Reacher Season 4 Episode 4 Delivers High Emotions, B-Team Excellence & a Killer Twist

Critic’s Rating: 4.3 / 5.0

4.3

Our conspiracy just intensified, and it’s glorious!

The race is on to find the drive in Reacher Season 4 Episode 4. But our ragtag gang just pieced together that their mysterious journalist is instead their primary suspect!

And now, Reacher is once again in a standoff with the authorities!

We once again got an action-packed hour, and the plot points have been moving rather quickly, with this hour not slowing down in the least.

While my Reacher season premiere review highlights my indifference to Lila and how parts of her arc were playing out at the time, this installment forces me to eat my words.

Of course, for those who have been tuning into the series and have also read the books, the twist at the end was obvious. But it still leaves room for a huge payoff, even as the season races through the source material.

Reacher was smitten by Lila and invested in helping her with her “story,” even though she’s been lying to him since the beginning.

In this instance, it was hard not to snort and chalk things up to the fact that Reacher totally got taken by a pretty face — and that, combined with the genuine guilt he’s felt for Anna, has clouded his judgment since the start.

Lila has been misleading Reacher since the season began, and whenever there’s pressure on her to be upfront, she pivots, adapts her story accordingly, and finds a way to get him back on her side.

But Lila isn’t the person who’s under threat so much as she IS the threat.

Credit where it’s due, it finally makes her more interesting than she seemed when she was just a journalist trying to expose a political conspiracy, and frankly, the story makes far more sense now than it did before.

After Cahill’s suicide, it prompted Reacher to have a real sit-down with Sampson, and it at least colored in some things about why Cahill would’ve jumped. But from the start of the conversation, what was clear was that Lila once again may not have been telling all of the truth.

We got the tale of what happened overseas with Sampson. His mission at the time was to protect some scientist, and in exchange for the US posting up in Indonesia, the soldiers taught the Indonesian military tactics and helped them train.

It’s not a unique tale: Americans having these loose alliances, of sorts, with people who ultimately cause grave harm and end up as our enemies, and they smartly reference multiple similar instances, including Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden.

To his credit, Sampson seemed genuinely rattled and horrified by the idea that the work he did in Indonesia at the time resulted in an Indonesian general committing war crimes, including slaughtering entire villages.

It’s something that, understandably, he’d want buried or not to be at the forefront of his campaign.

But even with their beer-turned-scotch debriefing at a bar, there feels like so much to this story. My eyes always return to Sampson’s wife, though. She leads him by the nose, has her hands in everything, and always seems like she knows far more than what meets the eye.

It feels like it’s so much more than just a protective wife and shrewd, calculating campaign manager.

Sampson always seems easily taken aback and aloof about things, like Reacher’s blunt accusation that Sampson sicced the CIA after him.

Still, Sampson’s wife has been running interference since before we even met Sampson, so I genuinely want to know about her involvement in everything.

Because that woman is a masterclass string-puller.

What’s been interesting about the season so far, as well, is that Reacher has spent a lot of time on his own despite having this endearing team.

And that’s not to say Reacher isn’t notoriously someone who works alone and loves to run off alone, but it’s given the secondary characters more time to shine without Reacher looming over them.

Many shows don’t want to take that risk.

Typically, shows treat secondary characters as if their entire purpose is to orbit the lead, so I find it refreshing that the perfect, reasonable, and practical “divide and conquer” approach has us spending almost as much time with Tamara and the guys as with Reacher himself.

This also panned out well because it left Lila to be this relatively elusive being, so the twist at the end lands with a gut punch, but also with that lingering vibe that we should’ve suspected as much since we still didn’t really know her like the others.

The hour also excels at the secondary characters shining, because it makes the revelation that Ben is dead more impactful.

It felt apparent that Ben was dead, but still, you didn’t want it to be true. After all, it made little sense that, upon Anna’s death, the people who had Ben would have resorted to reaching out to Jacob next.

Not reaching out to Jacob at all, or even assuming he had more knowledge from early on, was a sign in itself.

I love the blunt logic of Reacher versus Tamara trying to navigate this situation while still keeping hope alive, and ironically, neither of them was wrong given the information they had.

For Tamara, there weren’t enough signs to signal Ben was dead from her perspective as a homicide detective.

For Reacher, with the more information he gathered, it made more sense that Ben was dead from a conspiracy angle.

Ben was a big guy, a football player, and not someone the bad guys could easily control, so kidnapping him was a huge risk, and it wasn’t something they could keep up for long.

Once Reacher and a very astute Plum’s wheels started turning, the picture came into full frame.

At some point, it became clear that Anna had secured a file set for incineration, copied it onto a flash drive, and that it was invaluable information in high demand.

Ben spurred Anna to act as she did, doing whatever she could to save her son; she was on the subway because traffic kept her from making the exchange deadline.

I can only imagine what it was like the moment Anna realized that the reason she wasn’t getting “proof of life” was because Ben was already dead.

From there, when Reacher found her, she was just the distraught, vengeful mother who wanted to kill the people who murdered her child.

Anna on that train was a woman who had nothing left to lose, and I, for one, was relieved to learn the reason behind her wearing that jacket in summer — she needed to distract from the white shirt she was wearing when she intended to sneak up on her son’s killers and kill them in return.

We also got to the bottom of why Anna killed herself the second she heard Reacher say he was a cop. She felt Reacher thwarted her mission and that a cop would take her to jail and keep her from her revenge.

It’s such a heartbreaking revelation because if she knew anything about Reacher, he genuinely would’ve helped her, no questions asked.

The entire tragedy could’ve ended differently if Reacher hadn’t misread the situation — if he’d played his hand differently.

He had hoped that saying he was a cop would be the right move to soothe her and save her, but in reality, it was the last thing that pushed her over the edge.

And that’s something that naturally haunts him in a way that properly fuels why he’s more dedicated than ever to this case.

Gosh, my heart broke for Jacob as he processed all this news, and worst of all, showed signs of misplaced anger toward Reacher. It’s the grief talking, but it’s so not fair.

Again, the B-Class are shining quite well. Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette absolutely gutted me with his performance as Jacob, who has been quietly unraveling at the edges with each passing episode and finally reached that breaking point.

What’s been nice is the dynamic he’s forged with Tamara. She’s been his anchor since she had to share the news about his sister, and she appears to be the one thing holding him together now.

Given his background, that means something. He was a kid with no family who got adopted; his adoptive parents died, and Anna and Ben were all he had — and now they’re gone too. You can feel how deeply his identity is tied to them, and now it leaves him unanchored.

But he has justice, and vengeance, and Tamara. And might I add that, on the surface, a burgeoning romance and chemistry between the two could seem contrived at best and ill-advised and doomed at worst.

The scene with the sugar and coffee was such a transparently telegraphed “moment” for them, designed to spark these feelings in a fast-paced series that rarely has time to allow dynamics to blossom naturally.

And from there, there were a series of little “moments,” and yeah, that can feel inorganic at times. But I also don’t care because I like their dynamic and whatever it is and could potentially be, dammit.

Hell, at least it has a shot at a happier ending, despite obvious circumstances compared to Reacher and Lila, am I right?

Although, there’s a very Batman-and-Catwoman energy it potentially serves, with Reacher initially feeling he was saving a damsel, when she’s really a kickass terrorist who guts people like it’s a damn sport.

After what she did to Ben and that other girl, I want her dead. But only after Reacher makes it worth our while.

Since I support women’s rights and women’s wrongs, I’m totally here for this particular ride.

Is it wrong that I want to see her and Reacher having a knockdown drag-out fight?

Don’t get me wrong, I loved our boy going toe-to-toe with the CIA (still cackling at the ice fight and him handcuffing that guy’s arm and leg together) and mercenaries (the train action was EPIC).

But Reacher going at it with a woman who has taken out so many others has me excited.

Over to you, Reacher Fanatics! Did you love that twist?! What are your thoughts and theories on what’s to come?! Let’s discuss it all below.

All-new episodes of Reacher stream on Wednesdays on Prime Video.