Reacher Recap: Dead Reckoning

Reacher
Vote For Sampson
Season 4 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★
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Reacher’s fourth season has to date represented a Reacher-sized upgrade from its third, but it hasn’t shed the series’ historic weaknesses entirely. Invariably there comes a late chapter that stumbles beneath the expository burden it must bear to get us to the bloody finish line — and beneath the deliberate wrong-footing prior episodes have engaged in to make us wonder which characters will break bad. With the penultimate episode of the season wrung from Lee Child’s 2009 novel Gone Tomorrow, we reach that bump in the road. “Vote for Sampson” is a clunky affair redeemed in part by a thrilling denouement. Let’s get into it.

We rejoin Reacher and Green, chained up in the van two members of the ‘75 Cincinnati Reds — Reacher’s very specific nickname for the killers we’ve only just learned are mercenaries hired by Plutus Chemical CEO Leo Ahlquist — have packed them into for execution and burial. Their captors are distracted by an offscreen male voice: “Would you guys mind taking a look at my map?” 

Green and Reacher quarrel over how best to save the life of this poor fool, a metaphorical babe in the literal woods. The two Reds have their pistols concealed behind their backs as they turn to approach the man… 

… and they’re dropped by two gunshots. The shooter who steps into frame is Springfield, security chief for John Sampson, U.S. Representative from North Carolina and a presidential hopeful. When we heard Sampson order Springfield to find Reacher and “handle it” in the last episode, we were meant to infer the congressman was ordering his subordinate to kill Reacher, Ahlquist, or both. Exhibit A of the wrong-footing I mentioned. Springfield now explains he was on his way to “talk to” Ahlquist when he saw the unconscious Reacher and Green being loaded into the back of a van, a reliable indicator of foul play. He followed, he saw, he saved their lives. 

“Unlock us!” Reacher demands. Would it kill HoboCop to say thank you to the man who just prevented him from being, you know, killed?

Even allowing for the fact that these two Reds were bad apples just seconds away from committing three murders, including his own, Springfield is oddly chill about having just shot two men dead. I suppose to become the security director for a SEAL-turned-politician whose chief of staff, Nolan Cahill, was also an ex-SEAL, you’d have to have some moves and some emotional calluses yourself. 

The other member of the Clue Gang who was being driven to his apparent death last episode is Jacob, last seen begging Philadelphia police detective Shaun Docherty not to kill him. Docherty made no effort to calm Jacob, which turns out to be wrong-footing Exhibit B. Only after Docherty has ordered Jacob out of the back of his prowler at gunpoint and made a point of asking Jacob to turn around and face him does he announce he’s letting Jacob go free — in an alley lined with windows! Docherty invites Jacob to clock him with the butt of his service revolver to help sell Docherty’s lie that Jacob overpowered him and escaped. You might expect a veteran detective to know enough to stage this impromptu fight call in a place he can’t be seen. 

Since Jacob and I were both wondering at this point, Docherty volunteers that it was the nothing-to-see-here aftermath of Reacher pulling that C.I.A. goon’s head through the bars of his cell two episodes ago that persuaded him of Jacob’s innocence. Clearly, the C.I.A. guy who’d passed himself off as a Philly patrolman had intended to kill Reacher in his cell. That, plus Docherty’s faith in his partner Green’s integrity even now that she’s become a fugitive herself, was enough to convince the lazy old cop that Jacob would turn up dead if he took him into custody. Even Docherty’s atrophied conscience can remain dormant for only so long.

When Jacob tells Docherty that Green accompanied Reacher to Delaware to talk to a chemist, Docherty says the Philly cops found “Bunsen burners and shit” at the abandoned restaurant where Lila and Misha Hoth escaped from the Clue Gang last episode. 

“How can I thank you?” Jacob asks. 

“By getting the fuck out of here,” Docherty says. “We’re not friends now. We’re not having a moment. Get lost.” 

Down in The First State, Reacher ambushes nefarious chemist Leo Ahlquist by crashing the murder-van he appropriated from the dead Reds into Ahlquist’s car. “We never got to finish our talk!” Reacher declares. 

This brings us to an interminable exposition dump that accounts for more than a quarter of this episode’s run-time and includes multiple flashbacks. After Reacher starts breaking Ahlquist’s fingers to loosen Ahlquist’s tongue, the chemist spills the tea: Ahlquist was a post-grad government contractor when he was in Indonesia with Sampson and Cahill in 1998. Sampson didn’t know this, but Ahlquist was part of a secret U.S. effort to develop chemical weapons so that they could also develop antidotes and countermeasures. The reason everyone has been chasing after that photo of Sampson and Cahill with Indonesian General Reza Putra is that it also contains a deadly chemical formula written on a whiteboard in the background. The formula was out of focus and illegible in the photo, but 21st-century A.I. image-decryption technology has now made it possible to read.

“So what was unclear yesterday is clear today!” Springfield chimes in, like he’s on Sam Altman’s payroll. (This is an Amazon show. He’s on Jeff Bezos’s payroll.) 

Here Shawn Doyle, the TV veteran who plays Ahlquist, shows us what professionalism looks like, chewing his way through fibrous paragraphs of exposition while covered in phony blood and bruises and never forgetting that he’s supposed to be in agonizing pain. When he clams up for a second, Green turns to Reacher, who’s still holding on to the chemist’s mangled hand, and says, “Snap that shit.”

It works. Ahlquist starts to sing again, revealing that chemical weapons he was working on 28 years ago became, in much-diluted forms, the pesticides that built his fortune. At some point Ahlquist became successful enough that Cahill, who was in charge of the SEAL team training General Putra’s security forces in the late ‘90s, recognized him in a press photo and reached out. Ahlquist placated Cahill by telling him he had at least as much to lose if their ties to Putra were exposed as Cahill or Cahill’s now-boss John Sampson did. 

I don’t buy that the mere possibility of all this coming out years later was so terrifying to Cahill as to make this ex-SEAL jump to his death from a Baltimore rooftop. That, in retrospect, becomes still another example of this show’s bad-faith wrong-footing.

Only after eight-plus minutes of exposition do we cut away to the makeshift lab Lila and Amisha have set up to brew the chemical weapon Ahlquist devised the year There’s Something About Mary arrived in cinemas. Why does Lila inject their experimental chemical weapon into a thrill-seeking junkie they’ve lured in off the street? Simply to give us the gruesome scene of the kid convulsing to death while leaking blood from his eyes, nose, and mouth. A poison that must be spiked directly into a victim’s vein is the opposite of a WMD, so as a test of the deadly compound Lila and Amisha have cooked up from that old recipe, this is meaningless. As yet another display of their oft-demonstrated sadism, it’s redundant. Say it with me now: Reacher is a nasty show.

This distasteful interlude cuts back to Reacher and Green continuing to interrogate Ahlquist. Springfield points out the historical difficulty of making toxins into aerosols. Ahlquist says he solved that “problem,” but altered the formula to create a substance lethal only to mealworms. “I fight famine,” he tells Reacher. But he’s surmised that Lila and Amisha are going to realize his weapon in its original, most lethal recipe, stage a chemical attack to prove it works, and then auction it off to whatever terrorists or despots offer the best price.

Ahlquist’s final, begging promise to keep what he knows to himself falls on disbelieving ears. Reacher points out all he had to do to get Ahlquist to talk was to snap a couple of his fingers. Lila and Amisha have more horrifying extraction techniques in their arsenal, as Jacob’s nephew Ben Merrick and OnlyFans model Mary Ellen “Smellin’ Degenerate” Daniels learned in their last hours. Probably Reacher would’ve made the calculated decision to kill Ahlquist even if the bastard didn’t try to argue that the agricultural advances he’s made possible outweigh the regrettable deaths of innocents Anna and Ben Merrick, give or take a few with those of some “midlevel” C.I.A. guys and amoral hired guns. It’s still shocking when Reacher snaps Ahlquist’s neck. 

Springfield is less appalled that Reacher has just killed a man than that Reacher was brazen enough to do it in front of him. 

“Saving the world comes with costs,” Reacher says, quoting the former CEO he’s just right-sized. 

“I’m good with it,” Green says. 

On the phone with Jacob as Reacher and Green drive back up to Philly, the trio deduce that Lila and Amisha’s likeliest target is the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, a 14,000-capacity amphitheater that on this evening is showing a beloved summer blockbuster with a live score courtesy of the Philadelphia Orchestra. They contact Docherty to get his help having the event delayed while performers and attendees are searched, but it’s a bust. There’s no evidence of a foiled chemical attack. 

It’s only when Reacher checks in with Sampson that the Clue Gang finds the target. Elpeth, Sampson’s wife, is holding a fundraiser for her charity at Penn’s Landing. There will be thousands of well-heeled guests, and another incentive for Lila and Amisha: revenge. Sampson previously confided to Reacher that he knew of a U.S. attempt to assassinate Putra. The congressman now reveals he fired the shot that killed the despot himself — and that Amisha, Putra’s devoted acolyte, saw him do it! 

“Get paid, get payback,” Reacher says. 

There’s no story reason for Reacher and Sampson to take turns reciting the list of suicide-bomber warning signs we heard Reacher explicate in the season’s first episode, when he mistook Anna Merrick for a terrorist intent on blowing herself up on the Broad Street Line. Still, it does provide for a satisfying bit of symmetry. It also involves the viewer in Sampson’s desperate search of the Penn’s Landing crowd, wherein the young, very tall Black man Lila and Amisha welcomed from Djibouti in the prior episode, and the large backpack he’s wearing, stick out like sore/broken thumbs. 

Sampson is a political animal whose loyalties have remained murky up ‘til now, but he’s got it where it counts. He runs at the bomber and tackles him into the Delaware River, where the bomb, the bomber, and the congressman all explode. Can we assume that because the chemical weapon detonated underwater, the evening air at Penn’s Landing is unpoisoned and the crowd is safe? Reassurances will have to wait a week. We cut to credits over a close-up of Reacher’s expression — shock, astonishment, and admiration battling for space. 

In an Investigation, Details Matter

• We don’t see what movie is being shown at the Mann Center, but the music we hear the Philadelphia Orchestra playing is a dead-reckoning giveaway. It’s one of the latter Mission: Impossible flicks. Before Christopher McQuarrie co-wrote and directed four of those circa 2015-25, he warmed up by writing and directing Tom Cruise in 2012’s Jack Reacher.