Reacher Season-Premiere Recap: No Small Ask

Everything about the lengthy cold open of “Persuader,” the first episode of Reacher’s third season, feels off. We’re in Abbottsville, Minnesota, a town that looks as charming as it is fictional. Havenhurst University, the (presumably) liberal-arts institution that anchors the town, is made up, too. “Blood and Roses,” the 1986 debut single from the Smithereens, a real band, is playing inside an establishment called the Vinyl Vault, where Jack Reacher has just arrived to unload a crate of LPs.

Reacher, a man who famously owns nothing more than a passport, a toothbrush, and the clothes on his Mt. Rushmore–size back, is hawking vinyl? It just doesn’t wash that a man who values mobility and independence more than anything in his nomadic life would embrace the heaviest, most expensive, most fragile, least portable format of recorded music.

There’s a story reason for this, and then there’s the real reason: Reacher is a show for dads.

There’s an unlikely High Fidelity turn as a Vinyl Vault patron in an MC5 T-shirt asks Reacher to confirm that the best song ever written on the subject of water is “Surfin’ Safari.”

Pedantry is Reacher’s love language, and nowhere does middle-aged dude pedantry sound more natural than in a college-town record store: “’Surfin’ Safari’ is a ripoff of Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’” says Reacher. “So that knocks it out on principle.” It makes sense that Reacher would revere Berry, a loner who hired pickup bands in each town rather than bring a group with him on tour and who insisted on being paid in cash.

The proprietor of the Vinyl Vault has only enough time to pull The Ethel Merman Disco Album from Reacher’s crate before shit pops off.

Outside, a kid slides into the back seat of a luxury sedan just in time for the car to get intentionally T-boned by a pickup truck. The baby-faced driver of the pickup yanks the kid from the backseat of the sedan, throwing a flash grenade inside before wrestling the kid into the cab of the truck. Reacher, having produced a revolver that would look comically large in anybody’s hands but his, shoots the would-be kidnapper behind the wheel of the pickup. He retrieves the kid, telling him, “I’m not going to hurt you!” Reacher then turns and fires reflexively, hitting a portly man square in the chest. The dead-or-soon-to-be man’s hand opens, revealing … a detective’s shield.

Cop-killing suits Reacher even less than vinyl does. “I didn’t know!” he says. His panic is unpersuasive.

To us, anyway. Not to the kid, whom Reacher throws into his van before peeling out. Noticing an ugly scar where the kid’s left ear should be, Reacher asks, “Why are people trying to kidnap you?”

Reacher pulls into a lot to ditch the shot-up van that’s now presumably being sought in connection with the murder of a police officer. As he sets about hot wiring a different vehicle, the kid, who says his name is Richard Beck (and is played by Johnny Berchtold), begs him not to leave him. Reacher, newly a cop-killer, won’t go to the authorities. So Richard asks the big man to drive him home, promising that his father has money and connections to get Reacher out of this jam. “He’ll be grateful that you kept me from getting kidnapped again,” the kid explains. The first time, five years ago, his abductors had to mail his dad his ear before the old man paid.

Reacher points out how improbable it is that Richard would be targeted twice. He’s not buying Richard’s claim that his dad is a “rug merchant” with “generational wealth,” but he’s in a bind. He agrees.

Richard’s home is a brick seaside mansion surrounded by a fence with a guardhouse. Reacher is canonically six-foot-five, and the guard who orders Reacher out of his stolen vehicle towers over him. This is our introduction to Paulie, played by Dutchman Olivier Richters, who at seven-two and 330 pounds is in the Guinness World Records book as the world’s most vertically abundant professional bodybuilder. So before long, we’ll have Alan Ritchson facing off against Oliver Richters, which I’m pretty sure is how you say “Alan Ritchson” in Flemish.

Inside, Reacher meets Duke (Donald Sales) — the Beck family’s head of security — who orders him upstairs to see Richard’s father. This is Zachary Beck, whose desk is surrounded by display cases showing off several generations of firearms. Rug merchant. Beck is played by Anthony Michael Hall, who’s come a long way from asking Molly Ringwald to lend him her panties in Sixteen Candles. The mileage shows on his face. Reacher refuses the glass of “50-year-old Macallan” Beck offers him but answers Beck’s questions truthfully: He’s retired from the Army, has no fixed address, trouble follows him whether he goes, etc.

“I just need a place to lie low for a couple of days and then money to buy fake ID for a clean start,” Reacher says.

“That’s no small ask,” Beck replies. Only then does Reacher make a show of putting his size XXXL fingerprints on the whiskey glass he declined previously. “We just need to know who you are,” Beck explains.

“I’m the guy who saved your son’s other ear,” Reacher tells him.

Reacher goes to check on Richard, who tells him his mom died when he was four. In Lee Child’s 2003 novel Persuader, the literary basis for this season of Reacher, the mother is alive and unwell, with little role in the story other than to be subjected to a campaign of sexual assault by Paulie. Her elision is a welcome change. Richard is painting a landscape of the scene outside his window, notably minus the guardhouse. The kid asks Reacher what he would paint if he ever painted. Reacher has never considered this. “Dogs, maybe.”

The fingerprint check completed, Beck reads the highlights of Reacher’s sterling military resume out loud, to Paulie’s annoyance. With his son’s bodyguard apparently dead, Beck wants to bring this well-qualified man onto his security team. But first, he demands a test of Reacher’s “stones,” placing Reacher’s revolver and a single bullet on the table.

In Persuader-the-novel, which is told in the first person, Reacher explains why the odds of shooting oneself in a game of Russian roulette are substantially lower than one in six — something about how when only one of a revolver’s chambers are loaded, the weight of the round will pull the loaded cylinder down and away from the hammer. There’s none of that here. Warned that Beck will give him to the cops if he doesn’t play, Reacher spins the cylinder, presses the barrel to his temple, and pulls the trigger. Then he does it twice more until Beck snatches the revolver back and hands it to Duke.

“I know the bullet didn’t have any powder in it,” Reacher says. Duke has to pull the trigger three times before the hammer lands on the live round. It’s unusual for us to see Reacher proven wrong!

Duke tells Reacher he’s locking him in his bedroom until the next morning. After checking for listening devices, Reacher pulls a tiny phone out from the heel of his boot and says, “I’m in.” Twenty-one minutes into this 50-minute episode, we get the title flash, with the bizarrely punctuated all-caps attribution: “BASED ON PERSUADER BY LEE CHILD AND HIS CHARACTER, JACK REACHER,” suggesting that the fictional Army supercop turned vigilante hobo is a co-author of his own adventure.

We back up, per another title card, to Days Earlier. In a scene that plays silly even by Reacher’s standards, Reacher intuits that a kid at a bus stop is about to rob a woman with a young child. After a Sherlock Holmes–style rundown on how he came to this conclusion, Reacher warns the would-be perp off, gives him $100, and tells him to get a job. Then Reacher seems shocked — far more shocked than he looked when he killed that cop, supposedly — at the sight of a man who steps into the back of a car across the street from him. Reacher tells the would-be purse-snatcher he just scared/bribed straight to give him his phone. The warrant officer who picks up at Reacher’s old Army unit, the 110th Special Investigators, can’t believe he’s speaking to the legend who created the 110th, Jack Reacher himself. He promises to call Reacher back with the result.

At a dive called the Yorkie Motel, Feds pound on Reacher’s door. He legs it out of an uncommonly large bathroom window, reaching back in to retrieve his toothbrush like Indiana Jones pulling his hat from a fast-closing tomb. A woman with a badge intercepts him. This is Agent Susan Duffy of the Drug Enforcement Administration, played by one Sonya Cassidy. She bludgeons her New England accent as only an actor from Olde England can: “I’m nawht just a pretty face,” she declares. Indeed, she’s a graduate of the Royal Awcahdemy of Drahmahtic Ahhht.

Duffy introduces the two other G-men on her team, Elliot (Daniel David Stewart) — the babyface we recognize as the pickup-driving kidnapper — and Villanueva (Roberto Montesinos), a.k.a. the plainclothes cop Reacher “killed.” We knew it was all a Mission: Impossible–style ruse. This opening fake-out is a direct lift from the book. It wasn’t convincing in prose, either.

Duffy says they’re looking into an import business called Bizarre Bazaar, which would be funny even if she didn’t say it as “Bizarre Bizaaaahhhh.” The license plate Reacher clocked was affixed to a car that took Richard Beck to a meeting with a major West Coast drug runner.

Sensing that they’re telling him all this for a reason, Reacher makes a demand in return for his help: He wants them to check a hospital around Linton, Virginia, on or around March 13, 2012, for an Asian American man in his 40s, with injuries reflecting a small-caliber gunshot wound to the head and/or drowning. In the next scene, Duffy tells Reacher they found this guy washed up on a beach near the made-up Virginia town Reacher named. “Dawctuhs figuh thuh freezing watuh saved him,” Duffy says, adding that the guy claimed to have amnesia. The authorities could never identify him. “But from the way you eye-fucking him, I think you know his name!”

Reacher does know: It’s Francis Xavier Quinn, a Lieutenant Colonel Reacher investigated on suspicion of selling military secrets. This is the guy Reacher saw getting into that car right after he gave the would-be purse-snatcher a C-note. Reacher tells Duffy he never managed to arrest Quinn, but pleads ignorance when asked how the guy ended up in the water with a bullet in his head back in 2012.

Duffy finally shows her cards: Her team needs Reacher because they’re investigating Beck unofficially after they messed up their search warrant and were ordered to stand down. Duffy got a civilian informant named Teresa Daniel a job at Bizarre Bazaar so she could spy on Beck, and now Teresa has disappeared. Duffy shows Reacher a photo of Teresa with a pair of giant hoop earrings because she wants him to know Teresa’s face … so he can infiltrate Beck’s organization and rescue the girl.

Reacher and the trio of DEA agents spend the next few scenes plotting out the phony kidnapping and rescue that will persuade Richard to invite Reacher inside the Beck compound. There’s some funny business with poor Agent Eliot getting squibbed and a discussion of mixing live rounds with blanks in Reacher’s revolver because “fake fights look fake.” He uses Villenueva’s pocket knife to scratch a mark into one of the chambers so he’ll know where the live rounds end and the blanks begin. This backfills how Reacher was able to play Russian Roulette thrice without dying. Sort of. It goes without saying that this is a dumb plan with an absurd number of uncontrollable variables, but Villanueva says it anyway. Good man.

The 23-minute flashback ends, and we’re back in Reacher’s bedroom. Under cover of darkness, he climbs out the window for a covert walkabout, the nighttime sky behind him looking screensaver-y as he clambers over the roof of the house and down to the shed where he overperformed in his Russian Roulette job interview.

In the dirt, he finds one of Teresa’s earrings.

In an Investigation, Details Matter

• Abbottsville is made up, but The Ethel Merman Disco Album is all too real. And the producers of Reacher missed an opportunity to have her 1979 version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” play over the end credits, especially since this entire episode is about staging a fake kidnapping attempt and rescue so Reacher can gain the confidence of Richard and then Zachary Beck.