REVIEW: Reacher – Season 2, Episode 4, “A Night at the Symphony”

Television Reviews

“A Night at the Symphony” is a legwork episode, with Reacher and his team connecting the dots and slowly forming the picture of the conspiracy that killed their friends. But it stops from feeling dull or slow with a propulsive pace and plenty of character work, adding layers to Reacher without betraying his nature or personality and contrasting him to his old friends from his MP days.

Reacher, Neagley, Dixon, and O’Donnell study the documents and files they stole from New Age Technologies while trying to determine Swan’s role in the plot. Russo faces the repercussions of helping Reacher. The traveler acquires a new identity. Reacher gets some new clothes.

“A Night at the Symphony” opens with one of the funnier images the show has had so far: Reacher and his crew sit at a table in a diner, eating breakfast while poring over the various papers and files they just stole in a high-profile robbery. You have to wonder if it’s wise to be this brazen about it, especially when they admit they’d all be in jail if the theft had gone wrong. It’s a cool visual, but wouldn’t it have been smarter just to order breakfast and do this at the hotel? Regardless, I like that this show doesn’t waste any time moving the plot forward; immediately, they’re looking through everything they took from New Age, making connections and raising more questions. That’s what keeps an episode like “A Night at the Symphony” from becoming boring; the dialogue is clipped, the shots are quick, and the scene has energy.

*SPOILERS*

The biggest question the group has is what Swan’s role in the New Age scheme is. O’Donnell discovers that Swan was the assistant director of security, with his boss being Shane Langston, the director of security and the mastermind behind whatever is going on at New Age (as far as we know). O’Donnell questions whether Swan could be involved with Langston, and the others share his concerns – except for Reacher, who shuts down any talk of Swan being a bad guy. Again, the disconnect between Reacher and his team is illustrated through character, something the second season has done consistently well. The others know it’s crazy not to consider that Swan may have thrown in with Langston, especially as the evidence against him mounts. But Reacher insists it can’t be true because he knows Swan, even as O’Donnell points out that this kind of thinking is at odds with what Reacher taught them years ago. Reacher has changed, his need for personal freedom flying in the face of his past in the military, and while that sometimes works to their advantage, here it’s giving him a blind spot; he cannot be methodical and beholden to procedure (loose though it may be) because it’s a friend on the line.

But is it that simple? Neagley doesn’t think so, and she tells Reacher he refuses to entertain the notion that Swan may have turned because Reacher brought Swan into the unit. If Swan helped kill Franz, Sanchez, and Orosco, then Reacher is partly responsible for their deaths, having put them together with one of their killers. And while Neagley says this isn’t fair, that even if Swan is evil, it’s not Reacher’s fault, he’ll still blame himself. This ties into his guilt over losing touch with the team since leaving the military; Reacher left them all to fend for themselves, and now three of them are dead, possibly at the hands of a fourth member. Perhaps he thinks that if he had kept up with everyone, the three dead men could have come to him for help, and he could have saved them from Langston and possibly Swan. The contrast deepens when O’Donnell gets a call from his family that requires him to settle a dispute between his sons; everyone else on his team has something tangible to show for their post-MP lives, whereas Reacher has nothing but the moss he gathers as a rolling stone. For that, three good men are dead.

I think this could go either way. On the one hand, Reacher is ignoring some of the warning signs Swan displayed over the years. Another flashback shows the completion of the drug smuggling case from the previous episode. After they solved it, a brick of heroin disappeared, and they quickly found it in Swan’s car – or, rather, Swan found it. This could have been an accident; it was under the driver’s seat, where it could have easily rolled if it simply fell from the back seat. But it also came after Swan lamented how unfair it was that the people dealing drugs made more money than anyone doing legitimate military work. Would Swan have used his post-MP career to make the big score he had to abandon when the missing heroin was discovered? On the other hand, Reacher keeps coming back to the dead dog in Swan’s house, insisting Swan would not have let his dog die. The others point out that if he were desperate enough, maybe Swan took off as fast as he could. And if he really is a criminal who would kill his friends, perhaps they never knew Swan as well as they thought, as Neagley says. I like how this is playing out, and while I don’t know what will happen (if I had to guess, I’d say Swan is innocent), I do know that if Swan really did set up the others, he’s going to be sorry when Reacher finds him.

The plot brings Reacher to Boston to locate a senator’s aide who helped New Age get some much-needed legislation passed. A quick set-up at the titular symphony courtesy of an elegantly-dressed Dixon, some hastily-acquired cocaine (which happens in a funny scene where Reacher revisits the drug dealer from whom he got his gun in the season premiere), and a surprise appearance from last season’s sidekick, Finlay, gets them the information they need. New Age has developed highly advanced weapons technology that would make launched missiles impossible to avoid, and the aide slipped a rider into a massive senate bill that gave New Age a lucrative contract to sell the missile system to the government. Interesting, but what does it have to do with whatever Langston is up to? Does he want to use the missile tech for his own purposes? I wonder if that weapons shipment the traveler hijacked is a bunch of missiles Langston wants to infuse with the guidance tech. Considering the traveler’s usual clientele, is Langston going to sell these missiles to terrorists or hostile foreign countries? I’m sure they could make a nice under-the-table profit from that, effectively supplying both sides of the War on Terror.

There are some cool scenes to balance the plot and character development in “A Night at the Symphony” as well. The traveler pays off that glimpse of the plastic surgeon ad from the third episode, but instead of having his face altered, he kills the surgeon (and his secretary) and steals his identity. This is one ruthless villain, and after seeing him murder these two innocent people, it will be a pleasure when Reacher catches up with him. I liked seeing Finlay again; it made sense that Reacher would call on him for help, and it looks like this is the only appearance he’ll make this season. If they had to bring someone back, this was the way to do it. And the fight with the biker gang at the end acts as a nice way to let off some steam after a mostly procedural episode. Reacher promising to kill the ringleader and then making good in brutal fashion perfectly demonstrates the show’s appeal. I like this season a lot so far.