“Reacher” ended its fourth season on Prime Video this morning, and the last thing it does is put Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) back on a Philadelphia subway car, which is where the season began. Eight episodes ago he watched a woman with her hands in a blue bag take out a gun and shoot herself, and the last thing she said to him was that nobody could help her. The finale is called “Cut.” It answers who killed her, what she was carrying and why seven different factions spent the season chasing it, and it does all of that while Reacher has a nail through his hand.
The woman was Anna Merrick (Karen Kwong-Chip), an Army human resources employee and the adopted sister of Philadelphia police officer Jacob Merrick (Chris Marquette). She was not protecting the flash drive she carried. She was trading it for her kidnapped son, Ben, and she pulled the trigger once she understood he was already dead. Ben’s throat had been cut with an Indonesian curved blade called a karambit and that detail is the thread the whole season hangs on. Season four adapts Lee Child’s “Gone Tomorrow,” which is where the villain Lila Hoth comes from and where Elsbeth Sampson began life as Elspeth Sansom.
Warning beyond this point there are full spoilers for the “Reacher” season four finale, including every death in the episode, the fate of both villains, what happens to Congressman Sampson, and how the season ends. There are also mild spoilers for the opening of “Neagley,” which premiered the same morning.
It answers who killed her, what she was carrying and why seven different factions spent the season chasing it, and it does all of that while Reacher has a nail through his hand.”
The episode opens quietly. Reacher, Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel) and Jacob are holed up in the loft belonging to journalist Russell Plum (Kevin Weisman). Jacob lays out what the drive actually held. It is a photograph of three men: the late Chief of Staff Nolan Cahill, Congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas) and General Putra. Behind them, blurred, is a whiteboard carrying a formula for a chemical weapon. Run the image through modern enhancement and the formula becomes legible. That is the whole engine of the season. A photograph nobody looked at closely enough.
Lila (Agnez Mo) and Amisha (Anggun) have already rebuilt the toxin from it. Their plan is to prove it works and sell it on the dark web, and they intend to demonstrate it twice on the same night. The first target is a fundraiser hosted by Elsbeth Sampson (Kathleen Robertson), with her husband the congressman thrown in as a bonus kill. They send a suicide bomber, Tomas Waberi, into the room wearing the device.
Sampson stops it himself. He spots Waberi and tackles him and drives him out of the building into the Delaware River. The weapon detonates in the water and kills them both. That is the first major death of the episode and it is a genuinely good one, because the season spent seven episodes asking whether Sampson was a conspirator or a victim. The answer is that he was compromised and he knew it, and the only clean thing left to do was carry a bomb away from a room full of donors.
The second demonstration is worse. One of Amisha’s operatives takes a canister into a crowded nightclub, intending to release it through the fog machine. Jacob and Tamara chase him down. Tamara shoots him before the canister opens and it hits the floor intact. Hundreds of people never learn how close that was. The show does not linger on it, which is the right instinct, but it is the most people Reacher’s team has saved in a single scene in four seasons.
Reacher goes after the source. Lila and Amisha have gone back to the abandoned restaurant they were cooking in, which is the one place he already knows. What follows is the most punishing fight the series has staged. He works through the remaining crew, takes a sledgehammer to one of them, and beheads another in an elevator. He also gets his hand nailed to the floor. He pulls it free and keeps going, then uses the wound and the nail as a weapon. Ritchson has spent four seasons making Reacher look unbothered. This episode makes him look breakable.
Both women come at him with knives at once. Amisha kicks him through a wall. Reacher gets hold of her and throws her out of a top-floor window, and the show lets you believe that finished her. Then he turns to Lila. She taunts him about their last meeting, which is a mistake. He puts her own syringe into her and empties it. The toxin she spent the season perfecting kills her in seconds, and the episode makes sure you watch it work.
The twist is that Amisha survived the fall. A CIA operative named Baker (Hugh Thompson) turns up to shoot Reacher, and this is the same man Reacher had previously dragged face-first through a holding cell door. He does not get the shot off. Amisha cuts his throat first, which is exactly how Ben Merrick died and the same blade that started all of this. Episode four was called “Karambits and Pieces” and the finale is called “Cut,” so the season has been telling you what its murder weapon was for a month. Then she goes for the injured Reacher with what is left, and she is close to finishing him when Jacob arrives. Jacob shoots her and then arrests her. She uses the moment to taunt him about his sister and his nephew, which is to say about Anna and about Ben, and he puts the cuffs on her anyway. A police officer who has spent eight episodes learning precisely how his family was taken apart chooses the handcuffs over the trigger. That restraint is the real ending of Jacob’s arc, and the season earned it.
The epilogue is unusually generous by this show’s standards. Reacher wakes up in a hospital bed with Tamara beside him. Elsbeth Sampson uses her position to make the legal problem disappear, and Reacher tells her she would make an excellent president. Tamara gets her detective’s shield and the Medal of Valor. Jacob comes out of it a hero and rather obviously interested in Tamara. Plum recovers, gets the flash drive, and writes the story that wins him a Pulitzer. Everybody who survived gets paid.
Then Reacher gets on the subway and thinks about Anna. He buys a cheesesteak and sits down next to a woman who is clearly having a bad year, and hands her half of it. They eat without talking and the season ends. It is the same carriage, the same hour, the same setup as the premiere, and this time the stranger gets help. That is not subtle and it does not need to be.
Here is the thing worth flagging, because a lot of people went looking for it and it is not there. There is no post-credits scene handing off to “Neagley.” The spinoff dropped all eight of its episodes the same morning, and the handoff happens inside the new show instead. Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) opens her series closing a kidnapping case with Reacher’s help, then takes him to a Cubs game, calls herself an acquired taste and tells him she is fine on her own, with Ritchson guest starring. Prime Video ended a four-season run and started its successor on the same day, and the finale itself does not acknowledge it once.
That is a defensible choice. “Neagley” is the first story in this universe not adapted from a Lee Child novel, so it does not need the parent show to introduce it. Season five is already ordered and is reported to be adapting “Make Me,” Child’s twentieth Reacher book. What season four leaves behind is a cleaner Reacher than the one it started with. He came into Philadelphia owing nothing to anyone, and he leaves it having given a stranger on a train the thing he could not give Anna.
What Do You Think? Was Sampson carrying that bomb into the river the right ending for him, or did the season let a compromised politician buy his way out with one brave act? Should Jacob have arrested Amisha after what she taunted him with, or was that restraint the only way his arc could finish? And was dropping the entire “Neagley” season on finale morning smart scheduling, or did it cost the “Reacher” finale the attention it earned?
See you on the next binge!
