Lamb to the Slaughter

Apologies for the delay on this all. After a busy Saturday, last week I found myself unable to handle the time shift Sunday. That kept me behind on the day, then throughout the week, until I was forced to recognize that the best course of action was simply to bump things back a week. Things should return to their normal weekly cadence after this.

If you take away one thing, I think the Reacher book is very bad and the show is worth watching. You’ll know by the end of the first episode whether or not its for you. Now let’s get into it.

Police procedurals are a genre that I have a hard time enjoying frequently. As all current subscribers know, I don’t fuck with the police. With the direct linkage to slave patrols, the rise of police unions and qualified immunity, and the violence done by police by on and off duty, most police procedurals often end up becoming copaganda and valorizing the profession, making it difficult for me to derive any enjoyment. Yet at the same time, I still get a thrill watching bad people getting taken down and good people being saved. This leads me to try to find shows that can scratch the itch cop shows can’t. Most of the time when I do enjoy a crime procedural, it follows someone who isn’t a cop being a much better crime stopper than the police. Shows like Psych, The Mentalist, Castle, Lucifer, and even Hannibal to an extent all portrayed the police as somewhat incompetent and reliant on outside help to do their job. This is a vibe I can get down with.

After sampling a few different shows that let me down, I stumbled upon Reacher on Amazon Prime, which is a mix between what a usually go for and the classic police procedural. The conceit is simple: Jack Reacher is a former military brat turned army major turned drifter. In the military, he served as the leader 110th MP Special Investigations Unit (so military cop). After leaving the army, Reacher decided on an alternative lifestyle. He has no home, no family, no job, and no possessions beyond basically the clothes on his back. He wanders America going wherever his whims take him to explore the beauty of the country he served, but never experienced growing up or in the army. He takes no orders and no shit from anyone, and for the most part just desires to be left alone. And he is very, very large.

The show is based on book series, simply titled Jack Reacher, by the British author Lee Child. Child’s nationality should have been a warning to me. The first season is based on the first book, The Killing Floor, which I read after being sucked in by the show. In the book’s forward, written 15 years after the book was published, Child stated “By the time I started writing I was tired of [the underdog]. I wanted to start over with an old-fashioned hero who had no problems, no issues, and no navel gazing. His physical competence is really an expression of his mental competence, too. He’s a fully-functioning person.” Child makes clear that he was trying to create a mythical sort of demigod white knight, a legend in the mold of the Lone Ranger or Hercules.

Reacher is not so much a man as he is a force of nature. He doesn’t look for trouble, and he would in fact prefer to just stay out of things. But trouble always seems to find him, and when Reacher implements justice, it is swift, efficient, and brutal. What calls Reacher into action is varied. Pulling from Child’s vision of the character, again in the forward he pulls a quote from later down the series: “I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.” The show works hard to sand down the harshness of this approach so that Reacher does seem to care about helping people, at least a little bit. One of the first things that happens in the show is Reacher staring down an abusive boyfriend. Even if the show leaves ambiguous if Reacher is truly “standing up for the little guy,” it makes clear that his approach is beneficial to the little guy. But the plot of The Killing Floor is about as straightforward as it comes, as makes sense for a debut work. They kill Reacher’s brother, and he’s out for revenge.

The Killing Floor sees Reacher arrive to the small Georgia town of Margrave. In the book he’s only six months out of the army, in the show its been a couple years. Reacher comes to Margrave because of a half-remembered conversation he’d had with his older brother Joe, about a blues musician who was killed in the town. Upon arrival, he is arrested under suspicion of murder, and Reacher quickly suspects that his brother might have told him about Margrave for a reason.

Reacher becomes wrapped up in a massive corporate conspiracy, where the villains are perfectly happy to kill anyone who even hints at being aware of what’s going on, and do so quite brutally. He finds allies in the town’s chief detective Finlay, a black cop from Boston, and Roscoe Conklin, a young female officer who believes in Reacher’s innocence from the very start. The characters are significantly different from page to screen, while I’ll dive into later.

In the book, Reacher almost stumbles across the answer of what is going on, and the way the character struggles to piece together even basic information makes him appear almost dumb, which is more an indictment of Child than the character. There’s never much surprise in the plot, and Reacher is able to settle the situation without much effort or struggle. Characters are perfectly happy to go out of their way to give him whatever he wants, and he receives essentially no pushback from his allies regarding the extreme methods he takes to achieve his goals.

Of course there’s a classic double cross in the story. There’s always a double cross in a story like this. It’s surprising in the book mostly because the character pulling the cross is shown so little that it’s surprising that they are even plot relevant. While this helps to surprise the reader, it keeps the moment from being earned.

In the book, it was pretty frustrating that the double-crossing character has so little presence that its never really made clear why the cross happens, nor does it feel surprising when the cross is revealed. In contrast, the show gives all the characters more time to breathe, so when the inevitable betrayal comes, it is more surprising to the audience and the characters, and there is better grounding for why it has happened. Otherwise, for the most part it’s pretty apparent from the start who the heroes and villains of the story are going to be.

To be blunt, the book is not good. Initially, I wanted to give it grace because I knew that it was a debut novel, and because I thought I might have been colored by the improvements made by the show. But the more I look into things, the clearer it is that Lee Child is not a particularly good author. Let me break down why exactly I think that is.

First, the man’s prose and dialogue are quite bad. One of the top reviews for the book on Goodreads calls out the lack of commas in the story, and that was something that I kept noticing as well. The sentences are all extremely basic, which isn’t always bad but here makes obvious that Child is just not comfortable writing complex sentences. His scene setting and descriptions are similarly poor. For example, when trying to describe a tanned Reacher, the best he could come up with was to say the man was “like a condom stuffed with walnuts.” That is a visual that is both off-putting and fairly meaningless.

The dialogue and character interactions also tend to be rough to get through: “Roscoe?” I said. “What?” she said. You’ve got the most beautiful ass on the planet,” I said. She giggled. I jumped on her.

From a pacing standpoint, the book is all over the place. Scenes with little plot significance can drag on for chapters, whereas the final showdown did not begin until page 390 of a 400 page book. On technical, foundational level, the man is not a good writer. I have to hope that things improved as the series went on, but this did not give grounds for hope. I don’t want to be throwing stones from glass houses, but this was simply put painful to read, regardless of the narrative.

The next issue I have with Child’s writing is how he plays with genre tropes. The book is written from Reacher’s perspective, which unfortunately lets the reader know exactly how little is going on upstairs and how often he’s objectifying Roscoe and the other female characters. The way the character has a different love interest each book/season is classic thriller in the lineage of Bond, but Reacher just doesn’t have the charisma for it to make sense in the book.

Reacher is a British person’s conception of the modern cowboy, a wandering do-gooder who enacts vigilante justice without understanding the blue collar origins that made the genre endearing before genre deconstruction and interpretation happened in the 60s and 70s. There’s almost a mocking condescension to how Child portrays Reacher as an American ideal, made all the more frustrating to me by the fact that Child was correct that American audiences did end up loving the character.

The final issue I have with Child comes from his conception of what it means to be a mythic figure. He imagines Reacher as mythic because he can do anything. Reacher is the pinnacle of fitness, intelligence, and morals as far as Lee Child is concerned. He’s a demigod made flesh. And by making it clear that this is what he believes, Child has made clear that he fundamentally misunderstands myth as tradition. Pulling from American mythos, John Henry is not just famous as the man who beat the machines, but for the fact that he gave his life to do so. Achilles’ pride, Zeus’s concupiscence, Hercules’ temper all play on the idea that flaws are intrinsic to heroes.

That’s not to say that Reacher doesn’t have flaws, but I don’t think Child intends for them to be seen as such, even though there was a scene that explicitly states the character doesn’t know how to do laundry. It’s clear Child is portraying Reacher as a type of masculine ideal, the type of hyper competent protagonist who is inhumanly fast, strong, intelligent, resourceful, etc. Which makes the characters beliefs all the more troubling if Child is setting Reacher as some of aspirational ideal. Reacher is in a way worse than copaganda. For as bad as the police are, at least there are some guardrails and an (admittedly weak) accountability structure. Valorizing vigilante justice like this is worse.

“I had no laws to worry about, no inhibitions, no distractions. I wouldn’t have to think about Miranda, probable cause, constitutional rights. I wouldn’t have to think about reasonable doubt or rules of evidence. No appeal to any higher authority for these guys. Was that fair? You bet your ass. These were bad people.” Child is inspiring the worst type of tribalistic, brutish thinking which is why we even have restrictions on law enforcement in the first place. Reacher is always portrayed as justified in the actions he takes, in part because of the size of the threats he faces, but also because he is never wrong in his assessment. He always somehow knows who’s good and who’s bad, and as soon as he deems someone to be “bad,” there is almost no action that he views as too drastic.

This makes for a hell of a fictional story, but it’s a worldview incompatible with my own. In the world of Reacher, authority is always either incompetent, collusive, or both. The only way to solve problems is through exceptional people like Reacher, and there is no action too extreme for these exceptional people to take. The only way to combat any sort of problem in this world is through precise, exacting violence. This is the mindset that motivates white supremacist accelerationists and radical militias. Anyone in the real world who so self-assured that they are exceptional enough to commit unchecked violence is not rational. The fact that Reacher’s instincts are always right encourages a “trust your instincts” approach from individuals who should absolutely not trust their instincts. This strategy gets innocent people killed, and encourages violence as a meaningful solution to structural problems. It’s a mindset that I find extremely troublesome, and is my biggest reservation about not just the book, but also the show.

Overall, I was pretty let down by the book, rating it only 2⭐, the first 2 star I’ve given something in years.

Given that, how is it possible that I left the first season of the show, drawing on mostly the same story beats, mostly the same characters, and mostly the same themes, and still left feeling positive and exhilarated? Well, that’s certainly a complicated proposition.

Let’s begin on a technical level. The show is exquisitely shot and has exceptional framing. Where this is most effective is the ways in which Reacher is shown to be a larger than life figure. At every possible moment, the show makes an effort to portray Reacher as towering over those around him. Alan Ritchson is “only” 6’3'‘, but by casting mostly individuals 5’10” and below, he’s nearly a head taller than most of his castmates. The sound design is also exquisite. Reacher came to town searching for a blues singer, so the backing track consists of some of the best that classic blues and jazz has to offer. The background music and foley work, especially during the fight scenes, are done with a rhythmic intentionality so that even the most visceral snapping of bone or roaring gunshot has a pleasing flow to it. For a great example of this and for how well the fight scenes are shot, this scene from the first episode is a great example, although TW for some gore.

The plot of the show takes the extra time of a TV season to really give the plot room to breathe, and helps to flesh out some of the worst plot holes. Reacher gets to be more active, as a lot more digging is required for him to figure out what’s going on in the criminal conspiracy. He travels throughout the South, from Georgia, to Florida, Mississippi to Louisiana, Tennessee to Virginia, rather than just having information fall into his lap. Side characters are given the opportunity to tasks which Reacher tackled in the book, which allows for more interesting resolution to scenarios as the different characters handle things different ways. There's more action, more intrigue, and more characters introduced. The villains are given additional depth and conflict in the ranks, not to make them more sympathetic but to make them more realized.

The character work by the actors and the shows writers also helps to add a much needed does of depth and nuance to all the different characters:

Alan Ritchson as Reacher is portrayed as much more fallible in the show, but he is also more competent, and more set in his beliefs. While the book character didn’t have much of an answer when questioned about why he wants to be a drifter, for Ritchson’s take on the character, it’s an act of defiance against the chafing order he had to live with his entire life before retirement. More facts are withheld from the character, making his confusion at the situation and crimes more understandable. He has to lean on the people around him, working collaboratively with his allies and calling in favors to tackle a problem that’s too big for him to take on alone. Lastly, he does things that serve to solidify the characters moral compass within the show: as previously mentioned he intimidates an abusive boyfriend, there’s a recurring bit about him standing up for an neglected dog, and he’s willing to be self-deprecating if it helps someone else.

Willa Fitzgerald’s Roscoe Conklin is not just some giggling, glorified secretary turned damsel in distress in the show; she’s portrayed as one of the more heroic figures who gets to save Reacher multiple times and stand her own ground. She’s Reacher’s equal in terms of intellect and heroism. While there is still a romance, it’s more of a slow burn which makes the relationship less grating. The fact that Roscoe stands up to Reacher repeatedly and doesn’t just take his shit also helps to make her feel more like a person instead of just a simpering accessory.

Maria Sten as Frances Neagly is a welcome addition to the show. Taking a character from later on in the books, the show uses her status as one of Reacher’s former soldiers to flesh out his history and morals. She knows how he works in a way his other allies don’t, and this allows her to get under Reacher’s skin in a way his other allies can’t. Neagly is presented as just as if not more competent than Reacher in many moments, and the rapport the two have is a necessary addition to keep Reacher from just being a hulking, sulking, brute.

But last and certainly not least is Malcolm Goodwin as Oscar Finlay, the man who ties the whole show together. Finlay in the books is simply yet another Reacher yes-man. In the show, Finlay is at times more on top of things than Reacher. He’s constantly antagonized by the townsfolk and by Reacher, yet manages to stay mostly calm and mostly collected through all the situations that are thrown at him. Finlay and Reacher are constantly antagonizing each other in incredibly endearing ways. Finlay also helps to smooth out some of the worse attempts the book made at racial politics, although there are still fumbles. I certainly could have done without the scene where Reacher explains the rich history of blues music to Finlay while Finlay defends the sanctity of classic rock. But Finlay is given so many quirks, personality traits, and great lines that are wholly original to the show. He’s also the one who does the most to keep Reacher in check during this vigilante journey, calling out the hypocrisy of Reacher’s approach and getting the gang to mostly work within the confines of the law, with a few exceptions once shit really hits the fan. Overall, both the improved writing and Goodwin’s understated performance really help to emphasize the more bombastic elements of the show.

The first season of Reacher is sheer, dumb fun done incredibly well, and sometimes that’s enough for me in a show. The schadenfreude of seeing bad things happen to bad people is an itch that I want my media to scratch at times. Reacher manages to hit this note incredibly well, and does so even better in its second season. The show flirts with problematic themes, but thankfully nowhere near to the level that the book does. Sadly the currently releasing third season seems to be dropping the ball somewhat in this regard. Despite this, I think that Reacher is a show worth watching and it is certainly having a moment right now. I left solidly enjoying the season, giving it 4⭐

That’s all for this week folks. If you like the newsletter, consider giving a like to the paired post on my instagram, and a follow if you’re not already. Next week, you’ll either get a post on the Reacher movies or the Looney Tunes. We’ll see which way my mood swings. You’ll hear more about the Reacher show in a few weeks, most likely after the third season ends. As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to check out or talk about, feel free to reach out.

Until then, take care of yourselves.