"Reacher," Season 3: review

Reacher (Alan Ritchson) and Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy)

[WARNING: some spoilers.]

Season 3 of "Reacher," based on the 2003 Lee Child novel Persuader, gives us a broken family, a kidnapped CI (a confidential informant who works with police), a son wishing for the love of his father, a rogue soldier seemingly back from the grave, lots of gunrunning, and a new love interest for Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) in the form of Maine-accented DEA agent Susan Duffy (British actress Sonya Cassidy). 

As the story begins, Reacher is already in the middle of an operation, helping out the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) by infiltrating the posh, New England seaside home of Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall, who's made a quiet comeback over the past few years—at least since "The Dark Knight" in 2008), seeming to "rescue" his son Richard (Johnny Berchtold) from a staged kidnapping. This is actually an undercover operation designed to generate trust, but Zachary Beck, more than a little shady, doesn't quite buy the situation, so he puts Reacher through some tests of loyalty and sincerity. Beck's gigantic bodyguard Paulie (Olivier Richters) also doesn't take kindly to Reacher, and a mutual antagonism quickly develops between the two alphas. Coordinating the operation against Beck is DEA agent Susan Duffy, who had one of her CIs go missing while working at Beck's. Duffy's mission is less a true DEA op and more a result of her crisis of conscience: the CI, Teresa Daniel (Storm Steenson), is a good young woman who doesn't deserve the fate that awaits her at the hands of whatever criminal organization Beck is a part of. Reacher has consented to help Duffy because he's discovered that a man he thought he'd killed, Francis Xavier Quinn, a.k.a. Julius McCabe (Brian Tee), is alive and somehow related to Beck, either as a coworker or as a boss. As with previous seasons, Reacher discovers the mystery runs deeper than it seems to at first blush, with several agents from different US agencies already placed strategically in Beck's home. Reacher has to tread lightly, both to avoid suspicion from Beck, Paulie, and Beck's other underlings and to avoid accidentally harming or killing other undercover agents, none of whom can reveal themselves without outing themselves to the bad guys. Many people die by the end.

Better than with Season 2, Season 3 hews a bit closer to the novel it's based on, but it does once again bring in supercompetent Frances Neagly (Maria Sten). Granted, Neagly (pronounced "neely") is one of my favorite characters, and I was happy to see her make an appearance, but was she really necessary for this story? I found her presence simultaneously welcome and hard to justify (she's not in the novel). Otherwise, the plot over eight episodes followed what has become a formula pretty reliably; I didn't detect much in the way of deep themes, memorable tropes, or great storytelling novelty. I'm a little bit worried that Reacher's character was a little too well-established in Season 1, and the ensuing seasons have done little more than repeat the same moments that seemed new and fresh from the first season, e.g., Reacher being ordered to do something, and his staring stonily while replying with a flat "No," with its subtext of And what're you gonna do about it? The only truly new thing about Season 3 was Olivier Richters as Paulie. Richters is a behemoth of a weightlifter in real life, meant to dwarf Reacher, who is used to being the biggest and the strongest in the room. Their final fight scene has a predictable outcome, but in it, Reacher arguably loses a bit of face because he can't defeat Paulie—himself a former combat vet—through brute strength or martial skill. That said, Season 3 was entertaining enough to propel me through all eight episodes without my getting bored, and the little variances with the story as laid out in Child's novel added a tiny bit of variety if not exactly unpredictability. You don't watch "Reacher" to learn profound truths or to witness Oscar turns; you watch it for the same reason you might watch a dumb 80s action flick: the bruising stunts/choreography, the series of narrative hooks that lead your interest ever onward (a cheap trick), and the sheer pleasure that comes of watching Jack Reacher—who is almost autistically honest—generally brunt his way through most of his interactions with good and bad people. To that extent, I think that, if you've been a "Reacher" fan through the first two seasons, Season 3 will be up your alley. If Season 1 turned you off, though, Season 3 really has nothing new to offer you. And someone from Maine needs to confirm for me how legitimate the veddy English Sonya Cassidy's Maine accent was. The accent itself was unpleasant at first, but I got used to it. Do people from Maine really sound that way?