Jack Reacher Has Been Wrong About Everything This Season

Just a heads up: This article has a lot of spoilers for Reacher Season 4, through Episode 5, "Bridge."

Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) isn't perfect. He's usually the biggest and smartest person in any room that he can fit in, but during the first three seasons of this series he's made a few mistakes — that's bound to happen when making so many snap judgments based on limited evidence while a gun is pointed at his head. But in Reacher Season 4, right from the ill-fated opening scene with Anna Merrick — the mysterious woman whose subway suicide kicks off the story — Reacher has been in an impressive slump, making one catastrophically bad call after another. His only saving grace at the end of Episode 5 is that he's still alive and could potentially solve the case. Maybe.

In the season's fifth episode, we finally confirmed who the bad guys are: the Indonesian duo of Lila (Agnez Mo) and Amisha (Anggun). While they certainly looked pretty villainous when they whipped out their karambits — the scary-looking knives that are their murder weapon of choice — at the end of last week's episode, now we know that they're a genuinely heinous pair of jerks who enjoy torturing people to death. They took Anna's son Ben hostage to force her to steal an old classified picture from the '90s of current congressman and presidential hopeful John Sampson (Marc Blucas) with a cruel Indonesian dictator named General Putra, from Sampson's time in the U.S. military. And then they cut up and killed Ben when Anna showed any hesitation about her task.

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It may not be the best look for a presidential candidate to be pictured with a crappy dictator, but it's also not the kind of thing that's gonna derail anybody's political aspirations in the era of Reagan, Bush, and Trump. So Reacher thinks Lila probably isn't planning to use it for blackmail, and that tracks when you consider the extreme things that she and Amisha have been doing. Torturing and murdering people to coerce a government employee is kind of intense if all they're after is that picture, so there must be something else going on. But we'll need to wait at least another week for any real clues about what they actually want.

In the meantime, though, in Episode 5's dramatic cliffhanger, our pair of baddies have Anna's brother Jacob (Christopher Rodriguez Marquette), with Amisha's karambit to his throat, and they're demanding Reavher hand over the thumb drive with the photo on it. Is Reacher's cascade of mental errors about to end the rest of Anna's family, too?

Reacher absolutely deserves blame for how things have gone down. The entire reason this story has become so convoluted and confusing is because he misread Anna Merrick's distress so severely in the opening scene. Anna knew everything about this entire situation, could have filled him in on all of this, and would have been a great sidekick for Reacher on this adventure. But when he saw her in distress on the train, he jumped straight to confronting her as a potential hostile instead of offering help or just taking any more normal approach. And Anna, who had probably just watched the video Lila sent of Ben being killed, shot herself in the head because Reacher made himself an obstacle during the absolute worst moment in her life.

The reason we like Reacher anyway, though, is that he recognized his mistake immediately. When other characters ask why he's staying involved in the case, Reacher tells them that Anna needed help, and he failed to give her any, and now he has to figure out what's going on in hopes that it could make up for his screw-up in some way. But Reacher's mistake with Anna had consequences far beyond just her death. It made it much more difficult to figure out what was going on, and it made it easy for Lila Hoth to spin a sympathetic tale to convince Reacher to help her accomplish her goals, whatever they actually are.

So when Lila initially told him that she had cancer and that congressman Sampson is her secret father, Reacher believed her. When it became obvious that Lila had made that story up, she spun a new tale about being a journalist reporting on General Putra's abuse and murder of political protesters back home, and claimed Amisha was a survivor of Putra's purges, and Reacher believed that too. When Lila seduced him, it felt right to him because he liked that she seemed to be an idealistic crusader. His attempt to make up for his mistake with Anna made him susceptible to Lila's tricks, and he's been digging himself a deeper and deeper hole as a result.

But now, at least, Reacher knows exactly who his true enemies are — Lila and Amisha are standing right in front of him, with scary looking knives, threatening to murder Jacob if Reacher doesn't hand over the drive that contains the photo they want. There's still plenty of mystery yet to solve, but Reacher finally has the sort of clarity he needs to actually win this fight. Let's just hope he's able to save Jacob before things get any worse.

New episodes of Reacher drop Wednesdays on Prime Video.