Trash TV: Reacher Season 2 — Ronan's Internet Content Venue

Recently I was on a plane, and I found myself in that liminal phase where there was enough of the flight left that I wanted something to kill time, but not enough left to the point that starting a movie was viable. As such, I scrolled through the in-flight entertainment offerings and decided to throw on a few episodes of the second season of Reacher, a TV series I knew absolutely nothing about. In fact, prior to watching it I thought Jack Reacher and Jack Ryan were the same character.

Based on a long-running (26 entries and counting) series of novels about a guy who wanders around America punching and shooting people to death, Reacher is the second time this character has been adapted to live action, the first time being two Tom Cruise movies that don’t seem to have made much of an impact. Although they don’t really count, because as usual Tom Cruise is playing himself in those and not Jack Reacher.

I watched two episodes of this before my flight landed, and upon arriving at my destination found myself strangely compelled to continue. Yes, I just continued on watching the second season instead of going back to the first one. Apparently the Jack Reacher novels are intended to be read in any order, and this seems to largely be true of the TV series as well; this second season is actually based on the eleventh book, and apart from a few references to the prior season (based on the first book) and one character who briefly shows back up, you can easily go into it without having watched anything else and you won’t miss anything.

The first episode sets things up pretty succulently: Jack Reacher is a gigantic chunky wide-boy who lives an itinerant lifestyle, wandering the country with only the clothes on his back, relying on a meagre military pension to survive. Somehow, despite being constantly broke and not having a gym membership, he manages to maintain this physique:

While roaming the land, Reacher seems to get embroiled in murder mysteries and dangerous conspiracies with improbable regularity. He solves said mysteries using his experience as a military police officer, then punches/stabs/shoots the perpetrators to death, also using his experience as a military police officer, and usually he seems to bang a hot lady at some point while he’s at it (no word on whether his experience as a military police officer comes into play here, so I am forced to assume that it does).

This time around, the mystery/conspiracy hits close to home: several members of the special investigation unit that Reacher led during his military career have turned up dead, having been tortured and then thrown out a of a helicopter. Since this is the sort of thing that usually doesn’t happen by accident, a surviving member of the team contacts Reacher and they get the band back together in order to solve the mystery and take bloody revenge against the people who Pinochet’d their squadmates. They do this with improbable ease, since this is taking place in Hollywood-land where being in the army grants you sick Jason Bourne martial arts powers and thus every member of Reacher’s squad, including the forensic accountant, can take on multiple armed assailants using only their fists and win.

I don’t normally like to harp on about fictional stories being improbable. Anymore, I mean. I used to do that shit, but then I watched an episode of Cinema Sins and had an existential crisis, so these days I normally let a book or movie or TV show slide for being “unrealistic.” We engage with fiction to see unrealistic things happen, and thus sitting there going “Uhhh actually that wouldn’t happen in real life” is not just pointless, it runs counter to one of the primary goals of fiction.

But Jesus Christ, there are still limits, and Reacher blasts right past all of them. Reacher and his posse get into roughly one major fight per episode, and every single one ends with them killing all of their opponents (this is so they can’t interrogate the survivors and solve the mystery early, something that becomes comically obvious by the third time it happens). Early on the show tries half-assedly to make this plausible by having the heroes dump the bodies in wet cement or whatever, but by halfway through it just gives up and you have Reacher and co fighting a biker gang in a restaurant parking lot, leaving half a dozen bodies strewn around in plain sight. The only way the show even attempts to engage with this is by having the lead detective on the murder investigation decide to look the other way, and I’m sorry, but I don’t think a single New Jersey detective is going to be able to cover for Reacher and his bodies when they drive a car through the front doors of a corporate lobby and then ransack the building.

And look, I get it. It would be no fun if every fight scene was followed by the protagonists spending twelve hours in a police station trying to convince the cops they were acting in self-defence. But this is entirely a problem of the show’s own creation: it has to have all of the fight scenes end with no survivors so the heroes can’t question any of the goons for information, and you can’t not have a fight scene every episode or people will get bored, so what else are you going to do?

Well, you could spend more time on the mystery-solving and investigation. Which, to be fair, is actually at least as much of a focus as the meat-headed action, if not more so. And also to be fair, it’s a pretty compelling mystery.

One of this series’ great advantages is that there’s basically no filler. Reacher has no family, and so the episodes aren’t padded out with the standard soap opera drama (Indifidelity! Divorce! Misbehaving children!) that American TV shows habitually use to fill out their episode runtimes. He does engage in a romance with one of his old military subordinates—they were both vibrating with lust for each other back in the day and technically could have banged since she was the same rank as Reacher, but he held off because he was still her boss and he’s a stickler for those sorts of rules—but this is a purely physical affair that neither participant treats as anything more than that, Reacher’s compulsive nomadism not being conducive to an actual relationship.

Because the series is 50% less chunky than its main character, what you end up with is a fast-paced, lean mystery/thriller that wastes absolutely no time. Either Reacher and co are solving mysteries, or they’re killing dudes, or there’s a flashback filling in the backstory, which almost always is directly relevant to what’s happening in the present-day narrative. And the flashbacks even have their own little running plotline about a big heroin smuggling operation that Reacher’s unit busted back in the day, which means this is all plot, all the time.

Granted, I do wish the way the main mystery was solved was a little more satisfying. What generally happens is that Reacher and his friends will be puzzling over some mysterious clue, getting nowhere, and then a member of the team or a random bystander will say something innocuous like “avocado toast” and then Reacher’s big rectangular face will light up and he’ll be like “of course—that’s it!”. This happens over and over again. It’s already pretty hacky the first time, let alone the fifth time.

The other big problem getting in the way of the murder-mystery-solving (as in characters who murder people while solving mysteries) is that the series is just not as cool as it thinks it is. I could list examples of this all day, but here’s one to illustrate the point: the slogan of Reacher’s old squad, which gets repeated over and over again, is “you do not mess with the special investigator” which in terms of badass boasts is up there with “you do not interfere with the tax consultants.” Get that shit tattooed across your back, people will be really intimidated.

After finding the second season of the show oddly compulsive despite its flaws, I decided to take a look at the source material. The first Jack Reacher novel, which came out all the way back in 1997, is the imaginatively-titled Killing Floor, which picks up just a few months after Reacher has left the military and started his life of wandering. Stopping by in a small southern town on a whim, he gets picked by the cops for a brutal murder that happens to have taken place that morning. When the greater mystery implied by the murder turns out to have a surprising personal connection, Reacher joins forces with the lead detective and the only cop in town who isn’t corrupt in some way and is soon neck-deep in conspiracies both local and national in scale.

My main take away from reading this is that either the TV series amps up the action a lot, or the book series started off a lot more low-key. This is much more of on the “mystery” end of the mystery/thriller blend, with far more page count devoted to finding clues and investigating things than getting into random fights with hostile NPCs. The “southern locale in summer” milieu, the uneasy current of small-town corruption that runs through the story, and the shockingly violent nature of some of the murders gives the story an atmospheric, grimy edge, sort of like season one of True Detective or a Gillian Flynn novel. If you like that sort of thing, you might like this.

Or not, because it’s still filled with ridiculous macho bullshit. On Reacher’s first day in prison a gang tries to molest his cellmate, so he headbutts their leader into the shadow realm and instead of using their huge numerical advantage to pummel him to death, the other gang members meekly bow to his superior masculinity. This seems to be how dudes who fancy themselves secret badasses would like to think prison violence works; in reality, I’m pretty sure that even if you did win the fight like Reacher does here, someone would just sneak up and shank you in the kidneys later.

Reviews tend to describe the prose in this book as “spare” as if Cormac McCarthy wrote it, but in reality it’s just flat and basic. Page after page goes by filled with short sentences designed to be read in a monotonous, noirish growl, barely changing cadence between low-stakes conversations and gun-fights. Maybe there are some people who find this sort of thing compelling, but I’ve always just found it boring.

In order to close the oroborous of content I then went back and watched the first two episodes of the first season of the Reacher TV series, which is based on this book. I don’t have much to say about it, except that apart from some poorly-executed flashback scenes it seems far better than its source material in every way.

Also, the dude who plays Reacher is noticeably less chunky in this season. If the show continues for too long, eventually his bones aren’t going to be able to carry the weight of his muscles.