Reacher Season-Finale Recap: Bash of the Titans

The not-so-grand finale of Reacher’s third season opens with a gun battle that leaves an entire ATF Special Response Team dead, along with a commensurate number of henchmen that Quinn flew in from somewhere. Having concluded that his unwilling employee Zachary Beck could no longer be trusted, Quinn gave Beck a phony location for his imminent gun deal, with the aim of having his ATF pursuers dispatched, and Beck — whom Quinn expected would also be slain in this ambush — blamed for their deaths, allowing Quinn to get away clean.

It’s a colossal bloodbath, one that leaves only Reacher, Duffy, Villanueva, Zachary, and a single truck driver left alive. (Reacher kills the driver a few minutes later because he can’t find any rope with which to tie the guy up. No jury in the world!) How do Duffy and Villanueva react to the violent deaths of a double-digit number of their Federal law enforcement brethren? They don’t. A more thoughtful show might at least pretend to reflect upon all the suffering and death Reacher and Duffy’s shared rescue mission/vengeance campaign hath wrought. I’m not asking Reacher to be that show. I’m just asking it not to make me feel like an idiot for sticking with it after a very entertaining, only-intermittently-dumb initial season and a shakier-but-still-rewarding second.

I’ve asked too much, it would appear. I’m not mad, Reacher. I’m just disappointed.

In a late attempt to give the season greater stakes, Reacher intuited the last episode that Quinn’s Yemeni gun buyers were plotting to use their newly purchased cache of weapons to conduct a series of coordinated terror attacks. Naturally, the creative team of Reacher couldn’t have known that in the real world, which lately feels every bit as dumb as a season-three episode of Reacher, American war planners would accidentally send the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic a schedule of U.S. airstrikes on Yemen two weeks before the Reacher season finale, any more than they could have predicted the President of the United States would make an enemy of the peaceful, well-educated country that plays the United States on Reacher. But a broken clock is right twice a day, and Reacher, a show that in its own way strives as mightily as Seinfeld once did to be About Nothing, is accidentally almost topical, if only because its writers opted not to invent some fictional Middle Eastern country as the point of origin for their late-appearing terrorists.

The plotting has been so weak this season that I’m more interested in tucking into this concluding episode’s more granular choices, starting with this one: Reacher catches that truck driver who survived the ambush in the act of texting Quinn for help. He orders the man to text the following: “All good. Heading back now.”

Astute viewers will recall that in this season’s fourth episode, Reacher was alerted to the fact Kohl was in danger when a text message supposedly from her addressed him as “Sir.” I expected this trucker would do something similar, either intentionally or accidentally signaling duress by texting something that would make Quinn suspicious. That would provide some symmetry. A soupçon of dramatic irony. Nope! In Quinn’s international gunrunning empire, the phrase “all good” means all good. No one is trying very hard at this point.

The real gun deal is happening at Manse Beck during the Bizarre Bazaar tycoon’s 50th birthday party, which looks to be a well-attended, swingin’ affair. Who are all these people? “Some of the mid-Atlantic region’s most powerful businesspersons and players,” Quinn tells his Yemeni customers as they arrive. I can understand that Zachary Beck would have to keep up appearances if he’d been known as a pillar of the Abbottsville community before Quinn usurped his business and his life, but Agnes the Cook already told Reacher that Zachary has been a reclusive grouch in the years since his wife died. Sure, his big 50th birthday bash is a part of the climax of Persuader, but in the book, Elizabeth Beck is still alive, too. The TV version of Zachary does not seem like the sort of dud whose party would draw a crowd. But the party’s inclusion allows Neagley to borrow Villaneuva’s shirt and Zachary’s vest and bowtie to pass herself off as a cater waiter, which is sort of fun.

These party scenes are intercut with the Reacher-versus-Paulie smackdown we’ve been teased with all season. Reacher, quite sensibly, has no interest in fighting fair. He tries to strangle Paulie from behind, then unsuccessfully tries to grab a pistol so he can shoot the bigger man. Paulie swats the gun away and declares, “We do this like men!” Reacher kicks him in the crotch, to no effect.

I was annoyed initially by the frequent cross-cutting between this bash of the titans and other events inside Beck’s house. But the cageless cage match goes on for so long and has so many false endings that it eventually — and intentionally — becomes comedic. When the two men tumble in whatever body of water it is that’s been digitally composited between the Beck house, Paulie appears to be sucked down into the same riptide that has made this such an efficient means of corpse disposal for the Quinn-Beck criminal conspiracy, which feels like a suitably poetic death for Paulie. Moments later, he reappears on the road in the moonlight behind Reacher, both men damp and exhausted, each attempting to run but finding themselves incapable of more than a few steps. At this point, the fight won me over.

Inside the house, a Yemeni gun buyer and maybe terrorist named Nasser (Anousha Alamian) is rebuffing Quinn’s efforts to get their deal done, saying he wants to drink and enjoy himself before they talk business. Quinn presents this man with the gift of Duffy’s redheaded C.I. Teresa Daniel. (In the novel, it’s revealed for some reason that “Daniel” is an alias and that the hostage’s real name is Teresa Justice. That was a bridge too far even for this show, evidently.) The guy goes upstairs to assault this poor woman, telling her, “I hope [Quinn] hasn’t drugged all the life out of you because I do like a little fight in a woman.”

“Then you’re gonna love me,” Duffy quips, emerging from the bathroom to level her pistol at the would-be rapist.

For whatever it’s worth, this exchange of dialogue appears almost verbatim in The Dark Knight, when Heath Ledger’s Joker is menacing Batman’s old flame, Rachel Dawes. Its Reacher reprise doesn’t feel like an intentional echo, like the scene in Rushmore that repeats an exchange from Heat or the bit in John McTiernan’s 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair where he has a character parrot a line from his own Die Hard With a Vengeance that’s too weird and specific to be a coincidence: “Otto doesn’t speak English, do you, Otto?” (The pair of Die Hard allusions later in the episode do appear to have been put there on purpose.) Anyway, Duffy makes a point of shooting Nasser in the crotch several seconds before she puts a second round in his head.

The other Die Hard allusions: After Villanueva gives his Neagley his white button-up, he’s left wandering the upper floors of Manse Beck in his A-shirt with a semiautomatic pistol, where he’s nearly killed by the first henchman he encounters. Elsewhere, Paulie appears at last to have bested Reacher when he leaves our boy suspended from the ceiling of the carriage house via a chain around his neck, the way McClane left Alexander Godunov’s Karl after their Die Hard melee. Die Hard left Karl’s escape from this predicament unexplained. Reacher shows us our hero picking his body upward so he can get his feet on the beam from when the chain is suspended and then freeing himself via what’s essentially an inverted deadlift. It does not show us how he avoids landing directly on his dome, which would leave him paralyzed, if not dead, but I’ll allow it.

I will not allow the means by which Reacher finally kills Paulie in the guard house with the chain gun. After Paulie tries to shoot Reacher, the weapon backfires on his face. Reacher explains to no one, “You might be bigger and stronger, but I’m smarter. I pulled a bullet from the belt and plugged the barrel!” Tell, don’t show, is not how the screenwriting adage goes.

There is one genuinely inspired scene when Quinn takes Richard Beck hostage and Zachary tries to back him down by presenting the toy revolver Richard bought for him as a real firearm. The illusion appears to be working until the glue holding the toy together weakens, and the plastic barrel flops downward like a middle-aged Casanova after too many whiskeys. I love that someone had to build a prop with a barrel that bends downward on cue! I love the irony of Zachary trying to rescue his son using a toy the boy gave him. I don’t love that Quinn immediately shoots Zachary dead once the ruse fails, but Zachary, having confessed his crimes and made amends, sort of, with Richard, must pay for his sins.

There’s a fun moment when the Russians to whom Quinn owes money try to take him away in lieu of their missing payment. “Who is this monster?” one of them asks in Russian as Reacher appears. Reacher introduces himself in the man’s native tongue. After Neagley gives the Russians the bag of cash Quinn had intended to pay them and persuades them to leave Quinn behind via a bluff involving a defused grenade, Reacher finally gets his revenge. “Her name was Dominique,” he tells Quinn. There’s a flash of recognition in the amnesiac archvillain’s eyes in the instant before Reacher blasts him in the chest with a shotgun. Duffy will convince her DEA bosses that the Russians are responsible for this murder, so Reacher and Neagley are in the clear.

She tells Reacher that those bosses quite rightly fire Duffy for her innumerable poor decisions, though there’s no indication they’ll be pressing charges for her just-as-plentiful felonies. After she lets down Reacher easily before he can do the same to her, she tells him, “My grandfather woulda called you a throwback and a half.” I’m going to miss that accent more than anything else about this season.

Reacher’s farewell to Richard is clunkier still. He tells the kid to take whatever money his old man has stashed in the house and hit the road. He also advises his young charge not to dwell on the many, many terrible trials he’s survived.

“What do you do when you can’t forget the awful thing from your past?” Richard asks his poorly chosen surrogate papa.

“I find the awful thing,” Reacher says. “And I kill it.”

After declining Neagley’s offer of a bagel on account of his “loose teeth,” Reacher helps himself to one of Zachary’s motorcycles. Ritchson does look great on a chopper, but I prefer Reacher’s dorkier, more egalitarian practice of traversing these United States by bus. In the close-up of his mug as he cycles confidently into the unknown but probably Canadian future, Reacher has a visibly open, inch-long (prosthetic) cut on his forehead, one of his souvenirs from his 15-round death match with Paulie. Keeping that exposed while you’re hurtling along at 70 miles per hour can’t be a great idea. Get one of the various first responders hanging around to stitch you up, Jack!

In an Investigation, Details Matter

• The jokes this season have been lame enough that I feel I should praise Neagley’s crack upon first laying eyes on Paulie: “What about the gatekeeper? Knock him off the Empire State Building with some biplanes?”

• The band at Zachary Beck’s birthday party plays covers of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight,” released the year Zachary was born, as well as “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest, from five years earlier. Respect the classics, I guess.

• Villanueva’s imminent retirement was referenced so many times this season that even more than the demise of poor, dumb rookie Agent Eliot, the old-timer’s death seemed to be foreordained. I’m glad he made it home to his wife, who actually gets a line: “Get in here.”

• Johnny “Richard Beck” Berchtold is 30 years old, but he looks more like a college kid than the then-30-year-old Dustin Hoffman did in The Graduate. I note Berchtold played a character called Teenage Ted when he was a young buck of only 23. That would be Teenage Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski, by the way.