When Jack Reacher gained a crew in Season 2 – Neagley, Dixon, and O’Donnell, the reconstituted remainder of his Special Investigators MP team, determined to destroy the people killing their friends – it gave the very large wanderer material support beyond the reach of his two fists, and for viewers unfamiliar with the show’s source material, opened windows into Reacher’s personal history and emotional life. Season 3 is based on that source material, too – Persuader is the seventh title in Lee Child’s long-running Reacher book series – but it’s a good choice to adapt for a different reason. This time around, when we rejoin Alan Ritchson as Reacher, he’s back to his preferred mode of self-actualizing his own vanguard, and with only limited external support. But it’s bigger feelings that have put the big man into his latest predicament. When he saw a guy walking around who was supposed to be dead, the only thing on Reacher’s mind became how to kill him again.
This is how Reacher ends up in the middle of a downtown street in Maine, firing a massive Colt Anaconda revolver at a pickup that just T-boned a black sedan. Episode 1 of Reacher Season 3 opens inside this seeming kidnapping of Richard Beck (Johnny Berchtold), a university art student whose father Zachary (Anthony Michael Hall) presents publicly as a wealthy rug dealer. Once Reacher steps in, shooting up the radiator of the kidnapper’s truck, letting a few more bullets fly, and getting Richard to safety, the kid basically adopts him as his new bodyguard. Which, as we’ll see, is all part of the plan.
The two drive to the Beck estate, a gated New England monstrosity that abuts the rocks and the sea, where Reacher is greeted by another monstrosity, Paulie (Olivier Richters), who leers at him from the airspace above his head. What kind of rug importer requires an 8-foot-tall security guard with rage issues and a machine gun? The kind who Reacher has learned is involved in some way with the mysterious non-unalive man from his past. Saving Richard from his latest kidnapping and ransom – what’s left of the kid’s ear indicates this has happened before – has endeared him to Zachary Beck. It gives him a vantage point from inside Beck’s operation. And later, alone in his quarters, Reacher removes a tiny phone from the hollow heel of his boot. The line picks up. “I’m in.”
On the other end is Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy), a DEA agent who together with her team – the veteran Villanueva (Roberto Montesinos) and the rookie Eliot (Daniel David Stewart) – were trying to infiltrate Beck’s operation on their own, without proper authorization, when their efforts dovetailed with Reacher’s personal stake. Duffy and Reacher concocted the kidnapping conceit, and now that it worked – Reacher had to play Russian Roulette for Beck and Paulie, but don’t worry, he marked the revolver’s chambers – the big fella will figure out Beck’s link to his mark and search for Teresa Daniel (Storm Steenson), Duffy’s previously-inserted informant who nobody’s heard from, on tiny secret phones or otherwise.
Francis Xavier Quinn. That’s the name Reacher knew him by, back when both of them were still in the army, a military police investigator and a lieutenant colonel in intelligence, respectively. Reacher was investigating Quinn for selling top secret weapons tech on the black market, and eventually targeted him to be “dispatched.” What exactly happened beyond that is unclear, not from military records and certainly not from Reacher, whose features cloud over with mention of Quinn’s name. “If Teresa Daniel was taken by somebody associated with Xavier Quinn,” he tells Duffy, “chances are, you’re too late.”
The draw with Reacher is the destruction. That’s just how it is. Large man arrives in a random place, large man recognizes a wrong, and large man kicks the asses responsible before catching a bus outta town. But three seasons in, and with something scarring like Reacher’s history with Quinn to work against, Alan Ritchson has the ability to represent the pain inside his character alongside the pain he regularly inflicts. We don’t require a whole lot of this, because Reacher’s lack of dimension is an asset in the setup-and-result format it’s working with. But we’re glad it’s there, especially because in Ep 1 of Season 3, Ritchson is already working well off Sonya Cassidy. The New Englander accent Cassidy’s doing establishes where Duffy’s coming from, but in general the DEA agent does not suffer fools. (She calls her pencil-necked rookie Eliot “Precious.”) She’s a pro with a willingness to color outside the legal lines, and Reacher likes her immediately.
A faked kidnapping, federal agents working without a net, and Zachary Beck’s too-easy acceptance of Reacher’s presence: it’s more than a little preposterous. But so is the very idea of a guy who walks the earth with nothing but a passport and two fists, and who regularly leaves a trail of corpses in his wake. With Reacher, we like the preposterousness. We’re looking forward to our heroic tough guy loner’s inevitable clash with Paulie, his mountainous new adversary. We want to know more about what kind of shit Quinn pulled to make Reacher declare him the worst guy ever. And as things unfold here in Season 3, we’re also intrigued with how Reacher will bring back Maria Sten as Frances Neagley, since Sten was the best part of how Season 2 expanded Reacher’s circle.
We should see Neagley take up a position on Reacher’s six soon enough. But in the meantime, he’s working from inside Zachary Beck’s compound with no backup beyond what Duffy can offer through the incredibly shrinking mobile device. “Is Teresa there?” she asks down the line as Reacher searches the estate in the middle of the night. “No,” he responds. “But she was.” It’s only a matter of time until he deploys his fists against whoever took her.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
