Reacher's Sonya Cassidy: In Wake Of 'Horrendous' Setback, Duffy's Mindset Is Now 'Let's Just F-King Do This!'
The following contains spoilers from the March 6 episode of Reacher Season 3, now streaming on Prime Video.
The good guys lost a really good guy this week on Reacher.
All season long — ever since DEA Agents Susan Duffy (played by Lodge 49's Sonya Cassidy), Guillermo Villanueva (9-1-1: Lone Star's Roberto Montesinos) and Steven Eliot (For All Mankind's Daniel David Stewart) teamed with Reacher (Alan Ritchson) to fake an attempted kidnapping of young Richard Beck as well as Reacher's thwarting of same — Steven has been tasked with babysitting Cooper (Star Trek: DIscovery's Ronnie Rowe), Richard's "dead" bodyguard, at a remote cabin.
And for several episodes, Cooper had been plotting to somehow escape being bound to a (very uncomfortable) chair.
Midway through the fifth episode of Season 3, Cooper saw his chance, when he finally convinced Agent Eliot to fire up a cigarette for him. Mind you, Steven had been warned to allow their "prisoner" nothing, but he finally acquiesced. After all, how could the rookie fed know that, when his back was turned, Cooper had finagled a swig of rubbing alcohol, which he then spat out at Agent Eliot as he flicked a Bic. The eruption of flame frightened and distracted Eliot, allowing Cooper to knock him to the floor and then beat him to death with his boot.
That evening, Duffy returned to her team's base camp to discover the grisly murder scene. Afterward, she called Steven's father to solemnly relay the tragic news, and acknowledge that Steven had essentially saved her own life earlier that day.
"The loss of Eliot is horrendous. Horrendous," Sonya Cassidy tells TVLine.
"It is unimaginable to lose one of your team, someone who was so young...," the English actress notes. "But it's also a tragic sign of where they're at at that point" in investigating Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall) and Xavier Quinn (Brian Tee).
"They're losing. People are dying, and they're not getting any closer to taking down these guys or finding Teresa," Duffy's CI who disappeared while undercover at Beck's," says Cassidy. "So in that moment, we're at a crossroads with Duffy. She's like, 'Do I continue doing this? How much longer do I keep trying?' But she is so determined and driven that she chooses the path of, 'His death cannot have been for nothing, so let's just f–king do this'" and take down the bad guys. "'I am not walking away from this, I cannot walk away, having lost a young man's life and still having not having found Teresa.'"
In other words, Beck & Co. will come to rue the day that bodyguard Cooper decided he couldn't sit in that damn chair any longer.
Because from here on, over the three remaining episodes, "Duffy can see one path and nothing can deter her from it at this point," Cassidy avows. Said path "is very dangerous, it's maybe not necessarily the right thing, but I admire her for it — and it makes for better television, as well!"
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