be safe to walk around in even without the company of people trying to put aftermarket holes in you. It\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwe look like shit and you\u2019re covered in blood. That stands out even in Philly.\u201d Even in Toronto-as-Philly! Just then, they see their fugitive faces projected two stories tall on building-mounted LEDs in a public square.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s curious, then, that it\u2019s 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\u2019s too hulking to get lost in a crowd \u2014 \u201cGet Cracked in Philadelphia\u201d Liberty Bell T-shirt or no. Noticing the scar on his stomach Lila mentioned during their standoff moments earlier, she can\u2019t help but needle Reacher for sleeping with the enemy.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou were in a no-tell motel getting busy with a killer,\u201d Green says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo was she,\u201d Reacher retorts.<\/p>\n
Reacher, in turn, points out the palpable affection between Green and Jacob Merrick, \u201cthe anti-Conan type. And a good guy.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Our one scene in the Sampson camp this week finds the congressman\u2019s 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? \u201cHandle it,\u201d Sampson says. The question of whether Sampson is an ethical man or merely a pragmatic one would appear to have been answered.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s running through the names of the pet fish she owned as a child. (They were all named after Philadelphia Flyers.) Reacher infers she\u2019s trying to fight off claustrophobia.<\/p>\n
\u201cPhobias are emotional reactions to perceived but unreal threats,\u201d he op-eds, showing that tender bedside manner we\u2019ve come to love. \u201cFocus your mind on something logical and your brain won\u2019t have room for nonsense. Nothing more logical than math.\u201d 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\u2019d scheduled for an unholy hour the next morning. It kinda worked!<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s ennui infect her, too. She laments the irony \u2014 or maybe it\u2019s more like symmetry \u2014 that she\u2019s now found a case that has reawakened her social conscience, and it\u2019s likely to cost her her badge and land her in jail. At least she\u2019s made some good friends along the way.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s acting squirrelly: asking where Jacob\u2019s fellow-fugitive friends are; inviting Jacob to take a seat in the back of his cruiser; taking his sweet time driving away.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, Jacob\u2019s 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\u2019ve gotten himself into so much trouble, and pledging to get Jacob a good lawyer. It\u2019s Docherty, Green\u2019s partner, who comes to collect Jacob, telling another Philly cop he plans to \u201ctake the long way\u201d back to the precinct. The other cop warns him not to leave any bruises on Jacob\u2019s face. Yikes.<\/p>\n
In Delaware, Reacher and Green talk their way past Ahlquist\u2019s receptionist. Apparently Green\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t fugitives, Green might feel duty-bound to intervene when Reacher threatens to start breaking Ahlquist\u2019s fingers until he reveals what incriminating material he\u2019s destroying, but she\u2019s past that. Reacher recognizes the goons Ahlquist summons as the gang he\u2019s been referring to as the Reds; we now know they\u2019re mercenaries working for Ahlquist. \u201cThey\u2019re quite expensive,\u201d the chemist says. \u201cShame I killed so many,\u201d Reacher claps back.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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 \u2026 hand it to him?<\/p>\n
In the back of Docherty\u2019s police car, Jacob concludes he\u2019s about to be not beaten but killed. He reads Docherty\u2019s hesitation as a crisis of conscience, imploring him not to kill him because \u201cI\u2019m a good cop.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
At the same time, chained up in the back of a van, an uncharacteristic fatalism has overtaken Reacher. He tells Green they\u2019ll be dead soon and there\u2019s nothing they can do but face their fate honorably. \u201cI once told a friend we live and then we die,\u201d the big man philosophizes. \u201cAs long as we do both properly, there\u2019s nothing much to regret.\u201d He\u2019s paraphrasing from Tripwire, Lee Child\u2019s third \u201cJack Reacher\u201d 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\u2019re unafraid.<\/p>\n
Me? I\u2019d be afraid.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Reacher\u2019s trick of relying on math to keep panic at bay has its limits. After a few times tables, he ups the degree of difficulty. \u201cLong division? Fuck you,\u201d Green tells him.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Before condemning him to death, Ahlquist tells Reacher he could\u2019ve saved himself by simply walking out of the Philly police station where Green and Docherty questioned him and getting a cheesesteak \u201cthree days ago.\u201d The time stamp was helpful.<\/p>\n
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