Are his most recent attackers Prime Video‘s Reacher fans? Because they took him down with tranquilizer darts designed for large animals, and even built a sturdy cage to hold him. That’s where Reacher comes around, groggily, in Season 4 Episode 2, since they actually hit him with two tranqs. There are manacles around his ankles and wrists, and alongside in two more cages are Philadelphia detective Tamara Green and small town cop Jacob Merrick. “Welcome to the party,” Tamara says. Whoever abducted all of them did so with total impunity. 

“Before I leave this room I’m gonna put all of you to sleep.” Whether he does or does not — and don’t worry, he will — Reacher always begins a battle by telling his adversaries what’s gonna happen. He’s already informed Tamara and Jake it’s probably the CIA who grabbed them, and the besuited agents are comically over-serious as they ask him questions that sound like demands. They want the flash drive he never had and still doesn’t. Instead Reacher slams the table into his questioner, bounces a chair off another guy’s skull, and uses the tranq darts to knock them all out. “Told ya,” he tells the zonked pile of government agents. 

Reacher uses the power of a million diner breakfasts and all of the cheesesteaks he ever consumed to turn the manual crank on a scissor jack, which pries the cage bars apart for Green and Jake to wiggle through. And while both of these people are police, Reacher’s newest allies seem willing to overlook his string of extra-judicial beatdowns and all the occasional murdering. Jake is compelled by the mysterious circumstances of his sister Anna’s subway suicide. And Tamara Green was just abducted in Philadelphia, driven to Washington, DC, and forced against her will into a cage. Her pension with Philly PD can wait. “I’m in this shit now.”

And there’s one more member of Reacher’s impromptu Season 4 support team. Russell Plum (Kevin Weisman), who swoops in to rescue them from pursuing CIA goons, is a freelance muckraker full of stories about federal overreach. (He was watching the building with the cages as a CIA black site.) “I’m gonna blow the lid off this thing!” Russell declares from the driver seat of his rusted-out Ford minivan. Right after he determines exactly what that thing is.   

While the crew checks out Anna’s DC-area home — naturally it’s been ransacked, but they do inherit her little white kitty — Reacher heads to the National Mall to meet with John Sampson. He sent the congressman a note, “I saw a woman die with your name on her lips,” which isn’t entirely true. But it will work to dig into how Sampson is linked to Anna Merrick, and signing it “Jack-None-Reacher, US Army Retired” is good for getting an audience. Reacher actually meets with Elspeth Sampson (Kathleen Robertson) and Springfield (Aaron Poole), the politician’s head of security. “My husband and I have no secrets,” Elspeth tells Reacher. Maybe. 

Why would Anna Merrick drive from her Washington, DC home to Philadelphia, but then ditch her car in favor of taking the subway? Taking Russell’s minivan to Philly and Temple University, Reacher and Green question the fraternity brothers of Anna’s nephew Ben (Denis Wong). He hasn’t been heard from for days, not since he left an area bar with an attractive woman. But when they track that lead, there is only more violence. At her apartment they discover the woman dead, tied to her bed and tortured. “They weren’t amateurs,” Reacher says to Tamara. “They saved the kill cut for last.”

Who is “they,” though? And whoever “they” are, they’re apparently a different, more ugly and violent “they” than the stuffy federal agents who put this crew in cages. Whoever killed the young woman must also have abducted Anna’s son Ben, which makes her suicide on the subway still more suspect. All this blood spilled for a flash drive with unknown contents? Reacher decides to make another run at Congressman Sampson, and tracks him down in a campaign trail hotel suite.   

“That’s what this is about? You think I had an affair?” John Sampson strikes Reacher as a truth-teller, because the congressman offers to take a pop DNA test, so as to disprove the baby daddy suspicions of Lila Hoth. (“You’ll see I did not father any children in Indonesia.”) And maybe it’s a little bit of their shared military background, too, since Sampson says he wouldn’t bullshit a fellow officer, and he doesn’t know anything about the CIA putting people in cages. 

“I can’t see the CIA being so involved in a domestic political sex scandal that they kidnap three American citizens on US soil,” Reacher says. “Two of ‘em cops.” And both the congressman and his wife agree. “We’ve elected presidents after sex scandals. People don’t seem to care much about that anymore.”   

Outside the hotel, Reacher joins Jake, Tamara, and the cat inherited from Anna’s condo. He tells them he no longer believes Sampson was involved. Which is right when the congressman is being loaded into a waiting SUV by his staff, one of whom Reacher definitely recognizes. “Remember when I said there was a fourth witness on the train when Anna killed herself? That’s him.” Maybe John Sampson really hasn’t heard of Anna Merrick or a missing flash drive. But Nolan Cahill (Chris Owens), the congressman’s chief of staff, was on the subway that fateful night.

Pocket Items for Reacher Season 4 Episode 2 (“Cage Fight”):

• “Deputy Dog and Hobo Cop.” We’re not yet sure if Shaun Docherty is friend or foe to Reacher’s group, but the cranky Philly detective gets off some good lines, and a character actor like Kevin Corrigan is always welcome. And maybe Docherty ends up being an ally, like Domenick Lombardozzi’s Detective Gaitono “Guy” Russo in Reacher Season 2.

• We also like Kevin Weisman playing an internet-conspiracy-addled investigator of government secrets in Reacher. It acts like a spiritual throwback to Weisman’s memorable run on Alias as SD-6-turned-CIA tech guy Marshall Flinkman.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.