L.A. Story

Anyone else getting tired of Duffy getting on and on how she must save Teresa and because of that she keeps doing increasingly dumb moves? I mean, come ooooon, we get it, you've coerced the kid, stop repeating it over and over... Not to mention that Duffy actress is as good at acting as I am at knitting.

And that's another theme of this season, the acting is so incredibly poor, like no one gives a rats behind anymore. Why even bother to produce it any longer if you don't care, just scrap the series if you don't have the heart to do it or let it be done by someone who actually cares... As the saying goes around in this TV show - details matter!

Not much to this one, just a bridge to the final episode with Reacher and Bad Boston Accent working with the stereotype feds to take down the evil gun runners, with Breakfast Club Crimeboss, now missing an ear, in some maudlin drama with his son (indicating predictably that he's probably not going to make it through the last episode) and of course, Neagley doing her girl boss thing because she's just the best at everything and just always has to show up in every season to be the greatest evar! I have to admit there wasn't a great deal of exciting buildup to the final episode next week. I mean, we know it's coming, but you just sort of feel blah about it. Let's just get it over already. We need to see Reacher beat up the 8 ft. Tall bearded guy and to properly take out the bad guy that miraculously survived being shot in the head and falling off a cliff. I really hope that if they keep this series going that maybe they'll mix things up a little, keep it a little closer to the books, and maybe do a season based on something like Past Tense, without the tired "Team Reacher" formula and just him showing up in town and doing everything alone for a change.

The writers of this show really can't write smart or emotional plot lines but they insist on trying to do it, and it always fails miserably.

The super drug lord from LA has successfully evaded the authorities for who knows how long, they can't pin anything on him, but along comes Reacher and in about three seconds he dismantles his whole operation. Very believable.

The forced, manufactured out of nothing romance between Reacher and the annoying fed was terrible. But, hey, they dug up some grandma out of somewhere so that she could say how she sees that they are in love, because she is old and knows a lot of stuff, so the audience should just accept it and ignore the zero chemistry between them and annoying fed's general mentally unstable behavior towards Reacher. And so, Reacher ignores the common wisdom about what you shouldn't do in crazy, and does it anyway.

The whole Teresa plot is so stupid and unbelievable. Perhaps that is why the writers have to remind us every five seconds that Teresa is so important and they are doing it all for her. Seriously, some international rich hot shots can't find themselves a redhead anywhere, so Quinn has to keep her alive because she is such a prize?

The acting is atrocious across the board. Ritchson is barely passable some of the time, and terrible the rest of the time, while the rest of the cast is terrible all of the time. Whether they are trying to appear tough, or emotional, the result is always laughable and it is a toss up what is worse - the acting or the writing.

Reacher is a simple, formulaic, by the numbers show. It can be entertaining but only if it accepts its limitations and plays to its strengths. It doesn't have the writing nor acting skills to be some masterpiece, but apparently, the showrunners can't accept that and keep trying to reinvent the wheel, which always ends up in a mess like this episode.

I can't believe they had a chance to ramp up the tension but instead wound it down to this. It's a bad episode of reacher and a bad episode of tv overall.

This whole season has been a bit silly all round with some good tension here and there but has never reached the highs of season 1 and 2

The acting has also been wooden this season with very few likeable characters. It's clear that the budget was much lower this season.

I need to type another 300 words for this review so please forgive this pointless last paragraph, all right see you at the finale and I hope they adopt a better book for season 4.

Lee Child wrote Persuader in first person from Reacher's perspective. That type of source material is difficult to translate to the screen. It requires the main character to narrate the entire story with no knowledge of the actual backstories impacting the other characters unless they convey them to the main character directly. The writers chose to digress from Reacher's recollection of the unfolding story by creating scenes of the background players and inventing dialogue which was irrelevant to the overall plot.

They also blunted Reacher's personality. Alan Ritchson may not win any best actor Oscars in his career, and if his stage direction was to deliver every line in monologue form and as fast as he could say the words, then he succeeded. In the first two seasons he was able to portray more of Reacher's personality, and the supporting character's dialogue filled in their knowledge and expertise. In this season, the writers apparently decided that Reacher knew 10 times more than everyone else and he had to educate them on every aspect of how to deal with each situation.

This episode was the worst of the series by far. The season started off with some promise by following the opening chapters of the novel. Then they digressed and made it a one dimensional revenge mission for Reacher and removed the observational aspects of his personality, which in previous seasons has enabled him to evolve from his starting point of view.

I've previously written that I thought Tom Cruise pulled off the Jack Reacher character in the movies by portraying Reachers attitude, personality and intelligence in spite of the physical differences.