REVIEW: Reacher – Season 2, Episode 3, “Picture Says a Thousand Words”

Television Reviews

Reacher’s second season took a bit of a detour with “What Happens in Atlantic City,” but “Picture Says a Thousand Words” revs the show into overdrive. The already quick pace picks up even more speed as Reacher and his team focus their investigation, the connections between the villains appear, and a flashback introduces a possible secondary mystery. It also gives one of Reacher’s friends some terrific moments that flesh out his character.

Reacher and the remnants of the 110^th return to New York with a target: New Age Technologies, the company that gave his would-be Atlantic City assassin a parking pass. But their investigation is hampered by a run-in with the cop Reacher assaulted – or is it? The mastermind behind the killings is given a name, and the traveler with the AM aliases feels the heat.

“Picture Says a Thousand Words” opens by showing us exactly how Franz died. We knew how it happened, but the flashback erases any doubt that Robert Patrick was behind it; he even contributes a few blows to Franz during his torture session, and he’s the one to throw him out of the helicopter. From this, we learn that Franz endured pain and, ultimately, death (although the latter probably would have come anyway) to protect Sanchez and Orosco, which confirms that they were helping him investigate the bad guys. It also assures us that Franz died as the team knew him, a loyal friend, which will be important later. And, as Franz assures his killer before he’s thrown to his death, it means the bad guys are going to have to deal with “the big guy.” The very next scene is Reacher finagling some guns from an amenable shopkeeper, letting us know he’s coming for the people who killed his friends. This short sequence exemplifies what I like so much about Reacher: bad things happen, and the villains have teeth, but we know Jack Reacher is going to set everything right, the unstoppable righteous avenger we wish were real.

*SPOILERS*

The meat of “Picture Says a Thousand Words” kicks in when Reacher and his team are pulled over by a cop despite not breaking any traffic laws. It doesn’t take long for the bald cop Reacher beat up – whose name is Detective Guy Russo – to arrive and arrest Reacher. O’Donnell, who has gone to law school (and apparently retained little), goes along with them to act as Reacher’s attorney. Naturally, Reacher and Russo are at odds initially, but they soon decide they’re on the same side. Russo looks like he’s going to fill the role Malcolm Goodwin’s Finlay did in the first season: he’s the cop who must maintain law and order while Reacher is stomping around  dispensing his own brand of justice. It’s an important perspective for a show like this to have, not only because it explains how Reacher can get away with being a vigilante but because it makes Reacher look even cooler, like a rebel defying an ineffective government to get justice. When Russo tells the team not to do “any cowboy shit,” Reacher immediately assures them that’s what they’re about to do, and you can’t help but grin like a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Characters like Russo and Finlay also give Reacher access to resources he otherwise wouldn’t have, which is how he learns more about the AM-initialed traveler. The police IT lab was able to recover a pending document from Franz’s printer, a letter sent to Franz from Sanchez (James Bond fans may have a laugh at that) that details a man named Azhari Mahmoud, an arms broker who supplies weapons to terrorists. This is what I mean about the fast pace of “Picture Says a Thousand Words;” a lot of details are coming to light, and Mahmoud (which is probably not his real name) is a bit less of a mystery than he once was. His sole scene in the previous episode revealed that he was going to hijack a truck full of weapons; that gels because it’s his job, and while he would normally sell those to hostile forces in the Middle East, a phone call between him and Robert Patrick – whom he identifies as Langston – connects the two. He’s working with Langston on something Langston says will get them all sent to federal prison for life if discovered; we can infer this is some kind of weapons deal or possibly a larger operation that requires a bunch of weapons. We also learn from his evasion of the cops waiting for him at the airport that Mahmoud is a skilled operative, spotting his pursuers, making sure they’re cops, and evading them with relative ease. (Not that these guys made it too hard for him, standing at attention like Roman centurions.) Reacher’s going to have his hands full with this guy when they finally meet.

The final thing we learn in “Picture Says a Thousand Words” is the meaning of the title. During a break-in at New Age Technologies headquarters to steal the company’s records and hard drives, Reacher finds a picture of Langston and a bunch of his employees, one of whom is Swan, the missing team member. Earlier in the episode, Reacher reiterates his belief that Swan is dead, that he is not the sort of man who would leave his dog to die. But seeing him in the picture casts doubt on that. Is Swan in on Langston’s plot? Did he give up Franz, Sanchez, and Orosco? It would make sense; we know Franz didn’t tell Langston about his buddies, yet Langston had to have identified them before he had them killed. Or maybe Swan is being held captive, with Langston bleeding him for information and Swan not holding up as well as Franz did; this would indicate that Swan was helping the others but was found after Franz. It also makes that flashback more interesting; in their MP days, the 110^th were investigating what looked like a simple bar fight but turned out to be a murder that was part of a drug-running operation. When a commanding officer shows up seemingly at random, it seems clear he’s the one behind it, but what if he’s a red herring and Swan was the drug dealer? Could that case tie into whatever Langston’s got cooking? Maybe this is a big criminal enterprise with Swan as the narcotics supplier. We don’t know yet, and there are five more episodes, but a lot of possibilities are popping up.

But maybe my favorite part of “Picture Says a Thousand Words” is the focus on O’Donnell, When the team is driving through New York early on, they mock his marksmanship skills; his legal expertise is shown to be severely lacking, and he’s effectively relegated to the squad goofball. But throughout the episode, he shows his skills and demonstrates his value. While his knowledge of the law is nothing that would have gotten OJ off, he does mediate the confrontation between Reacher and Russo, getting them to work together and share information by appealing to two hard men individually. And in the action scene where Reacher and his crew tear up a criminal flophouse, a big guy gets the drop on O’Donnell, and he not only takes his assailant down but also saves Dixon’s life. He uses the brass knuckles and knife that were set up in the first episode, then shoots Dixon’s attacker in the head with one shot. O’Donnell, with his wiseguy remarks and jokey personality, could have easily been annoying, but Reacher presents him as much better than the stock court jester he would have been elsewhere. Actor Shaun Sipos also knows just how to play O’Donnell, how to make him funny and a little jerky while still being a capable investigator and combatant. He’s a great character, and “Picture Says a Thousand Words” is a great episode.