Among Reacher Season 3's Changes From The Novel, This One Drives Me Nuts — Plus, Grade The Premiere
The following contains spoilers from the first episode of Reacher Season 3, now streaming on Prime Video.
Prime Video's Reacher this Thursday kicked off its eight-episode adaptation of Lee Child's seventh Jack Reacher novel, Persuader, which was published in 2003.
The season opener found Reacher (played by executive producer Alan Ritchson) in a college town, trying to pawn off some vinyl at a record store, when he laid witness to the attempted, smash-and-grab abduction of student Richard Beck (Johnny Berchtold). Reacher bravely intervened, gunning down the kidnapper before plucking the kid from the getaway truck and throwing him into his paneled van. Before they drove off, a man came barreling around a corner; Reacher shot him on instinct, only to see that it was a cop about to flash his badge.
Reacher sped the van away, evading a super-diligent campus security detail and eventually driving Richard to his family's secluded, well-guarded estate in Maine. There, Reacher met Richard's father, rug importer/exporter Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall) — who was alternately appreciative of this large stranger thwarting the second-ever kidnapping of his son (who'd lost an ear the first go-round), but who also saw an opportunity to leverage this accidental cop killer to do his bidding. After surviving a round of loyalty-testing Russian Roulette, Reacher was led to a bedroom upstairs, by security chief Duke (Donald Sales). Once alone, he pulled a tiny mobile phone from a cavity in the heel of his boot, to report: "I'm in."
The remainder of the season premiere jumped back in time to reveal how, days earlier, Reacher had spotted what looked like to be a man from his past — a dead man named Xavier Quinn (Brian Tee). Reacher called into the 110th to run the ghost's plates; not long after, he was met at his motel by DEA agent Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy) and her cohorts Guillermo Villanueva (Roberto Montesinos) and Steven Eliot (Daniel David Stewart). After comparing notes, the foursome concocted a plan for Reacher to go undercover inside Beck's operation, by way of the elaborate ruse orchestrated above — using some blanks, a flash-bang grenade, and Eliot and Villanueva respectively playing the kidnapper and ill-fated cop.
Back in the present, Reacher sneaked out of his bedroom by way of the window/roof, clambered down to the ground and snooped around the shed he'd briefly been in earlier. There, he confirmed the existence of a hidden basement, inside of which he found evidence that Teresa, the CI who'd been working with Duffy prior to her ominous vanishing, had in fact been kept prisoner there.
WHAT CHANGES DOES REACHER SEASON 3 MAKE FROM THE NOVEL PERSUADER?
All TV adaptations — including Reacher's first two seasons — tweak or significantly change up the source material, for a variety of reasons. Reacher Season 3, at first blush, has at least three meaningful changes. One, though, drove me a bit nutty all season long.
CHANGED: BECK'S WIFE
I don't believe it is is made crystal clear in the Reacher Season 3 premiere, but is established soon enough that Beck's wife is deceased, whereas in Lee Child's novel Persuader, Elizabeth Beck was a meaningful (and alive) character. As Anthony Michael Hall, who plays Zachary Beck, told The Direct of that change, "obviously, you know, in an eight-episode season, you're not going to have everything in there."
Having read the novel, I'll say this change is no great loss; Elizabeth among other things is part of a clumsy and unseemly subplot in the book, involving bodyguard Paulie. Plus, on the TV series her shopping excursion with Reacher is effectively replaced with Reacher taking Richard into town, allowing the two to bond some (and for Reacher to deliver some enjoyable beatings).
CHANGED: FRANCES NEAGLEY
Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), Reacher's colleague from the 110th and longtime friend, is not a character in the novel Persuader, but she soon enough appears in Season 3 of the TV series, situated at her Chicago P.I. firm and happy to help Reacher get the 411 on the goons in Beck's inner circle.
Sten told TVLine that putting Neagley in Season 3 "accomplishes a lot of things," especially with the Neagely-centric spinoff now ordered to series and beginning filming this week. "This is a great way to set that up, that she is [in Chicago] living her own life."
CHANGED: REACHER'S SECRET MESSAGING DEVICE
OK, this one bothered me.... In the novel, Reacher while undercover at the Beck mansion quietly communicates with Duffy using what is repeatedly called an "email device," tiny and hidden in the swiveled heel of one boot.
On the TV series, however, Reacher is outfitted with an actual cell phone, one smaller and thinner than a deck of cards.
I mean, I get it — technology has advanced in the 22 years since Persuader was published, and more importantly, furtive text messaging isn't very thrilling to depict on-camera. But Reacher calls Duffy pretty regularly while inside his bedroom at Beck's home, and Alan Ritchson's Reacher voice is quite bassy. What's more, he never makes a point to huddle in a corner far from the bedroom door, or to use a hushed voice.
Yes, the mansion may have "good bones," as they say, the walls may not be thin. But it was a recurring point in the novel that Duke, for one, was keeping a close eye on the security team's new member, sometimes patrolling that upstairs hall. And at one point late in the season, someone even calls Reacher unannounced, creating a buzz-buzz vibration that could very well have outed him.
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