Jessica Kourkounis/Prime
From the very first two words spoken in Reacher‘s fourth season, it’s clear the show means business. Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) wanders out into the Philadelphia streets after solitary drinks at the bar, goes to the first cart he sees and confidently makes his order: Whiz wit.
For out-of-towners who aren’t in the know, Cheese Whiz has long been the respectable cheesesteak order, an easy way to signal that even if you aren’t local, you know how to order a cheesesteak. With onions, because you are civilized. (The cheesesteak game is actually in the middle of an epochal shift, as Whiz has been overtaken by regional blend Cooper Sharp as the ideal cheesesteak cheese, but I digress.) With this scene, Reacher does the world a public service but also exhibits a reason the recently concluded fourth season may have been Reacher‘s strongest yet: local flavor.
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Reacher is a story about a man on the road, and as such, it has tremendous travelogue potential. As Jack Reacher wanders from town to town with naught but some cash and his travel toothbrush (to see the country on his own terms, as he puts it), Reacher can easily slide into being a show about a place as much as it is about a given season’s mystery.
Season 4 of Reacher brought a sense of place that hasn’t been felt in the show since Season 1, set in Margrave, Georgia, where Jack Reacher spent a full eight episodes trying to enjoy a slice of peach pie. (And man: Who wouldn’t?) This season delighted in its Philadelphia setting, running through landmarks and gleefully figuring out how best to deliver the show’s brand of over-the-top-yet-still-sorta-grounded violence in every location. A guy got turned into a meat panini in the stacks of the Parkway Central Library; goons tried to gun Reacher down in the Magic Gardens (sacrilege!); even the stretch of I-95 where a plot-critical traffic jam occurs is roughly where there’s been some construction underway for months.
What’s funny is that Gone Tomorrow, the Lee Child novel this season is based on, isn’t set in Philadelphia, but New York — which means that someone on the Reacher production team either really loves Philadelphia or loves the idea of Jack Reacher running riot through it. Regardless of the reason, the crazy-quilt version of the city (loving as it is, it’s about as geographically bonkers as John Wick’s New York) does a lot to give this season texture beyond gags about Gritty and cheesesteak cravings. Every season of Reacher effectively starts from scratch with a new supporting cast, and it goes a long way to feel like that cast is from some place, and like they’re not just interchangeable cogs.
To that end, Reacher could have been even more specific and really made a story that was about Philadelphia, and not just set there. The show, after all, has made surprisingly little hay of its man-on-the-road premise. The second and third seasons of Reacher featured its hero expressly moving through places and lingering out of obligation, not really taking in the local scene — he does more of that when he makes a brief appearance in the premiere of the new spin-off Neagley to help Neagley (Maria Sten) catch bad guys and take in a Cubs game than he does in either of those seasons.
The series could really lean into his travels, to showcase locales as diverse as Jack Reacher’s ass whooping methods. He could be the Anthony Bourdain of beatdowns, painting a humanistic portrait of a place while also doing considerable violence to people foolish enough to run into his turkey-sized fists.
Because this season got close, offering a moment of real bittersweet romance as things drew to a close. This latest year of Reacher ends in a long montage that frankly doesn’t resound as much for the characters as it does for this town — as Reacher sits on the SEPTA train with a cheesesteak like he did on the night when everything this season went wrong, you get a little sense of Jack Reacher, endless vagrant, getting a taste of what it means to love the time you spent in a place, and be sad that you’re leaving it.
Reacher Season 4 is now streaming on Prime Video.