City of Brotherly Love
Season 4
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Reacher relocates to Philadelphia and immediately finds himself in a peculiar case, as he’s wont to do.
Photo: Prime
Gone Tomorrow, the 2009 Manhattan-set Lee Child novel that provides the basis for Reacher’s fourth season, spends its opening chapter running down the signs security personnel look for when trying to spot a suicide bomber. “City of Brotherly Love,” the popular Amazon show’s relocated-to-Philly season opener, does a skillful job of clueing us into this without dialogue. The Big Man has just stepped out of a gig at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theater and enjoyed an after-midnight cheesesteak before catching a subway train at the Walnut-Locust station. He spots a visibly distraught woman at the far end of the car, and his eyes go wide. She’s crying, talking to herself — praying, maybe, he’ll tell a cop later — and wearing a puffy winter coat in hot weather. Her hands are inside a bag resting on her lap.
More red flags than a Soviet drill team.
Approaching her as gingerly as a canonically six-foot-five, 250-pound man-beast can, Reacher opens with a command: “I need to see your hands.” When that gets him nowhere, he tries a little tenderness: “May I sit next to you?” Then he pivots to the assumption that she’s wearing explosives under her parka, pointing out the train is nearly empty: “If you’d waited until rush hour, your plan would be more effective.” Reacher comes off like the Terminator, whom star and co-producer Alan Ritchson appears to have been born to play, cycling through a bulleted list of conversation starters until the woman finally tells him to go away.
He persuades her to show him one of her hands. When the other one comes out of the bag, it’s waving a large revolver at Reacher’s chest. “That’s better than the bomb I thought you had,” he says, but his eyes tell us he’s more afraid here than he typically is when looking down the barrel of a gun. “I can help you,” he pleads. “I’m a cop.” He’s only half lying — he’s a retired Army investigator living off his pension — but he doesn’t sound like he believes himself.
“No one can help me now,” the woman says before shooting herself in the head. After the opening titles, Reacher is questioned about the killing by two Philadelphia PD detectives. Kevin Corrigan’s Detective Docherty — the more abrasive of the pair, which may be why he’s sporting an unremarked-upon shiner under his right eye — asks Reacher for his address. Reacher replies by asking for the address of the precinct. “So you’re homeless,” Docherty says.
“Now I see why you’re a detective,” Reacher quips. There’s no call for this hostility, but Reacher resents that these night-tour cops are talking to him like a murder suspect when they already know the shitty case they’ve caught is a suicide, not a homicide. There were four witnesses, after all, though evidently the cops interviewed only three. Reacher’s detailed description of all four — including the split-second deduction that led him to conclude the guy wearing a Colorado State jersey with Colorado misspelled is Albanian — earns him the nickname “Sherlock Has No Holmes” from Docherty. Ten comedy points.
Reacher calls the cops’ bluff by pointing out that their allowing him to wash his hands instead of immediately checking him for gunpowder residue proves they already knew he didn’t shoot anyone. Docherty insists Reacher might have said something to provoke her.
At last, Docherty’s partner, Detective Tamara Green, admits they’re stalling. Green is a more interesting new character than anybody we met in Reacher’s underwhelming prior season, and she’s played by athlete turned actor Sydelle Noel, so marvelous as wrestler Cherry “Junkchain” Bang on the gone-too-soon Netflix series GLOW. Feds are driving up from D.C. to talk to Reacher, she says, because the dead woman, whose name was Anna Merrick, had a sensitive government job. Agreeing to stay out of curiosity — he’s not under arrest — he asks for another cheesesteak.
Relations warm between Reacher and Green as they nosh at her desk. He asks what a cop as savvy as she clearly is did to earn such a lousy posting, but she shuts down that line of inquiry. Turning to the Philadelphia Flyers mascot bobblehead on her desk, Reacher asks, “What the hell is that?”
“Don’t be shitty to my Gritty,” Green warns.
When a patrol officer from another jurisdiction walks in, Green points him out, telling Reacher he’s the brother of the deceased. Reacher concludes from the flatfoot’s posture that he’s in shock. Other cops must find it exhausting that Reacher is forever pointing out cop shit like this.
It’s daylight when the Feds arrive. Because they refuse to identify themselves or their agency, Reacher dubs the three suits Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Snap, who seems in charge because he’s the only one sitting, says they checked Reacher’s military record. Highly decorated, but he left the service under a cloud. “Any issues with the Army or the government?” Snap asks.
“Tons,” Reacher replies.
The G-men think Anna gave something to Reacher before she shot herself. Frustrated by their refusal to specify what this MacGuffin could be, Reacher walks out.
We’re more than a third of the way through the episode and Reacher has kicked precisely zero asses. That shortfall rights itself when two goons accost him outside the station and request the flash drive Anna gave him. New information! Reacher asks who sent them, and they attack, the poor fools. Reacher is fast for a human elephant, slamming one of them into a Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper box. (Legacy media is not dead.) After he takes down these two errand boys, Reacher spots the patrolman Green pointed out earlier — Anna’s brother — in a greasy spoon across the street.
Officer Jacob Merrick (a sad-sack Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette) is in mourning. He’s dreading having to tell his 20-year-old nephew, a linebacker at Temple University, that his mother is dead. Jacob fills Sherlock Has No Holmes in on what Anna did for the government — human-resources work for the Army. He and Anna were adopted, and they were close. Reacher is sufficiently moved by Jacob’s account of his sister’s kindness to put himself back in the center of the mystery. When the two guys Reacher beat up moments earlier return, Reacher gives a kid at the counter of the diner $50 for the thumb drive on the kid’s laptop. He tells the two leg-breakers it’s the drive they were seeking. He’ll give it up only if they take him to their boss.
Enter Indonesian pop star Agnez Mo as Lila Hoth, who apologizes to Reacher for her cousins’ (!) poor manners. She’s with her mother, whom she tells Reacher had an affair with a Delta Force operator stationed in Indonesia in the late ’90s. Anna was using her access to classified Army records to help Lila find the father she’s never known because Lila is a leukemia patient who will soon die without a bone-marrow transplant. What Anna discovered was that the soldier who sired Lila was one John Sampson, now a U.S. representative from North Carolina and a likely presidential candidate. Given his earlier audience with the tight-lipped trio of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, Reacher finds Lila’s story credible and compelling. Lila gives him her number, and he agrees to keep investigating.
Back at the precinct, Green is angry to find the Rice Krispies taking the file about Anna’s suicide from her desk. Docherty warns her off. “The machine fucked you sideways, and you still didn’t learn,” he says, our second hint of a tragic, Chinatown-style backstory for Detective Green. “Punch in, punch out, and hope the phone doesn’t ring in between,” he waxes. “It’s about the income, not the outcome.”
Reacher and Jacob seek information on Rep. John Samson from an investigator’s paradise: the Parkway Central Library. Finding nothing incriminating in the newspapers, Reacher asks a librarian if the facility keeps military records.
Down in the basement stacks, he hears someone creep up behind him. “Give me the flash drive,” the creeper demands. Everybody wants that flash drive! The guy has the most adorable little knife, woefully insufficient against a Reacher-size enemy unless you can get him in the throat or in the eye. Reacher defends both soft spots, catching the blade in a thick hardback volume. The would-be killer gets a few ineffectual kicks in before Reacher wraps his arms around him and hurls him over a desk. The best library fight since John Wick: Chapter 3 concludes with Reacher crushing his opponent between two stacks while the dying man tries to get his blade to reach Reacher’s face. Reacher drags the corpse to the library’s well-marked “COAL ROOM (Staff Only).”
Inferring that Lila must’ve been targeted too, Reacher and Jacob race across town to her hotel. Reacher bursts into her room just in time to intercept another would-be assassin, whom he throws out a window. Reacher tells Lila to buy herself a muted wardrobe — “a woman like you stands out enough as it is” — and find a different, cash-only motel. He and Jacob will go to Washington to confront the congressman. Jacob protests that he drove his police cruiser across the Jersey state line to Philly and must return it. He tells Reacher he’ll meet him for the 6 p.m. train to D.C.
The moment they part, Reacher is accosted by another group of men in black suits. Four, this time, armed with tranquilizer guns. “Enough to take down a gorilla,” their leader says.
“We’ll see,” the Big Man says. Sure enough, it takes two darts to get him to release his grip on the leader’s throat, and all four of these guys to lift Reacher’s out-cold ass into their van.
Reacher’s prior two seasons were each a little worse than the one before, but this opening frame of season four is promising. Good quips, an intriguing mystery, an inventive library-sciences-themed kill, and a welcome new face in Detective Green.
• Several characters from Gone Tomorrow get their names punched up here. Philly detective Tamara Green was NYPD detective Theresa Lee in the novel. Susan and Jacob Merrick were Susan and Jacob Mark on the page, while the presidential contender John Sampson was called Sansom. Odd.
• In the greasy spoon where Reacher and Jacob meet, “Stoned,” by the Old 97’s is playing. Good song. Terrific band. The only public place I’ve ever heard it is at an Old 97’s concert.
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