An attempt to explain why Season Two was so bad.

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I’ve always been a fan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. I bought and devoured every book, right up until he stopped writing them himself (and my enjoyment trailed off a bit with the last few before then, but I read them nonetheless). I watched Tom Cruise’s version of Jack Reacher on screen. Like everyone else, I was sceptical that Cruise could make it work. But I thought he did. Then the TV series came out with Alan Ritchson, and I binged Season One with relish; it was a masterful execution of Killing Floor, one of the best of the novels.

So you can imagine my excitement when Season Two landed, and my subsequent disappointment when I had to stop watching it half-way through. Despite a surprising amount of positive reviews, this season fell very flat for me (and I’m not the only one), for several reasons. This week’s post is my attempt to explain what was bad about the season, with a hypothesis as to why it all went wrong at the end.

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A canon known for its gritty realism see-saws into fantasy

You’ll know from my writing that I’m a fan of realism in fiction (possibly more so than most people). And I loved the Reacher books for that reason: they mixed gritty realism with just enough novelty to let the reader suspend their disbelief and enjoy the rollercoaster. In most of the books, the most unrealistic aspect was Reacher’s propensity to roam the small towns of America running into trouble. For example, he often hesitates to shoot at baddies because he thinks about the fall of shot, and whom he might inadvertently kill (just like a military-trained person would¹). He’s a hulking brute, and we love seeing him up against three or four thugs, because we know he’s a street fighter extraordinaire who will put at least two or three of them in hospital. We also know that when he comes up against ten thugs, or thugs with guns, he will have to think his way out of the situation: he’s not a Superman.

Reacher Season One followed Lee Child’s debut Reacher novel Killing Floor quite faithfully. Season Two follows Bad Luck and Trouble, with a new storyline interspersed throughout which flashes back to Reacher’s time in the military. While Season One stuck pretty close to the source material, the Season Two writers had free rein to jump the shark with the flashback sequences, and added some new fantastical elements to the main storyline at the same time.

As a result, Season Two depicts a squad of Terminator-style invincible action heroes; flashy, fiery Hollywood explosions galore; and a main character who has gone from admirable maverick to contemptible psychopath.

The explosions are worse than Hollywood’s low bar…

Of course I’m going to get hung up on this, I’m an explosives guy. Some day soon I promise to do a full post on how Hollywood messes up explosions. There were only three big ones to speak of in Season 2:

All quite a bit garish and over the top, with lots of pointless flame and unrealistic blasts for the observed or implied size of the explosive charges used. All of this is pretty standard Hollywood fare, and, like I said, I’ll have a proper discussion about explosions one day. So I’ll forgive it here.

What I will not forgive, however, is the execrable segment of dialogue immediately after the big house explosion (start of episode 6). Our heroes are hanging out on swings in a kids’ playground, and they betray the screenwriters’ ignorance of explosives:

This exchange, although a fleeting one and easily overlooked, really summed up the season’s failings for me. In an attempt to make the 110th seem even more gangster, the writers made them explosives experts now, on top of all their other qualifications. But, as I’ve attempted to illustrate above, the power of an explosive is not the only factor determining how big a blast is. You could just, you know, use more of a less powerful but way more accessible explosive. In the same way, you could use stacks of $100 bills, or a bank transfer, to buy an expensive car; you don’t need to go looking for $10,000 bills, even though they would make the buying process easier².

All this scene tells us is that the writers are able to Google “what is a really powerful explosive” and “what is the most powerful explosive in the world”. But these explosives are expensive:

Explosive	Cost per kg
TNT	$11
HMX	$100
CL-20	$1,300

Finally, it’s worth noting that CL-20³, while more powerful than HMX⁴, is mainly developed and used as a propellant, so even if the baddies managed to break into China Lake⁵ and steal some, it wouldn’t be much good at blowing up a house.

This dialogue, along with the whole house exploding scene, is a confabulation of the TV series writers. Other confabulations of Season Two serve to turn the main character from a man (albeit an impressive one) to a machine.

…while Reacher has become a Terminator

Season Two has seen Jack Reacher metamorphose from a creature of flesh and blood to something closer to the Terminator. We get an early example of this when he sets off the airbag in Russo’s car:

An airbag needs an acceleration of 3-5 g to initiate (and this was the lower end of what I found; some said up to 20g). This means that Reacher’s kick needs to exert a force of 3 tonnes minimum. Even if his thigh muscles could produce that kind of power (they couldn’t), airbag deployment needs two sensors to simultaneously log the acceleration in order to deploy. There’s no way that this scene could happen with a human Reacher (and it even looks puny: the bonnet sustains only a small dent).

Another superhuman effort is when Jack catches onto the wheel of the helicopter as it’s taking off, a particularly Terminator-esque display:

The helicopter scene has even more Jack Reacher invincibility in store, when he’s holding Dixon and a gurney by the leg, out the back of the helicopter, while being beaten on by two baddies, one after the other:

Dixon saves the day here by freeing herself from the gurney straps (without falling), then vaulting up over the heli door opening (using the air around her for leverage) before stabbing baddie with the knife that had been stuck in the arm of Reacher that was holding her and the gurney’s weight:

Dixon isn’t the only superhuman one, since herself and Neagley survive an impossible volley of fire from three baddies:

And the whole squad, high heels and all, have a collective Terminator demonstration when they take out ten bikers (who have guns, but decide not to use them out of what, sportsmanship? You’re fighting against robots! Use your guns!):

The whole 110th⁶ seem to have undergone the cyborg transformation, and the drug deal flashback firefight is another example of this.

At least Reacher becoming a Terminator would explain the next section of my critique, which explains how his personality has changed from the Reacher we know and love.

Reacher has been the victim of a trans-orbital lobotomy

Who is Jack Reacher? He’s a tough guy, a maverick, a loner, a ladies’ man. He’s loyal, intelligent, and a lover of blues. Who is the main character in Reacher Season Two? He’s a psychopath and a thug.

Reacher the psychopath

The biggest wrench for me in this whole season was Reacher becoming a sadist and psychopath. The scene in the hospital was the final straw for me: Reacher needs info from a baddie who’s in hospital. He tortures him to get the info (promising to let him live), then kills him anyway in a horrifically painful way. It made me realise that he’s the bad guy in this show, and Reacher was never the bad guy before.

Rather than solve the problem by deductive reasoning, this season sees Reacher punch, kick, shoot, and murder his way from baddie to baddie, slowly climbing the chain of baddies until he gets the top baddie. Yawn. What’s worse is that he takes enjoyment in inflicting pain, which was never a trait of Reacher’s. He enjoyed justice, and, although never afraid to murder someone if he felt it necessary, it was never his first option.

In the books, this is made explicit. Reacher will always hesitate before letting rip with a firearm at an escaping baddie. He always considers the “backstop”, i.e. if he were to miss, or his bullets were to pass through the target, where would they go after that? There’s often when he doesn’t shoot for risk (even slight) of hitting a bystander.

Season Two Reacher has absolutely no such compunctions, firing left, right, and centre in urban areas. He even blasts away ineffectually at the baddies escaping in a helicopter. The real Reacher would have read my post on pistol accuracy (actually, he wouldn’t need to). He would also know that bullets shot up in the air come back down to hit innocent bystanders (albeit very rarely). This is not Reacher.

Reacher the thug

When I describe this TV season’s Reacher as a thug, I don’t just mean in the sense of a tough guy who beats on people. Arguably, that’s much of his persona in the books. I mean it in a more specific sense, and relating more to the flashback sequences, when he’s supposedly a Major in the US Army. I mean it in the sense that his depiction here is pretty much the opposite of a good military commander. The “thug” is the kind of soldier whom the likes of Reacher, an MP officer, should be targeting and persecuting. Instead, Season Two’s Reacher is a thug.

Like most thugs, he doesn’t want to think too hard, relying instead on his inbuilt biases and beliefs to get him through. Violence is his go-to when these don’t work:

• He refuses to believe that Swan was implicated in the crime, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. And no, the fact that he was ultimately right does not forgive this trait.
• He plans a drug bust (Army flashback) during a deal, but fails to consider that he could be ambushed by the other party in the deal.
• His troops are an inchoate, insubordinate rabble. He is less like a CO and more like a gang boss: offering protection in exchange for loyalty. He doesn’t even let them call him “Sir”, for God’s sake, and we’re supposed to think this is cool.

His decisive moment points even more to his thuggish-ness. When flashback Reacher’s CO orders him not to pursue the investigation any further, his choices are:

• The craven (but most sensible) option: Listen to your CO and get the perps on minor charges
• The morally righteous option: Refuse the order as unlawful, offer to resign, kick up a stink and maybe get someone higher up to pay attention and solve the problem.
• The so-so option: Agree publicly with the CO, then report him up the line to raise the alarm bells about the situation.
• The thug option: Agree publicly with the CO, then do whatever the hell you like anyway, taking the whole team down with you.

Guess which option Season Two’s Reacher chooses?

I will admit that the books, at least The Enemy, which is the only one set during his service years, has a little bit of this trope. A little bit, though, and it’s tempered by his interactions with the highest echelons of the Pentagon towards the end of the book. This Reacher is a guy who knows the system, knows how to stay (just about) in his lane, and knows how to cleverly work the system to achieve his ends. Season Two flashback Reacher doesn’t know, or care, where his lane is. He doesn’t see himself as being part of the system. He’s like a buff version of this guy:

Conclusion: Where did it all go wrong?

Speculation on Reddit leans heavily into the Writers’ Strike of May to Sep 2023 as an explanation. This is plausible, but I would question the timing, since filming for Season Two wrapped up before the strike started (Feb 2023). Whether or not the strike affected the show, however, it’s obvious that poor writing plagues this season. The source material is adapted very poorly, and the additional flashback material is even worse.

Perhaps an additional factor is the source material itself: Bad Luck and Trouble does not show Reacher at his logical, deductive best. Maybe this is because the team dynamic takes centre stage over Reacher’s own introspection: with all the additional dialogue and logistics, Reacher doesn’t get the space to just think through the problem on his own. Also, there are fewer windows for the iconic “Reacher said nothing” line which peppers most of the books to an almost (but not quite) absurd level. I’m not saying that BL&T is a bad Reacher book, but it’s one of the less Reacher-y Reacher books. It’s probably not the best one to adapt into a series, especially in the absence of a decent writing team.

Apparently Season Three will be based on Persuader. This is tentative good news: Persuader is one of the better novels, very Reacher-y, no team of friendly forces to confuse matters, and a great set of baddies. Let’s hope they stick close to the source material and deliver something akin to Season One. I’ll give Reacher a second chance. I won’t give it a third. Jack wouldn’t.

1. And as seen only last weekend, tragically, in the deaths and injuries during the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. ↩︎
2. In theory. In reality, I suspect the dealer would assume you’re some kind of criminal to have access to large denomination notes and would refuse to do business with you, or charge a premium. ↩︎
3. Its chemical name is the absolutely amazing and ridiculous “Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane”, and it is a sorta-box-shaped (that’s the technical term) molecule where the chemical energy of the explosive is bound up in the tight angles of the carbon bonds, while lots of nitrogen atoms provide oxidiser, resulting in a more efficient reaction. ↩︎
4. Also known as octogen or cyclotetramethylene-tetranitramene, the origins of the abbreviation are unclear. HMX detonates very quickly, making it excellent for use in shaped charges and other high-performance applications. One of the reasons it’s so expensive is that it’s a minor by-product of the Bachmann process, the reaction used to make RDX, a chemically similar but much cheaper explosive. You need to make lots of RDX to get a small amount of HMX. ↩︎
5. The “CL” in “CL-20” stands for China Lake, a naval weapons research facility in California. ↩︎
6. At least, the section of the 110th whom we see. This whole season does the typical Hollywood thing of treating military units as small squads of 8-10 individuals. This is not how militaries are organised, even military police. There’s another day’s rant in this. ↩︎