Reacher Recap: Bringing a Knife to a Knife Fight

Reacher
Karambits and Pieces
Season 4 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Reacher is a man as solid in mass as he is in moral rectitude. It’s difficult to move him when he does not wish to be moved, and as we enter the middle act of his show’s fourth season, our suspension of disbelief, too, demands more buoyancy than before. 

I refer specifically to the ease with which Philly Detective Tamara Green is able to infiltrate the secure-but-not-government facility where Anna Merrick worked and log into Anna’s workstation. Anna had high-level security clearance, but it turns out her office is more casual about letting employees share logins and whatnot than any I’ve ever worked in. A security self-own like this would’ve seemed implausible before DOGE; now… you know what? I withdraw my objection, Your Honor. 

Green gets into Anna’s computer and instantly finds evidence Anna copied and then deleted a file rather than uploading it to some central U.S. government server. Fine. It’s a good thing, too, because the employee whose badge Green stole to sneak in shows up, unmasking Green as an impostor. Green bolts, and it is indeed a pleasure to watch Sydelle Noel, who was a competitive runner before she pivoted to playing tough ladies on GLOW and Reacher, make tracks.

At the scene of his Army buddy Nolan Cahill’s suicide, John Sampson — U.S. Representative from North Carolina and likely contender for the presidency — is distraught. Springfield, Sampson’s security chief, warns him he should leave; reporters have arrived. 

Turning to Reacher, Sampson says, “I could use a beer.” 

It’s mid-morning, but at a third-shift bar Sampson knows, they raise their Natty Bohs to Cahill’s memory. (That regionally specific beer selection is a good, cheap way to sell the illusion this is Baltimore.) Sampson says that Cahill, who was his C.O. back in their Army days, “molded me in his image.” That being the case, Reacher asks Sampson to imagine what might make him take his own life.

When Reacher presses the candidate to tell him about the 1998 mission in Indonesia wherein Sampson and Cahill trained that country’s Special Forces elements reporting to General Putra, Sampson moves on to scotch. Emboldened by Dewar’s, Sampson confirms the general showed his true colors as a brutal despot who committed “unspeakable acts” once his Delta Force tutors went home. He even implies the U.S. government tried to assassinate Putra after this atrocity. 

Reacher spends this conversation pivoting between sympathy and antagonism; he’s the Good Cop and the Bad Cop. He just can’t stop himself from behaving like a detective trying to elicit a confession rather than a priest hearing one. But the fact is Sampson invited him to this dive. Maybe it’s the politician’s instinct to admit just enough to satisfy a reporter — or the 250 lb. former head of the Army’s 110th Special Investigations Unit — so they’ll stop digging.

This is how it comes out when Reacher tries to say Chin up, man. It isn’t your fault: “Noriega. Iran-Contra. We were even friends with Bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians. Wouldn’t be the first time America’s been burned.” It’s hard to buy that Reacher could believe his home country to be blameless in these affairs, if only on account of the number of murderous government operatives with whom he’s crossed swords over the last 3.5 seasons of streaming television. The man is an enigma.

Sampson says he hopes Reacher finds the jump drive he’s only been looking for since at least three different parties — the C.I.A., the Big Red Machine, and the Snap, Crackle, Pop trio, whom Sampson says are DoD guys — came at him in the belief he already had it. He urges Reacher to return the drive to the Army, “where it belongs.” Reacher tells the congressman exactly what he told Indonesian journalist Lila Hoth: He’ll get the drive, learn what’s on it that so many people have killed and died over, then decide what to do with it.

Outside that bar, Elspeth Sampson tells Reacher he’s a Jonah — the crew member whose presence aboard a ship brings ill winds and bad fortune. She asks him to leave her family alone. 

The C.I.A. guys who abducted Reacher at the end of the first episode roll up on him again. I don’t understand why they don’t just tranq him, which worked before, but they allow him to hop a fence and run into a dockside warehouse, where he pounces on them one-at-a-time, Batman-style. This is a gratuitous fight even by Reacher standards, but it boasts some flashy camerawork; long aerial shots of the hand-to-hand action that recall the way the 1967 Bond flick You Only Live Twice showed us Sean Connery — who was five years younger then than Alan Ritchson is now, but was looking and moving like he was far older by this point — taking on a comically large number henchmen as the camera pulled away to expand our field of view.

The other three members of Reacher’s squad — Green, Plum, and the one who does not have a name borrowed from the board game/1985 camp-classic movie Clue, Jacob Merrick — are stuck in traffic on I-95 in South Philly when they check in by phone with Reacher, mopping C.I.A. blood off his face in an alley. How are the Clue gang not in custody after fleeing a secure (but not) government building more than 100 miles back down the Interstate only to find themselves in a traffic jam? Don’t worry about it!

Overhearing Plum gripe about the bottleneck, Reacher asks what the nearest SEPTA station to them is. It’s Tasker-Morris, the stop where Anna boarded the Broad Street Line shortly before shooting herself in front of Reacher. Recognizing this as a clue, Reacher tells the others he’ll meet them there, which is easy because there’s a street-parking spot open right across from the station. (I wouldn’t bother pointing this sort of thing out were Reacher not so gloriously, nay defiantly, a Dad Show.)

Docherty, Green’s partner, calls with the sad news that Ben Merrick’s body has been found. The fact that Anna abandoned her car and hoofed it to the Tasker Morris station has led the others to a conclusion Jacob might’ve reached, too, had he the gumption to face it: His nephew Ben, Anna’s only son, isn’t just dead; he was already dead when Anna got on the train. With a nod from Green, Reacher admits his culpability in Anna’s suicide to her brother Jacob.

“I told her I was a cop,” Reacher confesses. Docherty is a lazy prick, but he was right about that much: Reacher did push Anna over the edge. “I wanted to help her,” Reacher tells Jacob. “I didn’t.”

Remembering a business-reply mail envelope she saw in Anna’s car, Green theorizes that Anna mailed the drive to Lila Hoth at Lila’s first hotel in Philly. (Every time Reacher shot-puts a would-be assassin out of the window of one of Lila’s rooms, she and Amisha must find new lodgings.) Green tells Reacher to follow up on that lead while she and Plum accompany Jacob to the morgue to claim his nephew’s body. 

There’s no mail for Lila at that hotel, but the journalist is mortified when Reacher tells her about Ben Merrick, saying she feels at least in part responsible for the death of a mother and her son. 

Turns out the Big Red Machine had part of its lineup staking out the hotel, because Reacher spots more hoods closing in as soon as he and Lila are back out on the street. Preparing to lead them on a merry chase, Reacher declares, “Someone’s got enough money for an endless supply of assholes. I need to find out who!” He and Lila run for the subway platform, and Reacher shoves her onboard the train as the doors are closing, staying behind to deal with the Reds. In the course of disarming one of them, Reacher essentially dis-hands the guy, too, holding his gun arm out into the path of another train. After that, the shooter tumbles backward onto the electrified rail of the SEPTA line, cooking himself.

Here Reacher must elude the two uniformed Philly police officers responding to the brawl on the platform. Reacher managed to lift a walkie-talkie off of one of the Reds before fleeing the cops, which he does by leaping across the track in front of an oncoming train, then flattening his Mini Cooper-sized frame against the wall as the train passes close enough to ripple the skin on his granite face. There’s a camp of unhoused folk in these Toronto-for-Philadelphia tunnels; Reacher gives one of them a wad of bills for the loan of his ball cap and blanket until the cops have moved on. He asks the guy to direct him via subway tunnel to Lila’s current motel, the Liberty Gardens. Reacher did tell Lila to downgrade to an all-cash, no-questions rat trap, so it makes sense the place would be known to the city’s transient population. On that walkie he picked up, Reacher hears that other Reds are preparing to raid Lila’s room. He breaks into a full run. Ritchson is no Sydelle Noel, but he can move. 

The reveal that concludes this episode is accomplished via a sly bit of cross-cutting. At the Philly morgue, a medical examiner tells Green that Ben was killed by the same type of blade used to torture hardworking OnlyFans content creator Mary Ellen “Smellin’ Degenerate” Daniels to death. The weapon is a curved knife called a karambit, the M.E. says, used “by practitioners of certain martial arts in Indonesia.” 

As we learn this, Lila and Amisha return to their room at the Liberty Gardens to find their bodyguards dead and four members of Big Red Machine waiting for them. The Reds produce their knives, expecting Lila and Amisha, who’ve presented themselves up ‘til now as vulnerable normals in need of defending, to be frightened. Instead, they each draw their karambits and drop into a fighting stance. 

By the time Reacher crashes into their room, the ladies have gone, leaving four more fresh corpses on the pile along with their slain bodyguards. And that’s how the Philadelphia S.W.A.T. officers who arrive on the scene seconds later find him: with bloodstains on his clothes and a half-dozen sliced-up bodies at his feet. Our itinerant ex-Army do-gooder is innocent of these killings, yet the cops have quite literally caught him red-handed. This looks bad! 

In an Investigation, Details Matter

• The donut shop where Green and Jacob steal a government clerk’s badge so Green can sneak into Anna’s workplace is called Hole Lotta Love. They must’ve had a location adjoining Bob’s Burgers at some point.