Truckin'

Reacher is one of the best action shows of the past few years. I couldn't wait til this season started but the first 1.5 episodes seem stiff and a bit unconvincing.

These are what came to mind:

First off , the new character Duff speaks with a very heavy, what I guess is a Boston or NY accent. It's way over done and is irritating. I don't know why they felt that added something, because it doesn't.

Second , there are some little things that don't seem to be logical, as one other reviewer said... for instance in one scene Reacher says he doesn't know how to hot wire a car. Seriously?? Reacher can MacGuyver bombs but doesn't know how to hot wire a car!? I know It's not a big issue but it's a lot of these little things that just stand out to me, unlike the first 2 seasons.

With that being said , it got a lot better halfway through episode 2.. so stick with it.

To say that this season doesn't hold a candle to season 1, or even season 2, in terms of dialog or actions is an understatement. Yes, it's only 2 episodes in, but already the decline in quality is clear as day.

Take, for example, an early scene where Reacher is investigating something at night. He's leaving, sees a car approaching, and the car parks. The two occupants get out of the car, leave the headlights on, and proceed to have a conversation in front on the headlights. Why? You were just in the car together, did neither of you speak the whole time? Why did you feel the need to leave the headlights on, stand in front of them, and have a conversation?

That's not something people do.

A scene later, one of the two guys tells the other to stay where he is, the other guy then asks if he can go somewhere else, and the first guy says he doesn't care what he does. Um, what? Clearly you do or you wouldn't have told him to stay where he was.

The next scene, the guy enters Reacher's room, tells him to get dressed, Reacher says "Give me 5 minutes" and the guy says "You have 2". Again, why? You're clearly not in a hurry, you just told the other guy he could wander around the house. What's going to happen if he takes 5 minutes, you're going to be mildly inconvenienced?

Then there's a scene in an impound garage. On of the main characters is hiding under a car, sees Reacher's foot and begins to desperately reach for a screw driver which Reacher slides to her. Pretty clever, she knows it's Reacher, she knows Reacher knows she's there. However, as Reacher is walking away, the camera pans down to 'reveal', complete with dramatic music, that she is in fact under the car. Yes, we know that's where she was we just saw her reaching for a weapon from under the car. Do the writers think that the car just randomly sprouted an arm or something? Also, why did she hide under that car? She knew that once the bad guys saw it, they'd walk over to it. Go hide behind any of the other 4 dozen cars that they wouldn't snoop around.

Season 1 was so fantastic because it didn't hand hold it's audience at all. The first scene of Reacher is him just staring menacingly at a douchebag, yet thousands of words were being said just from facial expressions and body language. We didn't need to actually hear Reacher say what he was thinking, we could see it. Even in the diner scene with KJ near the end of the season, Reacher is the one talking and KJ is just using facial expressions and body language to express very loudly what he's thinking. There was no hand holding. They used context and the audience's knowledge of the characters to do the work. KJ didn't need to tell Reacher that he thought very poorly of him and looked down on him, we already knew that that's what KJ thought.

It's only episode 2 but this season has got to get better than this or people are going to stop watching. A season based on arguably the best book in the series, is quickly turning out to be the most disappointing.

Reacher continues to be tested along the way. He is being asked to do things when he hasn't had enough sleep. He is sent on a six hour truck trip to see if he slips up. He also goes with a guy named Angel to check out the car that was used in the staged kidnapping. Afterward, Angel rightfully suspects him of being a cop and Reacher takes dramatic action.

Like every episode there are a series of close calls which are avoided by a hair's breadth.

The son who lost an ear to a kidnapper is becoming sensitized and wondering if her will face this again. A bond is working between him and Reacher without Reacher lifting a finger.

By the second episode. We know that Reacher and Duffy planned to infiltrate Beck's oriental importing business.

Duffy wants to find the missing operative Theresa Daniel. While Reacher is searching for Lieutenant Colonel Francis Xavier Quinn. The man who sold military secrets.

Only Duffy has not covered her tracks properly. The cars used to stage Richard Beck's attempted kidnapping are in a storage area and are a liability.

Angel meanwhile suspects Reacher's motives and confronts him. Leading Reacher to take drastic action.

There is certainly bone crunching action and you get the feeling that Duffy and her crew are not that good. Which does not bode well in keeping hold of their prisoner.

Reacher does deliver with some fun though. I liked that arm wrestling match with Paulie. Talk about pulling a lion's tale.

Quite the drop in quality from the first episode (and earlier seasons). Reacher continues his own mission subsumed into that of the broader aims of Duffy. And so our protagonist reports back at regular intervals, confirms next steps and we play that out: not quite inert but one of Reacher's strengths - other than physical - has been his autonomy and this season in burying that beneath the goals of the amazing Duffy.

Duffy is up and at it at 3AM - she's like that. And she's the best there is - another character tells us that. She doesn't seem to be since she fails to implement process to avoid stuff ups with warrants but she is so we'll just have to accept it. She's also called the B-word in this episode. Oh no! Amongst the drugs, death and other shenanigans this is a step too far for her other admiring partner who seems ready to slap him with an immediate 10 years in the pen for misogyny. The horror!

There's not really a great deal that actually happens in this episode to move things forward: we make a shipment and drive back. There is the threat of exposure and that's probably the key problem for now and how Reacher - with deference to Duffy no doubt - will resolve that will surely be the focus of episode 3.

And little kids have been playing the arm wrestling thing (and variants) for a while so just as well our physical threat wasn't aware of it. I suppose we'll start to see something come of the physical presence (as implied episode 1) but certainly nothing here.

Still, this is Duffy's show at this point and Reacher is along for the ride. It's enjoyable, yes, but hardly the 'agency' we might expect from our earlier action hero. Too tied to home, too much consultation and too much Duffy.