As the 5th episode of Reacher begins, Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) and the others listen to a news report on the radio before Oscar Finlay turns it off and says they shouldn’t have left her lying dead there. Roscoe Conklin (Willa FitzGerald) believes they did enough by calling 911, but couldn’t stay because Margrave PD is dirty. Jack says they have to make Molly’s death mean something by catching her killer. They can’t do that if they’re shot dead too. When Jack sees the dog lying on its side, he tells Oscar (Malcolm Goodwin) to pull over so he can check on it. Oscar joins him as they find that the collar is cutting the dog. The owner (Paul Braunstein) comes out to confront Jack who punches him. Jack wraps the collar around the owner’s neck and says they’ll see how he likes it. They take the dog and return to the car where Roscoe is waiting for them.
Roscoe asks what they’re going to do now. Jack suggests they take the dog to a no-kill shelter and drop him off at Hubble’s. Once they drop Jack off, Roscoe asks if he is okay. He admits he shouldn’t have let Molly get involved. Jack goes inside to retrieve the keys to one of the cars in the garage. He drives to the Kliner farm while asking why the owner is buying so much feed. As he walks back to his car, he notices that a little bur has clung to his pants. As Jack reaches the police station, he sees Roscoe scrubbing graffiti off her car calling her a hoe. He speeds off. KJ (Chris Webster) hangs out with Dawn (AJ Simmons) and another friend. He tells his buddies about blowing up his teacher’s mailbox before Jack enters and drags a chair over to join them. KJ reveals Jack and his friend Emmitt (Mathieu Simard) have something in common because both played college football.
KJ asks why Jack only played one game for Army and whether he couldn’t hack it. Jack responds by saying he was kicked off for being too violent. He asks KJ what type of man he is since he enjoys intimidating a woman half his size. Jack thinks he is the kind of guy who knows things and would’ve known he’d come after him once he saw what happened to Roscoe. He suspects KJ knew he’d see his truck and come in there. However, he doesn’t know what it’ll be like when he hits him. If he did, he would’ve never picked up the paint can. KJ leans forward and calls Roscoe a cock tease so Jack slaps him to the ground. He beats up all three of them until KJ pulls a knife. Roscoe and Oscar arrive with their guns drawn. Kliner Sr. (Currie Graham) interrupts and tells his son to put the knife down. Once he does, Kliner Sr. complains that Jack brought violence with him and he wants him gone.
Oscar reminds him he isn’t his boss though. He warns Oscar that he needs to stop this now or someone is going to get hurt. A man, Earl (Alan Catlin), stands up to say he saw the whole thing before claiming Jack walked in and started tearing the place up. Roscoe takes Jack outside at Oscar’s request. Jack tells her that Molly Beth died because she cared about a Reacher. Then, she gets a call from Mayor Grover Teale (Bruce McGill) about a possible oversight on her part. She tries to explain herself, but Teale fires her anyway. After the call, she explains that when the report came back for Joe’s car, she said the plates belonged to a con that Morrison put away. When Teale pulled up the report, he found out that the car had no plates so she was fired. Jack suggests he is starting to get suspicious while Oscar says he’ll talk to him. As for Jack, Kliner doesn’t want to press charges.
Jack suggests he is doing that to prevent it from going to court and letting Jack ask for discovery about KJ and his employment with Kliner Industries. He recommends going back to Joe’s punch list. Oscar says they’ve been over it and the professors are still out of the country. Neagley is looking into the Memphis angle. Jack mentions Gray’s files, but Roscoe doesn’t think he left anything behind. He says Gray gave her his Desert Eagle a year before he died. People who commit suicide usually give away their possessions right before. They go back to her place so Jack can look at the box it came in. Jack finds a hidden key before asking whether Gray had any filing cabinet or lockbox before he died. Roscoe believes Gray only spent time at the station and his house.
Jack remembers her saying something about Gray getting his hair trimmed every week despite not having a lot of hair. They go meet with Mosley (Willie Carpenter) who has something Gray told him to only give to Roscoe. He wanted Roscoe to know he was proud of her too. They open the case and find a bunch of files inside. Roscoe begins crying when she finds that Gray left her daisies. As they look through the files, Jack learns Kliner has 116 cattle that were all bought at once. He asks when a family farm becomes a commercial farm in Georgia. Roscoe remembers her uncle had to file with the state when he got up to 120 or so. Jack theorizes that Kliner stops just before the limit to stop state inspectors from coming onto his land to check on his operation. They end up arguing about the amount of animal feed Kliner had before Mosley enters with food.
Jack agrees Gray’s work was meticulous since he reviewed every tax return for the Kliner Fund. He wonders how the fund received so much money when it was primarily giving to business groups in one tiny Georgia town. Roscoe suspects Kliner has been buying everyone’s silence. Kliner likely owns Margrave and its citizens. Plus, he pulls all the strings. Jack admits the tax returns aren’t enough to convict Kliner so they’re going to need a direct connection to the counterfeit cash. Roscoe asks why they’d pick Margrave to do this since there are dying towns all over. Jack takes them to a map to show them why. He explains Margrave is perfectly located for distribution since the old state route arterial systems run right through here. Kliner’s trucks can stay off highways for most of the trips to avoid cops.
Roscoe questions why Kliner would suddenly go scorched earth. Oscar says it might be the Coast Guard blockade that the news has been talking about for days. Since it has been going on for a year, a lot of funny money is waiting overseas and making the group vulnerable to being caught. Kliner’s supplies are running low and his clients are expecting bills that he can’t provide. The type of people who buy this stuff won’t like being disappointed. They try to figure out what they would buy as Jack suggests it might be something dangerous. Alternatively, they might be trying to destabilize the US economy. He also claims they could be trying to destabilize a strategic nation that runs on US currency like Panama. Jack doesn’t care why and only wants to kill those who killed Joe. Oscar and the FBI can figure that out later.
Roscoe interrupts to say Gray didn’t commit suicide. She gets mad and storms out after saying they murdered him. Oscar says he’ll go talk to her. While they’re away, Reacher dips a rang in water and removes the lines from the map. That leads to a flashback in which Josephine (Leslie Fray) tells Joe and Jack that they’re going to march over there. After a haircut, they’re led over so Joe can apologize for giving the kid a black eye. Joe apologizes to Curtis, but Jack says he won’t. Jack walks up closer and says he is sorry the left side of his face doesn’t look like the right. He smirks while walking away. In the present, he goes outside to tell Roscoe to harness her anger and use it to make sure the bad people get what is coming to them. Jack gets a call. When it ends, he explains she said she wanted dinner at 10, but instead had it at six.
Ten-six is MP radio code for sending civilian police. Jack explains he needs to go meet Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) in Memphis to see what she has found. As he walks around Memphis, he tells Oscar and Roscoe how he’ll track down Frances in the city. Once he catches up with her, they argue about who tracked who. She gives him food and they head to the park to discuss what she found. Frances reveals the JW on his brother’s list was an EPA investigator named Jimmy Dupree Wilks who was gunned down in his home. FBI claimed it was a random burglary gone bad. She thinks they’re wrong because the murder weapon was a small caliber, 9mm, subsonic gun, and they didn’t steal anything.
Another odd detail is the fact that the body was beaten like a pinata post-mortem. Jack admits they did it to his brother too. When she asks if he is going to kill a lot of people, Jack responds by saying he has already started. Frances says a Memphis cop named Aucoin got the Wilks case before the FBI took over and he had suspicions as well. He has been waiting five years to get a call about this. He and his partner have agreed to take them to see a low-level hitman who might know who was hired to kill Wilks. When Frances made a FOIL request for Wilks’s records, she found he was looking into toxic pollution levels in the Mississippi. The first two chapters of his report deal with the level of pollution and the third dealing with the source is missing.
The pollution seemed to be worse at Chester, Arkansas. Although he wants to go there, he is warned that it might not be a good idea. These people are powerful and Frances doesn’t want to lose two friends given his size. She doesn’t see a connection with this and the animal feed off the top of her head. She agrees it is a lot of animal feed though. Meanwhile, Roscoe goes to Jasper (Harvey Guillen) to say there might be another murder. They discuss the severe contusion Gray had on his head when he died. He pulls up a picture of it so Roscoe can have a look at it. He admits the wound could’ve been caused by a blow to the head too. When he inspects it from that perspective, he admits it looks like the wound was caused by a diamond. Roscoe agrees and storms out of the room. Jack and Frances go to Arkansas where they find a man fishing.
They complain about him throwing a can into the water when there is an empty oil drum nearby, but he says the oil drum is cleaner than the river. When they ask what happened to the river in Chester, he blames it on Clarron Chemicals. He says it was a bunch of rich people in business clothes who tore through their town like locusts. He doesn’t think they had anything to do with animal feed. The fisherman reveals the EPA came through here years ago claiming he was going to clean it up. Jack says he did nothing though because he was killed. The fisherman says the town was killed too, but he continues fishing because there is nothing else to do around here. France reveals Clarron has been out of business for years after it dissolved. The parent company was Kliner Industries so they destroyed Chester and moved to Margrave.
Jack realizes Joe is the first agent he had killed. A text from Aucoin confirms the CI is ready to meet. Roscoe goes to the police station and begins attacking Teale. Office Baker (Hugh Thompson) threatens to tase her if Oscar can’t get her under control. In the car, Oscar warns her they’ll lock her up and try to kill her like they tried to kill Reacher. He thinks he needs to get her out of town since she can’t show her face in Margrave now. Frances and Reacher meet with Aucoin (Shane Marriott) and Officer Ribidoux (Mika Amonsen). Aucoin explains they’re going to talk to a small-time trigger-puller. Ribidoux doesn’t think they should get involved since the case already for a Fed agent killed. Jack tells him his brother’s life is easily worth his. Oscar takes Roscoe to a motel and says he’ll check her in. He insists he is doing this as her friend and not boss since she got fired.
As he gets out, he gets a call from Picard. Jack and the others meet with the CI who says he doesn’t mess around with badges. Instead, out-of-town talent deals with cops and agents. He isn’t sure what his mom called him, but one guy is called the Viking. That is all he is going to tell him. Frances attacks a guy who won’t stop touching one of the dancers although she tells him to stop. As they drive away in the police car, Reacher tells Frances those were some nice moves. Oscar calls Jack to tell him about Roscoe attacking Teale and he wants a warrant out for her arrest.
Oscar pretended she ran away from him. Picard is on the verge of leaving his job so Roscoe is going to take over for him and guard Charlene. Oscar thinks they need to take things up a notch so he suggests getting into Kliner’s files after hours. As for Reacher, it is only a matter of time before he gets his hands on the Viking. Roscoe makes Reacher promise that he won’t take out Teale without her. They say goodbye since they won’t be seeing each other for a while. After the call, Frances says Reacher likes Roscoe. They joke about that before Aucoin says they can go through the alias database to see what comes up for Viking. Jack says these people have reach so they can’t just walk in. Officer Ribidoux pulls his gun and puts it against Aucoin’s head. Ribidoux says they threatened to torture his family so he doesn’t have a choice. Once Aucoin is shot, Ribidoux says he is going to pull into the woods and shoot them really quickly.
Jack kicks the cage until it knocks Ribidoux out and the car crashes into the river. Ribidoux asks for help, but they’re not going to help until they get a name. He says he doesn’t know although they had accents. Jack says he can get him out, but he’ll go to jail and they’ll kill him inside. Then, they’ll go after his family. He begins praying after deciding to go down with the car. Jack tells Frances to take a deep breath before bursting out the window. They swim to the surface and climb out of the water. Frances says you don’t mess with the special investigators. Jack agrees. Once they leave, they change clothes by visiting a donation box. Reacher suspects Kliner hired the cop to kill them and hired the Viking too. He thinks something might come out of Finlay breaking into Kliner’s office later tonight.
Reacher asks her to walk away from this, but Frances says she is going back to Memphis to see what she can find out about Viking. Oscar gets out of his car and approaches Kliner’s office. He sneaks inside before looking through a filing cabinet. When he opens the door to Kliner’s office, he finds Kliner dead with a cut across the throat. He says Kliner wasn’t pulling all the strings after all just before the episode ends.
Reacher Review
The episode seemed like a real turning point for Reacher as the intensity and action were turned up a bit. Plus, it was topped off with a good twist at the end. The series has a unique, nostalgic feel that many viewers will enjoy. The story has taken a while to come together, but it has gotten better as the series has progressed. A lot has happened over the last few episodes.
Kliner is gone and Jack will be hunting for a hitman who calls himself the Viking. As for Roscoe, she will be responsible for guarding Charlene since she has been fired from the police department. There are so many ways this could go now that it was confirmed that Kliner wasn’t the puppet master. However, we can almost guarantee that Teale was involved in Gray’s death so he could be more heavily involved too.
The episode was better than the rest so far and I expect it to get even better in the episodes ahead. It scores a 7.5 out of 10. Recaps of Reacher are available on Reel Mockery here. Learn how to support the Reel Mockery project by following this link.
