It Is Once Again Time To Watch Reacher Clobber Some Guys

Consistency is hard to come by these days, especially in the world of streaming television. One day, a show will pop up with a good run of episodes that spins an intricate plot and catches your attention. You’ll be into it — reading blogs and recaps and everything. You’ll care about all the characters, especially one or two minor ones you’ve grown attached to. And then, whoops, it will disappear for two or three years and lose all that momentum. When it does finally come back, you’re left with three options: rewatch the whole thing to get caught up, dive through the Wikipedia page or a bunch of poorly-edited YouTube videos to get the basics, or spend the first few episodes of the new season saying things like “Who’s that guy?” and “Wait, why is that lady in Monaco now?” and “What happened to the guy with the hat? I think his name was Rocco?” Maybe when it comes back for the next season, the guy with the hat — whose name was Freddie, by the way — isn’t even on the show anymore because so much time passed that the actor who plays him got a gig on another show to pay the bills. None of it is ideal.

This is one of the reasons I appreciate Reacher, the Prime Video series based on the long-running series of books by Lee Child. Every 12-18 months, there’s a new season. Every season, Reacher is in a new place with a new wrong to right. Every time there’s a wrong to right, Reacher has to clobber a bunch of guys. The bad guys are all almost comically evil and deserve the clobberings they get. It’s all very straightforward, but it’s also very well-done and very satisfying. Mean man does bad thing, large man smashes mean man, large man leaves for new town to do it again. Sometimes there is pie. There are worse ways to make a television show.

I’ve written about Reacher before. Kind of a lot, actually. There was the one where I imagined what it would be like if the character popped up on other shows, and the one where I had some fun with how every fight scene on the show plays out, and there were a few published at my old job that have since been lost to time and/or mismanagement. There's a simple reason for all of this: I really do enjoy writing about Reacher. And watching it. It’s weird, in a way, how my brain will twist itself into complicated moral and philosophical pretzels over every real-life situation it encounters, but when it is fed visuals of Reacher distributing extrajudicial justice via fist-based violence, it will simply instruct my mouth to bark like a happy trained seal. I have decided not to examine this any further. It’s probably fine.

I bring this up today because, well, because, again, I really enjoy it, but also because the fourth season of Reacher is upon us, or at least will be upon us shortly, when the first few episodes plop down on August 11. The tagline for the season looks like this: “A chance encounter with a distraught stranger on the Philadelphia subway draws Jack Reacher into a deadly mystery.” This means that the city of Philadelphia has acquired both Reacher and LeBron James in the same summer. I regret to inform you that none of you will be able to tell me a single damn thing for the foreseeable future.

Look at this.

A few things worth noting here:

• We have a guy in a suit telling Reacher to “walk away” (lol)
• We have a potentially corrupt politician at the center of it all
• The trailer ends with the phrases “TRUST NO ONE” and “FIGHT EVERYONE” in massive red, white, and blue font

Hmm. Yes, that’s gonna get a hell yeah from me. Actually, no. Given the almost relentless amount of clobbering in there, let's go ahead and upgrade all of this to a HELL YEAH. Feel free to quote that on Rotten Tomatoes.

It’s almost clobbering time. Please prepare accordingly.

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

— good interview with Colson Whitehead about his kickass trilogy of Harlem crime novels, the last of which, Cool Machine, just dropped recently 

— a second good blog from Defector, this one about the viral raccoon Jimothy

— I like when people use their talent and connections to do useful things, so I dug this thing about Nick Kroll raising money to fight cancer 

— my favorite blog on LeBron becoming a Sixer

— regarding the LeBron thing: the local news was ON IT

— speaking of local news, shoutout to Philly weather icon Cecily Tynan, who is retiring after 30 years on the air

— Odyssey translator Emily Wilson hated the movie like poison 

— Matt Damon’s back hated the sandals he had to wear while shooting the movie

— I will write a buddy cop movie titled Ketchup & Mustard if the Disney money comes through

— Benicio del Toro comedy series

— Robocop TV series

— Purple Rain Broadway musical

— “Seattle police search for 2 men who parachuted off Space Needle”

— “Pickle spill shuts down Ohio road”

— “Orange County police search for spray paint vandal who allegedly tagged 13 Teslas”

— I would also like to be gifted my weight in tomatoes

— here is a behind-the-scenes featurette about the making of the music video for Fantasy by Mariah Carey

Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and enjoy a little clobbering.