Diksha Sundriyal
Jack Reacher returns in the fourth season of Prime Video’s ‘Reacher,’ once again finding himself face-to-face with a grave injustice done to an innocent person. The story begins with Reacher hanging around Philadelphia when, one night, he notices a woman acting strangely on the subway. There are only four other people on the train, and fearing the woman might have a bomb, he tries to calm her down. But it turns out she has a gun instead, and when he tells her he is a cop and can help her, she shoots herself in the head. Reacher is shocked by her act, but it also makes him adamant about finding out what happened to her to make her kill herself. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Reacher Decides to Solve the Suicide, Which is Actually a Murder
Having witnessed the murder, Reacher is taken to the police station to be questioned by two detectives, Sean Dougherty and Tamara Green. While Dougherty considers him a suspect, Reacher notes that Tamara is the smarter of the two. He also surmises that he isn’t actually a suspect and is being held until he can be questioned by the Feds. Sure enough, three suited officers arrive to question him, though Reacher isn’t sure whether they are Feds, the CIA, or some other three-lettered agency. They are unable to get anything out of him, but Reacher discovers that they are looking for a flash drive that they think the victim, Anna Merrick, may have given to him before she died. He also becomes intrigued by the fact that the Feds, or whoever they are, are interested in the suicide of a seemingly ordinary person working at the records department in the army headquarters in DC.
To make things more interesting, he is jumped by two strange men who also want the flash drive, but are beaten up instead. Reacher, then, turns his attention towards Jacob, Anna’s brother, who doesn’t believe his sister simply killed herself. To make matters worse, her son, Ben, also seems to have gone missing, as he is not answering his phone. Reacher tries to learn more about what Anna may have been involved in, but the thugs show up again. This time, Reacher uses a flash drive bought from a random man to find out who the two men work for. They led her to a woman named Lila and her mother, Misha. Lila reveals Misha had her out of wedlock with an American soldier in Indonesia.
Lila came looking for her father because she is suffering from leukemia and needs bone marrow, which her mother cannot give her because she has kidney problems. Anna helped her find her father, who turns out to have been Senator John Sampson, who is running for President. Because John wouldn’t accept her, she decided to get more dirt on him so she could blackmail him to get what she wanted. Still, this doesn’t explain why Anna suddenly killed herself. Reacher empathizes with Lila and agrees to help her. He goes back to find Jacob, who reveals he won’t give up on his sister so easily. So, Reacher joins him on a trip to the library, where they try to look into Sampson’s past. When he seems superficially clear, Reacher thinks to look into his military records, which are in the library’s basement.
He doesn’t get a chance to look around since he is attacked by a man looking for the drive. Reacher kills him, hides his body in the coal room, and immediately leaves the library, with Jacob in tow. He figures Lila is the next target, and sure enough, he reaches her hotel room just in time to fight the guy who was there to kill her. He throws the assassin out of the window, but the man isn’t dead. Reacher, Jacob, and Lila flee, with Reacher instructing Lila to hide somewhere else. Meanwhile, he and Jacob go to Tamara, who takes one look at Reacher and decides she wants nothing to do with whatever he’s mixed up in. Looks like it’s just Reacher and Jacob now. They split up as Jacob, a beat cop from Jersey, has to return his vehicle. They decide to meet up later. But some time later, he is confronted by another group of suited men, who tranquilize him and throw him in the back of their car.
Reacher’s Investigation Takes Him to Murkier Grounds
Reacher wakes up tied to a table in a cell, with Tamara and Jacob in adjacent cells. A quick look around tells him they have been taken by the CIA, who are also after the drive, which means whatever Anna was involved in is much more serious. Reacher is taken away for interrogation, where they try to get him to spill the truth by threatening Tamara and Jacob with torture. Instead, Reacher beats them up, frees his friends, and finds a way out of the building, while other agents pour in chasing after them. They are saved by a man who shows up in his car to rescue them. He is Russell Plum, a journalist in search of a story that will win him the Pulitzer. He had been keeping an eye on the CIA’s black site because he suspected they were doing something bad.
Turns out, he was right, though Reacher warns him off, saying things are much more dangerous than he might have imagined. Since they are now in DC, Reacher decides to visit Senator Sampson. He leaves a message for him at his office, but is later found by his wife, who wants to know whether Reacher is for real or just a fluke trying to blackmail her husband. She agrees to let Reacher talk to the senator, but when he reaches the designated spot, he finds the same suited officers who had tried to interrogate him at the police station. They tell him to back off, but clearly, Reacher is way past that. Meanwhile, Tamara and Jacob go to Anna’s house to find her car. They find the place is trashed, and someone has been hiding out there.
Her car and the keys are nowhere to be found, leading to the conclusion that Anna may have driven to Philadelphia, though that doesn’t explain how she ended up in the subway. They also receive a call from Ben’s football coach, who reveals the boy hasn’t been around for a couple of days. Still, they need a car, so Reacher returns to Plum’s and takes his car. With Tamara and Jacob, he goes to Ben’s frat house, where the boys tell him he is likely still seeing the girl he met online. It turns out that he found the girl on OnlyFans through his other friend, who wants to keep his kink a secret.
Reacher struggles to understand exactly what OnlyFans is and how feet and socks factor into the equation. He concludes that humanity is doomed and refocuses on the case. Tamara reaches out to Dougherty to find out more about the girl, and he comes through. It turns out she is a high-end model who would be too pricey for someone like Ben. Still, the trio goes to her house, only to find her brutally tortured and murdered on her bed. Reacher notes that whoever killed her enjoyed it. He also notes the use of knives, which leads him back to the attacker in the library. He tells Tamara about the guy and asks her to check for prints on the knife.
Reacher Confronts the Lies of the People Involved With the Case
The girl’s body and the possibility that his nephew might have met the same fate shake Jacob to his core. Still, he stays, knowing he cannot walk away until he knows the truth. Reacher thinks his emotional investment in the case will turn him into a liability. Tamara, on the other hand, starts to wonder if Ben killed the girl, leading his mother to kill herself because she couldn’t accept the fact that her son had become a murderer. Reacher doesn’t agree with her explanation, especially regarding the flash drive. The trio leaves the apartment with the girl’s now orphaned cat. Reacher thinks it’s time to talk to Sampson, so he finds the politician during a public event in front of the media.
This forces Sampson to talk to him, but when Reacher accuses him of having an illegitimate child in Indonesia, the senator gives Reacher his DNA to prove that he did no such thing. Reacher believes the man, which means Lila lied to him. Though he is not entirely surprised because he had had his suspicions about the story. Reacher walks out of the building believing Sampson is innocent, but then, he discovers that his chief of staff, Nolan Cahill, was the fourth person on the train that night. He was also the only person the cops never got to interrogate because he fled the scene. The trip returns to Plum’s place, filling him in on what happened with Anna and what they are looking into.
He starts looking into Cahill, confirming that he was also stationed in Indonesia with Sampson. Before he can get into more details, they are distracted. Turns out the CIA has found them, but they never get to make a move because the other group, the one with the knives, kills the agents and starts looking for Reacher and his friends. The fight looks futile until Reacher kills every attacker. He also discovers that this was not the only address on their itinerary. They were headed to a hotel next, which is likely where Lila had been hiding. Reacher leaves her a message to change her hotel, while he and his group pack up as well.
A Confrontation Leads to Another Shocking Tragedy
Reacher and Co need to change the car, so Tamara takes them to her contact, who drives a hard bargain to get a new car while also leaving the cat with the seller. On the way, Reacher gets a call from Lila and decides to meet with her at the bowling alley. When confronted, she confesses she is a journalist looking into Sampson, who she thinks committed war crimes with an Indonesian leader, Putra, who tortured and killed Misha’s husband. Putra and his men were trained by Sampson’s unit, which makes him culpable. The flash drive has all she needs to expose him. Before he can make more follow-up questions, Reacher notes they are surrounded by dangerous men. He tries to fight them off himself and eventually succeeds with some help from Lila.
Meanwhile, Tamara, Jacob, and Plum return to Philadelphia, where, thanks to Dougherty, they find Anna’s car. It is, as expected, trashed. They also discover another ID badge in it, which is curious because they had already found Anna’s badge at her house. Breaking the chain of custody, Jacob takes the badge and, upon examining it, reveals that Anna has high-level clearance for a government facility. Turns out, she might not have been a common clerk after all. Elsewhere, Reacher patches himself up, leading to an intimate moment with Lila, during which she talks about her motivation for being a journalist and wonders what drives Reacher to fight for Anna. They end up having sex, and then Reacher leaves for Baltimore to have another chat with Sampson.
Before he leaves, Lila asks him to be careful since she doesn’t want another person to die because of her. When Reacher reaches Baltimore, he discovers Sampson had been expecting him. He confesses he was stationed in Indonesia for some highly confidential mission, but he committed no war crimes and had nothing to do with Putra. Reacher asks him about Cahill being on the train, which is news to Sampson. He doesn’t believe his chief of staff is involved either, so to clear things up, they find Cahill. He is in the rooftop restaurant having breakfast. When he sees Samson and Reacher approaching, he laments how all secrets eventually come to light. He apologizes in his way to Sampson, praising his potential to be a good President, and then throws himself off the building, dying before Reacher or anyone else can question him for his crimes.
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