The penultimate episode of Reacher Season 4 ends with a bang. It’s actually a pretty exciting final minute or so of what was otherwise a ridiculous episode. Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) is no longer the hero of the show, unfortunately. In fact, his presence in the final moments of this episode actually made things much, much worse.

No, the hero of Reacher’s fourth season is Congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas), the would-be presidential frontrunner for his party were it not for a series of unfortunate events and one act of heroism. Spoilers ahead.

Last week’s episode ended with more big cliffhangers. This season is big on cliffhangers. Unfortunately, it’s not big on payoff. When Episode 6 ended, Reacher, Tamara (Sydelle Noel) and Jacob (Christopher Marquette) were all in the back of vehicles being hauled off to their deaths. Reacher and Tamara were cuffed in the back of a van with two gunmen driving them out to the woods, while Jacob was cuffed in the back of shady detective Docherty’s car, whimpering “You don’t have to do this!”

You’d think it might be tough to get out of such a tight spot! Actually it ends up being super easy, barely an inconvenience ! Sampson’s helper, Springfield (Aaron Poole) shows up just in the nick of time and shoots the thugs who have Reacher and Tamara captive, telling them that he tailed them from the offices of the chemist, Ahlquist (Shawn Doyle).

They race off to find the bad guy once they’re free, which might be tough since they’ve been – sorry, what am I saying? It’s super easy, barely an inconvenience! Offscreen, Reacher tails Ahlquist and runs him off the road. He then tortures him until the “billionaire” who, despite the massive amount of danger he knows he’s in, still drives himself solo in a Mercedes W222 S-Class sedan. A nice car, but not really a “billionaire” car, though given this is probably an older model it’s a reasonable car to wreck for a stunt. Why he doesn’t have a driver or bodyguards or a Bentley is beyond me.

What follows is a disaster. Probably my least favorite moment since Season 2 takes place in the ensuing confrontation between Reacher and Ahlquist. After getting the information from him, Reacher realizes that the Hoth sisters could use him to reproduce the formula. This poses such a threat – despite the Hoth sisters almost certainly already having access to said formula – that Reacher snaps the guy’s neck.

I’m sorry, but this is not Jack Reacher. Season 2 pulled the same crap and it was ridiculous back then and it’s ridiculous now. In that season, Reacher killed a guy who couldn’t defend himself in a hospital bed. Later, after letting a helicopter pilot go free, he shoots the helicopter down with a rocket. Both of these I’d consider cold-blooded murder. Same applies to his execution of Ahlquist, who posed no immediate threat and could have been arrested and placed into protective custody, or hauled off and left in a storage unit somewhere. Jack Reacher is a killer, no doubt, but only when he has to be. He isn’t a murderer, and this preposterous adaptation doesn’t seem to understand the difference. Tamara, a police detective, simply says “I’m good with it” when Reacher kills Ahlquist in cold blood. Because yeah, that’s what a police detective (and a “good cop”) would do.

I am Jack’s raging bile duct.

Meanwhile, Jacob is taken to an alley where Docherty uncuffs him and tells him to scram. Then, when he doesn’t scram, Docherty interrogates him for information about what’s going on. Hearing Jacob summarize everything – in an already exposition-heavy episode – just reminded me how silly this entire season has been. Docherty has Jacob pistol whip him in the forehead to make it look like he got away, which is another thing I don’t understand. Why did he even bother to take Jacob in the first place? Why not just tell his fake uncle to drive him back to Mayberry?

Oh right, for the cliffhanger, because we all care so much about Jacob, quite possibly the most obnoxious character in all four seasons of this show.

Ahlquist reveals almost all the backstory we need before he gets his ticket punched. He was in Indonesia back in the day when General Putra was in charge. The CIA was running a clandestine weapons program, developing chemical WMDs before the terrorists could in order to come up with countermeasures. Ahlquist’s sin, the terrible thing he’s been trying to cover up by sending out hit squads, was that he modified the formulas from his time there to create pesticides that made him rich. Seems kind of an extreme reaction, but then all the characters this season are caricatures, from mustache-twirling villains to aw shucks Mayberry cops.

This Indonesian base is also where Sampson was posted, but he was a “Boy Scout” and would have “blown the whistle on the whole thing” had he known. His superior officer and recent chief-of-staff, Cahill, was in cahoots on the project, however, which is why he followed Anna Merrick and then threw himself from the roof. Again, a pretty extreme reaction. Merrick I can understand if she had just found out her son was dead, but Cahill’s death makes no sense.

Amisha Hoth (Angunn), we learn, was an acolyte of the general and the one who took that photograph which had a blurred out formula in it which, it turns out, new AI technology can decipher (though knowing how well AI works, it would probably just hallucinate and give you the formula for Cheetos flavoring or something). Amisha and her own protege, Lila (Agnez Mo) have worked this whole elaborate plot up to get the formula which I guess she somehow knew was that specific weapon and somehow knew how to use it and somehow knew where to find and extract it, though none of this is explained or even remotely plausible given we learn that Putra was killed by Sampson and his troops driven off and the base shut down. It seems about 0% likely that Amisha would think “Oh that photo I took decades ago, I bet that has the formula to this WMD we discovered the Americans were making, and I bet I can figure out exactly where it’s stored and find someone in the government I can blackmail into getting it for me!”

Have I mentioned that this show is preposterous and stupid?

Speaking of stupid, remember when Reacher was smart? Because that’s all sort of worn off at this point. He’s just a big, dumb lummox now, and he proves it multiple times this episode – on top of being a murderer.

We, the audience, know that the Hoths have a working WMD on their hands, but we also have no clue how Amisha knew to aerosolize the chemical in order to make it a weapon that would target large crowds. Apparently she just does because she’s a magical villain with magic super powers.

When Jacob calls Reacher and Tamara and says that he found out from one of Plum’s contacts that the Hoths are planning to auction something on The Dark Web™ the next morning, Reacher realizes that it must be the weapon. Jacob says that there will be proof of effectiveness, so Reacher deduces that the Hoths are going to target a large event.

At this point, I immediately knew it would be a Sampson-related event. I assumed a campaign event since he’s running for president, but it actually ends up being his wife’s charity event (though why they’d be doing a charity event just before an election that wasn’t about the election is . . . well I don’t get it).

Reacher and his gang of geniuses, however, don’t even consider that maybe Sampson might be a target. I hate it when I think of something that seems wildly obvious but the super smart main character in a show, who is supposed to be this hulking, muscled Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t.

They find an outdoor symphony concert nearby and alert Docherty, sure that this must be it. Then, when they don’t find any chemical weapons or suicide bombers, Reacher decides that the attack will absolutely, 100% be on the freeway the next morning. This is just a guess, of course, but he’s certain of it and calls up Sampson to warn him.

One thing leads to another and Sampson realizes that the bad guys must be at his event (shocker!) and then he spots the suicide bomber: The mysterious person the Hoths brought in from Djibouti – though why the show has kept him such a big secret is a mystery unto itself.

Sampson spots the kid and starts tailing him. He displays all the telltale signs that he and Reacher discussed over the phone (after another lengthy flashback, of course, that reframed Amisha’s plot as both opportunistic and revenge). I have a feeling that Sampson might have been able to diffuse the situation or toss the kid over into the water, had Reacher not bungled into the event like a stampeding ox.

When a security guard shouts at Reacher, the kid looks up, alarmed, thinking he’s been caught. Sampson rushes him, quite courageously, and the two go over the edge into the water. There’s an explosion and Reacher runs to the edge and looks down. The credits roll on yet another cliffhanger, though only a show with the most absurd writing could ever have Sampson survive.

In other words, who knows! He might be alive next week, a hero and primed for the presidency. Anything is possible in The Amazing Adventures Of Jack Reacher And Friends!

While this last bit was exciting and a bit of a shock, the rest of the episode was infuriating and about on par for quality with the rest of the season. Making Reacher a murderer really doesn’t sit well with me. And don’t get me wrong. There is a time and a place for a murder in a show like this. If Reacher had found this guy and he was, say, some powerful billionaire who had killed a bunch of women or who was in charge of a sex trafficking ring or had done some other horrible things and was going to get away with it, sure. Fine. Have him take matters into his own hands. Reacher is a vigilante, so it’s not like he would never cross that line. But Ahlquist was going to face justice. He was not a threat anymore. He was badly injured. This is just not the Reacher I know from the books.

I do think we have one more twist coming. That last scene with Springfield finding the security guard’s body was very strange. Sampson’s wife was walking up in the background and seemed very suspicious to me. She’s been sus this entire season, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that she’s behind the whole thing, working with the Hoths. That would clear up some of the confusion about Amisha’s magical prescience as well.

I wish this show was better. I wish it was just Season 1 quality again. I’ve been catching up on Lioness on Paramount+ (and really enjoying the second season; I’m not sure why I didn’t keep watching after Season 1 which I also really liked) and I was thinking as I watched, I wish Reacher was this good . It’s not some masterpiece of television, but Lioness is a solid military-espionage-political thriller. That’s all I need from Reacher . Solid. Instead we get this cringe nonsense week after week. What a shame. What did you think of this episode? Let me know on Twitter , Instagram , or Facebook .

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Read my review of last week’s Reacher Season 4, Episode 6 right here .

Also, here are the five biggest problems with this season of Reacher .