The second season of Amazon Prime’s Reacher only has one episode left, and I know a few people are waiting for the entire series to be available before they start. Given the studio’s spotty track record for adaptation, it’s understandable if you want to wait. Just because season one was pretty great, there’s no reason to assume the second won’t hit a sophomore slump. Does it?
Well, kinda.
As a sometimes begrudging fan of the novels, I’m pretty familiar with the world Lee Child has created and how he’s built it. If Andy Martin’s book Reacher Said Nothing is heavy on fact and light on fiction, Child’s writing method is (was, I guess, since he’s mostly retired) not what you’ll learn in any professional creative writing program. It involves lots of cigarettes, coffee, and box cereal. He also majors in the minors, obsessing over individual words and the flow of the lines, while never going back to polish the plot.
Consequently, some of his novels wander.
If the writers on Reacher season two were looking to capture the sense of a man working to meet a minimum page count, I’d say they’ve done an admirable job. Bad Luck and Trouble, the book on which this arc of the show is based, also meanders. It feels organic, to be sure. Real life rarely has straight lines. Child can usually avoid filler, or at least obvious filler, but an eight episode TV show is expected to have a little more flow.
Reacher has more characters around him this time and the show feels scattershot.
It’s almost as if the writers took this as an opportunity to relax. Writing a long story with one POV character is much more difficult than one with a handful. It requires an economy of thought that any sane person would avoid if possible. I’d probably do the same thing. After the first three episodes, the show has burns through a large portion of the book and decides to go its own way. But if that was the plan all along, couldn’t they have improved on the source material rather than making the same mistakes in different ways?
Maybe not.
As its own thing, I’m enjoying the adaptation well enough. Reacher isn’t alway the central focus he is in the novel or should be in the show, but some of the stuff in the book wouldn’t translate to screen. I could have done without the torture scene in episode six, and much of the violence in the show seems manufactured to keep us coming back. In the books Child is stingy with the action and sometimes subverts our expectations. Not so here.
For the curious…
All the flashbacks in the show are new material. Not only are those events not in any of the books, they seem to change the origin of the character. That’s fine. I see what they’re trying to do and I think it works. As long as any changes benefit what’s right in front of me and don’t push an agenda, I’m content to let it be its own thing. When it’s sloppily done, I just roll my eyes and move on.
Still, there are some nits to pick.
Reacher has terrible situational awareness. One episode opens with him sitting in a restaurant booth, with someone blocking him in, and his back to the window. I would never do that, and I’m not a gargantuan killing machine. Sometimes the show’s signature line, “Details matter,” is plugged in when it doesn’t fit or belong. And speaking of gargantuan and details, Alan Ritchson is clearly on the juice and has become so large he sometimes seems to struggle with the fight choreography. Or walking through narrow doors.
Or just walking, overbalanced as he is by those massive traps.
If the complaint against Tom Cruise as Reacher was that he was too small, we seem to have the opposite problem with Ritchson (30lbs of muscle in a few months from only eating clean and working out, ha!). I guess it’s a good problem to have (watching an oversized Reacher, not being him).
Final verdict?
Season two is inoffensive if you don’t mind sketchy characterization, a loose plot, and extreme violence.
