Reacher season three sticks the landing in an explosive hour
"Unfinished Business" finally gets to the good stuff.
Photo: Jasper Savage/Prime
Well, that’s more like it. After a season that slow burned to the point that it arguably fizzled out, Reacher finally got to the good stuff in the third-season finale, “Unfinished Business.” We got to the long-promised royal rumble between two of the largest men to ever grace the small screen. We got a hero’s moment for Zachary Beck and a villain’s send-off for Xavier Quinn. What’s more, Susan Duffy saved Teresa, Guillermo Villanueva saved Richard, and Reacher shot up a fancy birthday party. This episode felt like what people like about Reacher: action-packed with just enough clever quips to keep the violence from dragging it down. While it didn’t quite return the show to its first-season form—that batch of episodes is still the best—sometimes all that matters is how a season sticks its landing. And this one stuck.
“My grandfather would have called you a throwback-and-a half,” says Susan Duffy about Jack Reacher, a line that better be in an ad for the show next season given how much it sums up what people love about Reacher. It’s an old-fashioned morality tale, a program that uses Western tropes to entertain. Put Reacher on a horse, riding into towns and ridding them of the powerful bad guys who run the saloon, and you realize how much the show works from a John Ford template. This season, Reacher rode into Maine looking for vengeance—and he certainly got more than he bargained for when he got off his horse.
The finale picks up right where the penultimate episode ended, leading into a shootout at the salvage yard. Waves of men come in to…what? Kill ATF agents? Take out Beck? Just blow some shit up? It’s entertaining even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of narrative sense, and it allows things to unfold back at the party, where Neagley is getting the lay of the land regarding the real weapons deal. They literally lay out the plan: “Sneak in, get Richard and Teresa, stop the deal, get Quinn.” And, of course, leave Paulie for Reacher. LFG.
The epic battle between this show’s green and red Hulks starts with the proclamation that they’re going to “do this like men” before Reacher kicks Paulie in the junk and then punches him in the face. The maniac seems to almost enjoy both. They trade punches and throw each other around in the first round of this Mortal Kombat. A shovel joins the chat, and the whole sequence has some nice fight choreography staged to music that sounds like something out of the MCU. After all, these two are about as big as Thanos.