Season 3 of "Reacher" kicks off: he punches people.
Based on the 7th book in the best-selling series
Ever since I first watched Reacher in a Kentucky hotel room back in 2022, I’ve enjoyed it for what it is: pure masculine entertainment, like the thriller version of a mid-2000s superhero movie that isn’t pretending to be anything that it’s not. About a year ago I was on Brett Cain’s Ironside Podcast to discuss the show and the book series, which I had just started to read, and I stand by the insight I offered back then: these books (and the streaming show) are Hallmark movies for guys.
Jack Reacher is a former military policeman who’s very intelligent, very terse, and very huge. This last part is important, because he always finds himself in the middle of someone else’s problems, and after he’s done thinking his way to the final boss, he beats the absolute piss out of them with his hugeness. He doesn’t have any bills to pay. He doesn’t have a job or anyone to boss him around. He drifts from town to town and usually meets a beautiful woman who needs his help, so he helps her, and most likely sleeps with her in the process (hugely).
Smaller, weaker men look up to Reacher through their soy-infused glasses and quietly wish they could be him, while maladjusted bullies keep taking a swing at him, for reasons anyone smarter than a dead hamster cannot comprehend. In season 1 a couple of morons tried to jump him after the town crime boss paid them a hundred bucks each; Reacher smashed them with his gigantic muscles. In season 2 a gang of trained mercenaries attacked him in a trap house, and he utterly clowned on them with his mass. Already in season 3 some idiot came at him with a baseball bat, and Reacher broke it over his leg, then pummeled the guy for being too small.
You may be thinking that this removes the critical element of tension from this so-called “thriller” of a TV show, but you would be wrong, dear viewer. Season 3 has brought us a plot twist nobody could have imagined: there is somebody even bigger than Reacher.
And get this…he works for the bad guys.
That’s how you know this man has no moral core: nature has bequeathed largeness upon him, but unlike Jack Reacher, he uses it for evil. If Reacher can’t defeat this titan with his own hugeness, what will happen next?!
Even though we know how all 73 annual Hallmark Christmas movies end, our wives and girlfriends still sit through each of them, because they like watching a successful, attractive, self-starting single woman find love in a charming small town at the abundantly young age of 38. Gentlemen, they have cracked this same formula for us of the more brutal sex, only now it’s about an invincible, jacked, aggressively stoic single man who can’t stop solving problems at the permanent age of (vaguely his 40s).
He doesn’t even work out. While eating donuts in season 1, a small kid asks him why he is so big. “Genetics.” In season 3, the Bigger Villain asks Reacher what’s his bench, and Reacher says he doesn’t bench, because it’s stupid. Then he makes the Bigger Villain punch himself in the face. He’s just like me, for real, for real.
(Language warning)
Chances are that if you watched Dragon Ball Z in high school, you watch Reacher as an adult, because it scratches the same itch. Reacher is just a white Goku who continually hits a higher and higher power level, commensurate to the stronger and stronger villains he faces. In the fantasy of the character, there’s a reliability that we wish to project on the world. Even through the schlock and schmalz our own power fantasies are validated, because we can see through the flaws in every side character’s thinking process. We are just as smart as Reacher, for real, for real.
So far the first three episodes have dropped, and they’re exactly what you expect them to be: Reacher ends up in trouble, he outsmarts the bad guys until it’s time to punch them, then he punches them as hard as he can. If he punches enough people the right way at the right time, he’ll save the day, and that’s what we’re here for.
It’s fun to be entertained again.
But Graham! This is just brainless fluff! It’s junk food for your mind!
My friend, you have described just about everything on the Internet. If you’re that worried, trust in the fact that I read a lot too. Check out my channel for more info on that.
Anyway. On to episode four.