REVIEW: Reacher – Season 2, Episode 5, “Burial”

Television Reviews

“Burial” moves the second season of Reacher along at a breakneck pace, clearing up more aspects of the mystery while throwing curveballs to heroes and villains alike, and all with a heaping plate of action to keep the pulse racing. There are new wrinkles to character motivations, an entertaining emerging partnership, and the implication that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

After O’Donnell gets his family to safety, he and Reacher compare notes with the agents who were tailing the Traveler they refer to as AM while Neagley and Dixon investigate a New Age Technologies warehouse in Colorado. The evidence against Swan mounts. The team attends Franz’s funeral, but so do some unwelcome visitors.

“Burial” opens with our first look at O’Donnell’s family. It’s a fairly normal home; O’Donnell’s wife is packing for their trip – which is being arranged to remove them from danger – while the kids chase each other around the house with what appear to be cardboard wrapping paper tubes. But this is also Reacher’s first insight into the daily lives of his old team, and that’s what makes the scene so fascinating. So far, the season has made it seem like Reacher has missed out on life by becoming a drifter, embracing unbridled freedom at the expense of some of the things that most make us human and that make life worth living: family, friends, roots, a home. But sitting in O’Donnell’s living room while his wild kids run around screaming and bopping each other on the head, Reacher looks like he’s suddenly confident he made the right choice. But O’Donnell is happy, too, and that’s the real point of this scene. Different people want different things out of life, and while Reacher and O’Donnell ended up in the opposite places anyone thought they would, they’re both living the life that’s right for them. Reacher acknowledges that when he tells O’Donnell how much he likes his wife. As for the kids, well… he doesn’t mention them.

*SPOILERS*

The plot kicks into gear after that, as Reacher and O’Donnell visit two of the guys who were tailing AM. They give Reacher the skinny on their mystery traveler, and it’s not much. They refer to him as a ghost; he has no real identity anyone can track, no political or religious allegiance, no cause outside of lining his pockets. This makes him ideally suited to supply the worst people in the world with weapons; he doesn’t care what their goals are or who they use their missiles on so long as the price is right. And AM has displayed that lack of conviction in previous episodes, killing without remorse if it’s to his advantage, displaying no feeling when the man who helped arrange the truck hijacking wanted to make sure no one was hurt. In this very episode, the hijacking takes place, and when one of his henchmen tells him about the dead driver, which will no doubt upset their facilitator, AM waves it off by saying money will assuage his guilt. AM is the perfect mercenary in that way, and a dangerous man to have as an enemy, which Reacher will no doubt soon learn. (It’s also doubtless that AM will learn the same of Jack Reacher.)

Speaking of the hijacking, it happens to a New Age Technologies truck as it’s transporting missiles. This is where the intel stolen from the office in “Picture Says a Thousand Words” led them, and Neagley and Dixon pose as government regulators to inspect the warehouse. Unfortunately, they’re too late to see the truck before it’s hijacked – though they manage to catch up with it before AM’s flunkies escape. Neagley and Dixon kill all of AM’s men and stop the steal, putting a crimp in the evil plot that’s slowly taking shape, but we have a bit more insight into what’s going on now. Langston hired AM to steal missiles from New Age, the very company he works for (and runs security for; bad luck, guys). He’s stealing missiles from a company that paid off a US Senator to force approval of their missile guidance technology through Congress. He hired a guy connected with terrorists to do it. And, as Neagley and Dixon learn, the conditions for the hijacking were approved by their old teammate Swan, who also works for New Age. For now, it looks like Langston is either going to use the missile tech for something evil or he wants to sell it to some unsavory enemies of the state. We still don’t know for sure, but the plot is unfolding quite well, not revealing itself completely but steadily giving some answers.

Swan is a big part of “Burial,” and his assistance with the hijacking is just the beginning. It seems he also hired a couple of snipers to kill Reacher and his team at Franz’s funeral. The evidence is undeniable now, and even Reacher, who’s been defending Swan in the face of reasonable accusations, can no longer ignore the likelihood that his old friend is part of the scheme. And this week’s flashback establishes why it’s so hard for Reacher to admit that Swan has turned: in an undercover operation to bust some drug dealers, Swan saved Reacher’s life, taking a bullet meant for the big guy. But the reveal is more interesting than simply illustrating Reacher’s hesitancy to condemn Swan; it also shows how important loyalty is to him. He was loyal to Swan, forcing himself to ignore solid evidence for as long as he could; now that it looks like Swan is evil and killed a few of their teammates, Reacher has gone in the opposite direction, wanting to choke the life out of Swan in revenge. There’s doubt as to what he’ll do, but his anger is off the charts now, and he’s not planning on leaving any bad guys alive.

Also amusing in “Burial” is Reacher potentially gaining two unlikely allies. The first is Senator Lavoy, the crooked politician who secured the military contract for New Age. He tells Reacher that he never knew about Langston’s plot and wants Reacher to do what he was already planning and destroy Langston and everyone in league with him. In return, Lavoy will protect Reacher and his friends from any legal trouble. On the surface, this seems like, as Lavoy puts it, a win-win; Reacher gets justice, while the missile tech is kept away from terrorists, and Lavoy gets to keep his payoff. But it feels wrong, and Reacher clearly suspects there’s more to it than Lavoy is letting on. The other is Detective Russo, who attends Franz’s funeral. After a confrontation, Reacher begins to realize that Russo is on the level, and the two team up to catch an escaping sniper. This pair is great together, trading insults and threats even when they’re on friendly terms. Russo also tells Reacher that Langston and his team used to be cops, and when they were being investigated for corruption, they all left and got jobs at New Age. Are they continuing a scheme they began when they were dirty cops, or did they move on to bigger and better things? And did they recruit Swan, or did Swan recruit them? Season 2 of Reacher is rocketing forward, and I’m torn between wanting to see how it ends and lamenting that it’ll be over in three weeks.