Series / Reacher

Reacher is an American action/crime thriller series created in 2022. It is based off the Jack Reacher novel series by Lee Child, which previously saw two theatrical adaptations. It is streamed on Prime Video.

Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) is a very tall and muscular wanderer who'd prefer to be left alone as he travels from town to town whenever the mood strikes him. Unfortunately for him, trouble always seems to follow him around and he usually finds himself neck deep in a murderous conspiracy no matter where he goes. As much as he'd like to ignore the situation and move on, he is never able to turn away, especially if innocents are involved, and he brings his analytical skills and large capacity for violence — honed from years as an US Army investigator and a rough-and-tumble childhood — to bear and take down the perpetrators once and for all.

The first season is based on Killing Floor, the first novel, and sees Reacher arrive in the small town of Margrave, Georgia, hoping to learn more about a blues musician he's a fan of. However, he's soon arrested on suspicion of murder and finds himself embroiled in a deadly conspiracy that soon shatters the town's idyllic veneer. To solve this messy situation, Reacher teams up with police officers Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) and Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald).

The second season is based on Bad Luck and Trouble, the eleventh novel, and sees Reacher reunite with members of his former investigations team to look into the death of one of their own. They soon become the targets of multiple, violent assassination attempts linked to a major defense contractor.

---

This series provides examples of:

A - F

• The Ace: Reacher. He's a brilliant investigator whose cases led to a 100% conviction rate, makes deductions easily with limited information, has multiple medals for acts of heroism in combat, including two Silver Stars and is a terrifyingly effective combatant who takes out multiple opponents without breaking a sweat.
• Actionized Adaptation: While the books have a fair number of action scenes, there only tend to be 2-5 scenes on average per book where Reacher is fighting antagonists with lethal force. The series features dozens of Canon Foreigner Mooks just for bigger and more frequent action sequences where Reacher and his allies can kill about as many villains as they do in the average book in almost every episode.
• Actor Allusion:
  • When Shane Langston (played by Robert Patrick) is told that Neagley checked into a hotel under the name Sarah Connor his hireling asks who "Sarah Connor" is in reference to. Langston quickly states that "I don't give a shit."
  • An interesting one as the actor isn't the one in the scene, but a scene in season 2 briefly has Russo gush about how cool he thought Aquaman was as a kid. One of the more well known earlier roles of Alan Ritchson's (Reacher himself) is playing Aquaman in Smallville. Given Aquaman's reputation in pop culture, its pretty clear this was a deliberate nod to Ritchson's time as the character.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Although Finlay and Reacher have some friction early in their relationship, when Finlay (very atypically) curses out Kliner Sr., Reacher can be seen hiding a smirk behind his hand.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: The famous incident where Reacher got a jawbone fragment to the stomach and still managed to save several people is mentioned, but the setting is updated to Baghdad instead of Beirut as in the novels.
• Adaptational Badass: Roscoe and Finlay take out several bad guys at the end of the season, even killing Picard and Teale (whom they had beef with), while they both were originally killed by Reacher in the book. Hubble also has a brief badass moment at the end when he headshots a mook while rescuing his kids.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Frances Neagley appears to help Reacher in the last few episodes of season 1, while she wasn't introduced until "Without Fail", the sixth book.
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • Finlay is a lot more belligerent and tightly wound toward Reacher early on.
  • In the book, Officer Baker comes across as professional during Reacher's arrest: courteous, quick to offer his help, and disturbed by the murders. In the show, he's surly, apparently racist, not openly concerned about the murders, and is pretty gruff while arresting Reacher. In both versions, he's a Dirty Cop working for the bad guys, but in the book, he tips off Reacher by being too calm and courteous toward him while he's a suspect in a brutal murder (as Baker knows he's innocent). In the show, it's because Baker is too apathetic. He's also more sadistic while holding Finlay prisoner.
  • O'Donnell is less prone to making sarcastic jabs at his friends in the book and is also more respectable in his private eye work.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In the book, Hubble's employer at the bank callously fired him before he got forcibly recruited into the counterfeiting ring. In the show, she seems pleasant enough and reveals that Hubble quit his job (due to being threatened by Kliner Sr., it turns out).
• Adaptational Villainy: In the novel, KJ was just as much of a scumbag as he is here, being part of the cleaner crew, but this adaptation has him depicted far worse than he already was, with him torturing and murdering Stevenson and his pregnant wife, killing Mary Beth in the subway, slitting his own father’s throat using an agonizing technique, and being the one who shot Joe.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
  • Joe's notes mention "Gray's Kliner File" as a source of information in his investigation, but it's never explained how he knows about the file. In the book, Gray contacted a New Orleans homicide cop who investigated Kliner for murdering EPA officials to find out what the Kliner family was up to before they came to Margrave. That cop's name is on Joe's list, so he presumably told Joe about Gray's file. In the show, the third phone number on Joe's list belongs to an EPA office and it's never mentioned that Gray had any contact with them.
  • Finlay being a former smoker rather than a recovering alcoholic makes it harder to tell why the corrupt local big shots hired a competent potential Spanner in the Works prior to the beginning of the show. In the book, his drinking caused them to assume he'd be too incompetent to learn anything about them.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Sherman Stoller is renamed Pete Jobling.
  • In the books, Roscoe is the surname of Reacher's love interest and her first name is unrevealed (although another author using some of the Jack Reacher characters named her Ann). Here, her name is Roscoe Conklin.
  • Joe Reacher's sources Walter Bartholomew and Kevin Kelstein are renamed William Bryant, and Susan Castillo.
• Adapted Out:
  • Three additional unnamed Margrave PD cops (a Lazy Bum desk officer and two men waiting as backup during the dinner arrest) are omitted.
  • In season 2, Reacher mentioned that he'd encountered James Barr in Indiana a year earlier, and that Barr owes him a favor as a result, implying that the events of One Shot (the basis of the 2012 Jack Reacher film) happened between seasons 1 and 2, without being shown.
  • Orozco's wife and kids are absent from Season 2.
• Affably Evil: A.M. is a ruthless mercenary with no qualms about killing, but he's rather polite and friendly. He even gives comic books to children during his stops, just to make them happy.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Langston and A.M. both beg Reacher for mercy once he has the advantage over them. He doesn't give them any.
• Alleged Lookalikes: The Reacher brothers are described as being near-identical, to the point Joe's assistant and lover mistakes Jack for Joe on the phone and as she dies, which Jack even claiming she'd recognise him without having met him purely off of his resemblance to his brother. Later, another associate of Joe's even remarks that there must have been "something in the water at the Reachers' place", ostensibly because Jack's build is recognisably similar to Joe's. When we finally see Joe (played by Christopher Russell in flashbacks), he's a much slimmer built man lacking Jack's sheer bulk, square jaw, and military crew-cut or even hair color, instead having shaggy black hair and a far less hunky appearance (Alan Ritchson is 6'3" and during filming, bulks up to 230 lbs; Christopher Russell is 6'2" and 180 lbs). The only thing they have even close in common is their height. Their younger versions look much more similar, despite those actors not being related.
• Almighty Janitor: Langston is the head of security for New Age's New York facility, which is a responsible position, but not normally a powerful or influential one. He uses his position to build a security force mostly consisting of his old, corrupt precinct, and then bribes and threatens enough key people that he's able to use the company's resources for his own plots with impunity.
• Amateur Sleuth: Although he's a trained investigator, Reacher is no longer affiliated with any law-enforcement agencies and participating in cases of his own volition. Unfortunately for the villains, the only thing "amateur" about him is that he's unofficially investigating without the backing of the law, and in Reacher's opinion, that's just another advantage.
• Ambiguously Brown: A minor plot point with A.M. (played by Ferdinand Kingsley, who's of mixed British-Indian ancestry), who has a long list of multiracial aliases that he uses throughout the season, making it more difficult for him to be tracked.
• Apologetic Attacker: The hitman sent to kill Marlo's daughter Jane takes a moment to apologize for having to kill her, acknowledging that life isn't fair. His hesitation allows Neagley to run him down with her SUV.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: A very cruel example. When Langston reveals Swan’s true fate and the cover story he made for Swan’s sudden disappearance, he very gleefully points out that Swan “even left his poor dog behind.” The fact Langston points this out after the audience already knows the inhumane fate of Swan’s poor dog shows that he and his crew knew they were leaving an innocent dog to a cruel grim fate just for the sake of their cover story.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted to an actually unrealistic extent. During a shootout, Dixon empties an entire clip into one Mook who, unlike his comrades, was wearing a bulletproof vest. He's stunned a few times by being shot, but doesn't show any real injury from her shots and he nearly kills her until O'Donnell shoots him in the head. For some reason, Dixon herself didn't aim for the head despite their close range, and somehow the vest held at such short range while he managed to keep fighting despite the fact he should have at the very least a few broken ribs from the impact.
• Artistic License – Law: Even in a tiny town with a population of only 1,700 people, there is no way two police officers who thought they spotted a murderer would burst into a diner, guns drawn, without evacuating the diner first. Both officers would've been written up and possibly fired by any sane police precinct in the country for that behavior. Given how corrupt Margrave turns out to be, this is possibly explained by the chain of command enabling this sort of behaviour.
• Artistic License – Linguistics:
  • The use of "carpetbagger" by a white Southerner who at most might be thirty years old. This term hasn't been spoken aloud by anyone from the South in a very long time, as the term was referring to the Reconstruction Era and at most, maybe someone elderly would say it, but certainly not the snot-nosed psycho KJ.
  • The use of Yankee while describing Finlay isn't accurate. Most Georgians refer to anyone from anywhere north of Virginia as simply a Northerner. Yankee phased out sometime around the 1960's as a common term for non-Southerners.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • Reacher is shown in flashbacks to have regularly patrolled a Baghdad neighborhood by himself. However, not only would a soldier never patrol alone, but as a major, Reacher would never even be directly involved in patrols. He would actually be overseeing multiple patrols from a tactical operations center.
  • Reacher is shown wearing the dress uniform branch colors of a US Army aviation officer (dark-blue and orange), instead of the dark-green color of a Military Police officer.
  • Neagley was a master sergeant when she served with Reacher. Assuming that a soldier joins at 18, they would most likely make the rank at 35 at the lowest. Neagley was clearly a lot younger than that when serving in the flashbacks.
• Artistic License – Prison: Two instances; one justified, one not.
  • In the pilot episode, Jack and another man are in prison and were placed into a cell block with convicted criminals. They should have been placed into a holding area, since they have not been convicted of any crime. This part is justified; a crooked guard dropped them there on purpose, and the non-crooked staff are appropriately horrified that such a mistake would have been allowed (partially because of how it reflects on them). The fact that it happens in the dead of night makes it more likely the crooked guard could sneak them in without others questioning it.
  • While in the general population, Jack beats the crap out of one convict who entered his cell looking to rape Hubble. One of the convict's gang is wearing sunglasses, which Jack makes him give up. The only eyewear prisoners are allowed to wear are prison-issued corrective glasses. Sunglasses are not allowed for two reasons: they prevent guards from being able to tell where a prisoner is actually looking, and the lenses and frames can be crafted into weapons.
• Ascended Extra:
  • The coroner only has one or two scenes and no name or character arc in the book. In the show, his name is Jasper and he's a regular character with a distinctive personality.
  • Charlie Hubble only has a few scenes in the book, while in the show, she provides some of the exposition her husband originally did and has more scenes in protective custody.
  • Officer Stevenson is relieved from duty early in the book due to his relation to Hubble, but remains on the force and has lots of scenes throughout season 1.
• Aside Glance: The day after Reacher and Roscoe sleep together, they visit Jobling's widow, who is not sorry he's dead. As they're searching the garage for evidence, she's listing reasons why their marriage had been on the rocks, then snarks that "It's amazing what you'll tolerate when a guy can throw a good hump into you." Roscoe and Reacher both pause and look at each other uncomfortably.
• Assassins Are Always Betrayed: The snipers who were hired to take out Reacher and the Special Investigators at Franz's funeral were told to go to a certain building afterwards to collect the rest of their payment, which was rigged with enough explosives to demolish the entire building, as the only surviving sniper found out (briefly) when he walked inside.
• Asshole Victim:
  • The villains are a brutal group of bad guys where Murder Is the Best Solution, who will not only kill anyone who opposes or fails them, but will do so in a brutal and horrific way in order to send a message for others to stay in line. This includes threatening kids as well as murdering a mother and her unborn child in front of their father, and doing so in a way where he can't look away. Suffice to say when Reacher starts dispatching them, no one feels sorry for their fate.
  • Some of their own victims as well. Chief Morrison, who is brutally killed by KJ and/or the South American assassins, was a corrupt cop involved in Pete and Joe's murders. Spivey, who is killed by the South Americans, was a corrupt prison guard who tried to have Hubble killed. And while Kliner Sr. may not have been involved in or even approved of the murders committed by KJ (hence KJ slitting his throat), he did still run a shady counterfeiting operation and cruelly forced Hubble to be a part of it.
  • At one point, KJ tells Roscoe that Reacher killed some civilians in Iraq. Turns out, this was because they were child abusers.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Reacher's Desert Eagle is this In-Universe just as much as it is in Real Life. While his size and strength allow him to deal with the gun's considerable weight and recoil, he can do nothing about its tiny magazine capacity, which leaves him high and dry on more than one occasion. The Desert Eagle also being a very flashy weapon means he can't use it freely without drawing unwanted attention. It is without a doubt a cool and powerful piece of hardware that saves Reacher's bacon more than once, but it's definitely not the most practical gun out there.
• Awesome by Analysis:
  • Fast and complicated Sherlock Scans of people and situations are all in a day's work for Reacher and his old military comrades.
  • Reacher's first meeting with the mysterious Sleazy Politician Senator Malcolm Lavoy has Lavoy casually emphasize that he knows exactly what went down in Margrave in the previous season after reading between the lines of some police reports and deducing Reacher's Vigilante Man involvement.
• Ax-Crazy: KJ Kliner seems fairly put together at first but after revealing his true colors, he is unquestionably this, gleefully talking about all the people he's killed or had killed, including his own father, and salivating at the thought of murdering Charlie and her two kids.
• Bad Boss:
  • The leader of the counterfeiting organization, KJ Kliner, frequently kills his own men in brutal fashion for failure or outliving their usefulness.
  • Langston is quite prone to killing his own men when they outlive their usefulness. When Reacher and Senator Lavoy's men invade his base, he immediately flees and leaves his men behind to die.
• Batman Gambit: When Reacher first formed the Special Investigators team, he invited them all for a beer at an officer's bar. A group of officers from another unit took offence at this since Neagley was an enlisted and thus not eligible to be in the bar. A Bar Brawl ensued. All of it was part of Reacher's plan. He needed his team to start trusting each other and nothing unites a group faster than fighting against a common enemy. He knew that the officers from the rival unit regularly visited that bar on Thursdays and that they were the type of people who would pick a fight over an enlisted drinking in their bar. He also knew that the people he selected for his team would stand up to such bullies would quickly bond over the experience.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: The final battle in the warehouse takes place after Reacher has started a fire and interrupted efforts to put it out.
• Berserk Button:
  • Neagley does not like the sight of a scummy patron in a strip club getting too handsy with one of the strippers during a lap dance, especially after the stripper repeatedly tells him to stop. She delivers a prompt beatdown before Reacher can even clear his seat to do it himself.
  • Reacher absolutely snaps when he sees that KJ has painted the word "WHORE" on the side of Roscoe's truck. He is self-aware enough to know the entire thing is a trap to get him to beat KJ up and get himself arrested, and calmly outlines this to KJ's face before clarifying that he still doesn't care and still delivers a much deserved ass-whupping anyway.
  • Seeing animals harmed is a big one for Reacher. He spends much of the first season making sure a dog is rescued from it's abusive owner who he gives a beatdown to and he goes apeshit upon seeing a dog died in a home and attacks the cop trailing him, mistakenly believing he was involved.
  • Any implication that someone Reacher cares about or respects is corrupt or involved in shady dealings will seriously piss him off. He barely restrains himself from attacking Finlay when he suggests that Joe was in bed with money launderers, leading to his death, and refuses to even entertain the idea that his former colleague and friend Swan could have been dirty.
  • NYPD Detective Russo is, underneath his grumpy exterior, an honest and principled cop who gets very angry if someone accuses him of being dirty, mainly because his father was killed by corrupt cops after refusing to join their illegal activities. Even insinuating that he's anything less than clean will elicit a profane tirade in response.
• Big Eater: Reacher tears into a massive plate of barbeque and fried chicken with great gusto and it's implied such meals are standard for him given his size and the levels of physical activity he regularly engages in.
  Jolene: Two fried chicken thighs, fried okra, ribs, collard greens, poe greens, rice with giblet gravy, cottage cheese and peaches.
  ...
  Finlay: How do you eat like that and still look like you do?
  Reacher: Like this! [Takes a big bite of food]
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Season 2 has arms dealer Langston and his client A.M. serve as the primary antagonists.
• Big Bad Wannabe:
  • Season 1: KJ Kliner talks a big game and murdered quite a few people, but he's nowhere near the physical threat he likes to think he is. Dawson gives Reacher the toughest fight of any character in the first season. KJ Kliner, by comparison, fights Reacher twice and is clearly outmatched both times, ultimately putting up very little in the way of a challenge.
  • Season 2: Langston. A well-connected retired cop who thinks of himself as the mastermind of a weapons deal which will make him rich, but in truth is just a clearly out of his prime middle-aged man who only survives against the 110th due to having a small army of Cannon Fodder and getting very lucky on one occasion. When he finally ends up in a situation where he has no minions left to throw at Reacher and can't escape, he's quickly reduced to begging for his life. It doesn't help.
• The Big Guy: Reacher stands at six feet, five inches, and packed with muscle. He towers over everyone else he comes across and sometimes has difficulty finding clothes that fit him.
• Bitchin Sheeps Clothing: Agent Picard initially appeared to be a friendly Reasonable Authority Figure and friend of Finley who helps Reacher and Co. anyway he can. The final episode reveals he is a Dirty Cop who is in on the operation and his true Jerkass personality comes out.
• Black Bra and Panties: Roscoe is shown wearing at least black panties when she and Reacher stay the night in a motel, though she has on a t-shirt so it's unclear what color her bra is (or if she's even wearing one). Likewise, Dixon has on a black bra when she and Reacher start to have sex, though the scene fades to black while she still has her pants on.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: O'Donnell does not blackmail people. He "incentivizes" them.
  Reacher: So, you blackmail.
  David O'Donnell: I incentivize.
  Karla Dixon: Sounds sleazy, O'D.
  David O'Donnell: It's sleazy adjacent. Hey, I got private school tuition to pay for, okay?
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: As in the books, Reacher is a good person, but his time with the military means killing people is way more of an option for him than with normal people. Beating the snot out of six men - including jamming one's eye out and potentially killing others - barely gets his heart racing.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: When Langston is asked about Swan, he reveals that he amputated the man's eye and finger to access his computer at New Age and activate certain retinal scanners to create the appearance he was still active at the company.
• Brick Joke: Reacher needs an inconspicuous car for a stakeout, so he drops Hubble's Bentley at an auto shop to get the windows tinted and bribes a mechanic to borrow his minivan. When he returns to pick it up, only two windows are tinted, and Reacher takes it without bothering to have the job finished. A few episodes later, Hubble is curious why two of his windows have been tinted.
• Broken Ace: Reacher zig-zags between being a straightforward The Ace and a Broken Ace due to the murder of his brother. He is highly competent (most of the time) but is so deeply emotionally stunted that he struggles to express his appreciation or affection for people in his general vicinity that he comes to care about. It takes him quite some time to truly process losing his brother.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Despite knowing everything there is to know about Reacher's military history, KJ still goes out of his way to antagonize him. Once his true nature is revealed, it becomes clear that he was actively looking forward to the challenge of killing such a formidable opponent, but is simply oblivious to the skill gap between them.
  • KJ pays off four townies to confront Reacher at his hotel, when they know he's been accused of murder. Granted, they are quite drunk by the time Reacher arrives, but $100 to confront a man you think is capable of murder is still a deal that shouldn't have been taken to begin with, and one they should have backed out of the second they took one look at him.
• Bully Hunter: Reacher can't abide bullies and flashbacks show that he'd pick fights with them wherever he went. KJ painting "WHORE" on Roscoe's truck gets him to attack KJ despite knowing full well KJ is baiting him.
• But Now I Must Go: Reacher at the end of season 1. Once everything has been settled, he leaves town to continue his wandering ways.
• Butt-Monkey: Within the 110th, O'Donnell is the recipient of most of their digs, has his accomplishments and feats treated as dumb luck, and his expertise generally dismissed. Of course, it's clearly affectionate and he dishes as much as he takes, with him seemingly going out of his way to antagonise everyone.
• By-the-Book Cop: Finlay is very serious about doing things the legal way. Even when bends the rules, he's careful to make sure the forms of the law are observed. This brings him into conflict with Reacher, who's more than willing to simply ignore any laws that keep him from doing what's right.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You:
  • The bad guys capture Reacher near the end of episode 7, but they can't kill him because Hubble has gone to ground and Reacher is the only person skilled enough to find him without a paper trail.
  • This is repeated in season 2. Reacher is once again captured, but they can't kill him immediately because Neagley is still running around and only he knows where she might be.
• Cassandra Truth: Reacher, twice.
  • The first is in season 1 when Reacher takes note that Kliner Sr. is bringing in an unusually large amount of animal feed despite Kliner's farm being small enough to put it under the limit where federal regulators would inspect the operation. Finlay and Roscoe just dismiss this because Kliner Sr. owns a large cattle farm but Reacher won't drop it to the point where Roscoe gets annoyed that he keeps bringing it up. Reacher turns out to be correct — the animal feed contains an ingredient necessary for the counterfeiting process and the cattle were just used as a cover.
  • In season 2 Reacher absolutely refuses to entertain the idea that Swan (by this point their last missing member of the 110th) is dirty and shuts down any discussion about it despite mounting evidence that Swan is involved with Little Wing. Reacher is right, and Swan is innocent. Swan uncovered what Langston was up to and went to Marlo, before contacting other members of the 110th for help. This got them all targeted by Langston.
• Cavalry Betrayal: Reacher enlists the help of Senator Lavoy's ex-military private security in dealing with Langston, only for them to turn on his team after Langston and his cohorts are all dead because Lavoy doesn't want any loose ends. Unlike most examples of a Cavalry Betrayal, they do actually help win the fight they were called for (in a highly effective manner) because it serves their interests, but afterward, they are prepared to end their Enemy Mine alliance with extreme prejudice. Reacher also suspects that they wanted to see Little Wing in action and so held off for a bit. Reacher anticipates their betrayal and reveals he called in Homeland Security, who arrive just in the nick of time.
• Celebrity Paradox: Played with in Season 2, when Neagley uses the pseudonym "Sarah Connor". Robert Patrick, who plays the main villain of the season, also played the antagonist in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This leads to a meta-gag when Patrick's character is asked who Sarah Connor is, and replies "I don't give a shit".
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Tony Swan's guitar, which is briefly seen in some early season 2 flashbacks, becomes unexpectedly prominent in a later flashback when the man who sold it to him turns out to be a criminal who recognizes Swan during a sting operation.
  • When Detective Russo arrests Reacher, he makes fun of a boxed toy in the back of the cop's car. Two episodes later, it turns out he bought that toy for Franz's son after getting to know the family during his investigation.
• Cool Car: The Hubbles' Bentley Flying Spur is such a cool and impressive car that Reacher has to briefly borrow another car because it draws too much attention for a stakeout.
• Combat Pragmatist: Reacher doesn't really care for playing or fighting fair. In his first fight in the series, he gives someone to the count of three to back off, then attacks him on "two". If he decides that beating someone is necessary, he'll do what it takes to win. He also has no issue simply ambushing and shooting opponents rather than fighting them directly.
• The Conspiracy: It becomes clear quite early in Season 1 that things in Margrave aren't as simple as they appear, and there are agents of a larger power everywhere, pulling the strings...
• Continuity Reboot: The series doesn't share continuity with the two Jack Reacher films starring Tom Cruise.
• Contrived Coincidence: The fact that Reacher finds himself in Margrave on the morning after his brother Joe is killed in the town. Finlay brings it up out at one point, but it is never addressed. Jack himself admits he stopped by the town on a whim, out of hearing a blues song on the radio and remembering his brother Joe mentioning a legendary musician named Blind Blake died there, wanting to check the place out. Given the fallout of Reacher discovering his brother's murder has on the villains' counterfeiting operation and that Reacher himself muses on the unlikelihood of him ever finding this out through official channels for a long time until the case had gone cold, given his current occupation, it's implied to be a case of Joe's spirit guiding Jack to help settle his unfinished business in the town.
• Cowboy Cop:
  • Subverted in that Reacher is not a cop and has long stopped being a military investigator, but he pretty much plays the same sort of role. He has no care for the rules or restrictions in any situations, and has no problem breaking the law to get what he wants. As he's fond of pointing out to others, they have rules and regulations, but he doesn't.
  • Lampshaded in season 2 when the NYPD detective demands Reacher not do any "cowboy shit" after he just set off a pipe bomb in a residential neighborhood to kill some goons. As soon as he leaves, Reacher's next order is to do exactly that.
  • Detective Russo is willing to bend the law, notably by covering up Reacher's crimes and keeping Reaxher unlawfully detained.
• Creator Cameo: Like he did in the films, Lee Child appeared in the series. He played a diner patron who bumps into Reacher and excuses himself in the first season's finale.
• Crowbar Combatant: Kliner's nephew Dawson comes after Reacher with a crowbar. This proves to be one of Reacher's toughest battles, both due to the weapon and his opponent attacking with insane ferocity.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Cross the bad guys and you'll end up crucified to a wall literally eating your balls, and/or watching your family be tortured with mirrors placed all around you so you can't look away. Everyone coming across the crime scenes is suitably disturbed to see such a level of brutality reach a quaint old Georgia town... Of course, Margrave turns out to be anything but.
  • The last Dirty Cop in the bunch gets crushed to death by Reacher driving a pickup truck directly into him and smashing him into the bars of the jail cell. He dies quite slowly and painfully, but had he not been a traitor, he may have died in a less horrible way.
  • In season 2, the bad guys like to torture people, break their legs and then toss them out fo a helicopter somewhere in the Cascade Mountains wilderness. If you somehow miraculously survive the fall, you will then die of exposure or be killed by wild animals. Your dead body might not be discovered for years.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: True to form, Reacher regularly demolishes any opponent he faces with frightening ease. Played with in that while normal people hold no real threat to Reacher, he's not completely invincible. He can be overwhelmed by superior numbers given enough time, and when facing an opponent with skill and training it's a lot harder for him to take them down, often resorting to desperate measures to take them out. Out-of-their-mind lunatics like KJ or his cousin Dawson who make up for their lack of practiced training with insane ferocity in a pitched fight require him to expend more effort than usual to put them down as well.
• Damsel in Distress: Conklin is thankfully incredibly useful and helpful the entire first season, but gets damseled for the season finale. She's captured off-screen along with Hubble's wife and kids and has to be rescued. She does manage to take down Teale after Reacher frees her, at least.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the two movies with Tom Cruise, with more violence, nudity and swearing.
• David vs. Goliath:
  • This usually ends up being the case with most people Reacher faces off against, as he's naturally towering a foot over most people and is built like a brick shithouse, but it's most apparent in Reacher's face-off with Dawson Kliner in the penultimate episode. Dawson is shorter than most people and the height and muscle disparity would clearly indicate a fist-fight between them would end decisively in Reacher's favour, but surprisingly, Jack actually loses in hand-to-hand combat with him. He makes up for his shorter stature with relentless ferocity and single-minded determination, attacking Jack with a crowbar and ignoring any guns in favour of beating him to death, shrugging off most of Reacher's blows and bouncing back whenever he's tossed around the room. Jack actually seems taken aback by his sheer energy in a fight and ultimately has to resort to blasting him point-blank with three Desert Eagle rounds to put him down.
  • In season 2, we get a flip of this briefly with Reacher's sidekick O'Donnell (played by 5'8 Shaun Sipos) who is visibly dwarfed by Reacher and several of the mooks they fight; in one particular fight, he ends up facing off with someone twice his size both in height and width, and nearly kills him through sheer physical strength. Because of his more modest size, he's shown fighting primarily with switchblades and brass knuckles, utilising them to great affect to get the upper hand on opponents.
• Death by Adaptation: Stevenson and his wife and Posthumous Character Mrs. Finlay are the only characters to survive Killing Floor but die in the show.
• Decomposite Character:
  • Dawson Kliner isn't in the book and has some but not all of his cousin KJ's personality traits and role as the head of the hit squad and the man who kicked Joe's dead body.
  • In the book, the corrupt guard Spivey is also responsible for moving Reacher and Hubble back to the general population of the prison after his effort to get them killed fails (while seeking to cover up his crime). In the show, a second (seemingly honest) guard does that.
• Defiant to the End: In season 2, Franz is severely beaten and about to be tossed to his death from a helicopter, and all he has to say to his would-be killer is that "the big guy" is gonna come for him once he finds out.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Reacher and the remaining 110th have been kicking the ass of everyone Langston throws at them with little effort and barely a few scratches, and just need to find out where they're having the Little Wing buy to stop them....but then out of the blue, O'Donnell and Dixon have been kidnapped offscreen and now Reacher has to surrender to stop them being tortured to death like Franz and the others were. Its particularly egregious because with how much fight the two have previously shown putting up, its hard to buy Langston's men being able to take them down alive, never mind the fact up until this point, he's been trying to have them killed on-sight rather than captured. While capturing them to force Reacher to surrender is a smarter plan, up until this point, Langston had been somewhat defined as being completely out of his depth as a Big Bad and not really the kind to think that far ahead, not to mention the only way he was able to capture them is because Reacher (offscreen) apparently used Russo's easily trackable police-issue car to drive to the motel they were staying at, which is a remarkably big oversight on Reacher's part. It's not helped by the fact in the previous episode, Reacher had Langston dead to rights and he only got away thanks to an out-of-nowhere helicopter showing up to rescue him, which also feels like this.
• Didn't Think This Through: A minor example. KJ spray paints the word "WHORE" on Roscoe's car with the intent of getting Reacher in trouble and it works. He ends up not pressing charges because, as Reacher points out afterwards, Reacher would be able to request discovery on the Kliners' financial information and records, potentially exposing their shady business dealings. The net result is that KJ gets bitch slapped out of his seat for nothing.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation:
  • A minor example, but Pete Jobling and Joe Reacher are shot with a suppressed pistol chambered in 9mm, 95 grain ammo (a fancy way of saying subsonic .380 ACP) instead of a suppressed Ruger pistol in .22 LR.
  • Another minor example, Teale is shot in the head with a Desert Eagle like in the book, but here, he’s shot through his eye by Roscoe instead of Reacher.
  • In the book, Kliner Sr. was shot in the chest by Reacher with the Desert Eagle during the climax; he’s killed much earlier here, getting his throat slit by his own son.
  • KJ was part of the cleaner team that Reacher slaughtered in the Hubble house and ended up being drowned in the swimming pool. Here, KJ survives until the end, where he’s dunked in a tank of chemicals, then thrown into a bunch of burning boxes, setting him alight.
  • Picard is shot in the head by Reacher with the Desert Eagle in the book, while here, he’s killed by Finlay when the latter knocks him into a money press and activates it.
• Dirty Cop:
  • In season 1, as things unfold, it becomes clear that two of the five cops on Margrave's police force are working for the bad guys. This even extends to the FBI, as Finlay's friend Picard is also on the take.
  • In season 2, New Age's entire security department, bar Swan, is made up of former NYPD cops who were under investigation by Internal Affairs, but took early retirements, after which the charges mysteriously went away.
• Disney Villain Death: How Langston is killed at the end of Season 2.
• Disposing of a Body
  • Subverted in season 1 as the bad guys want their victims to be found as a warning to anyone who might stand in their way.
  • In season 2, the bad guys like to kill their victims by dropping them out a helicopter over the Catskill Mountains. If they miracously survive the fall, they will die of exposure soon after. The victim is dropped far from any hiking trails which means that the body might not be discovered for months or years by which time most forensic evidence would have been destroyed by nature. The plot is kicked off because some hikers go off trail and discover Franz's body. Once the police know where to look, they find more bodies.
  • Reacher and Dixon kill some hitmen sent after them and get rid of the bodies by dumping them into the cement on a construction site.
• Disproportionate Retribution: What the Margrave kill squad does to people in the organization who fail them. Not only does it bring way too much attention to their operation and it unsettles the entire town, but the sadism involved makes it easy to connect the dots for the eventual reveal of the killers. It's eventually revealed that this is because KJ is a sociopath who enjoys killing and seemingly can't appreciate just how over-the-top all this killing is.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Reacher is rather insistent that everyone call him that, not Jack or even "Mr Reacher". Even his mother called him Reacher, but that might be why he's so insistent about it.
• Do Wrong, Right: At various points in Season 2, the international arms dealer A.M. gets frustrated by the fact that his Langston keeps making mistakes that threaten to expose their highly illegal criminal enterprise. This is because Langston is a jumped up Dirty Cop who is out of his league.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": Despite being an officer, Reacher was quite adamant about not being called "sir" by his subordinates in the 110th and insists that he be addressed as "Reacher" in spite it going against military protocol.
• Doomed Predecessor: Detective Gray (Roscoe's mentor and Finaly's predecessor) is repeatedly mentioned before it transpires that he was investigating the Kliners just like the heroes and his death a year earlier is a case of Never Suicide. Reacher and the others examine his case files and look at an autopsy photo of him.
• Dragon Ascendant: KJ is the main muscle behind Kliner's operation, but his methods are brutal even by Kliner's standards. KJ eventually kills his father as he feels he was too weak to run their operation.
• The Drifter: Reacher pretty much goes wherever he wants, solely on what intrigues him at the moment. The reason he's in Margrave in season 1 is because he wanted to find out more about a blues singer he had recently heard on the radio a few towns over.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: A.M. is built up as a threat throughout the second season, but he's killed off quite anticlimactically by Reacher and his team without even putting up a fight.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Senator Lavoy's private security detail is made up of several flavors of former Special Forces and they prove to be absolutely devastating when they assist Reacher and Neagley in the final battle of season 2, carving through Langston's men like a hot knife through butter. It is very telling of the opinion Reacher has of their skills that his plan to deal with their inevitable Cavalry Betrayal is to call in Homeland Security to arrest them rather than even attempt to fight them, though killing them probably would have made arresting Lavoy more difficult.
• Elite Mooks: The Venezuelans Reacher faces off several times over the course of the first season prove to be some of his toughest opponents. Justified in that they aren't local thugs hired for muscle, but ex-military with specialized training, meaning they are more capable of matching Reacher in a fight despite Reacher's physical advantage. When he takes them on, he either fights them to a draw, needs help to finish them off, or can only take them on one at a time. The only time he takes out two at once on his own is when he lays a trap for them in the third episode, setting up an ambush and shooting both of them in the back.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • In Reacher's opening scene, he gets off a bus and walks along down a highway, happens upon a Jerkass threatening his girlfriend and stares the guy down until he stops and apologizes. Then he goes into a diner, but before he can start eating, notices police cars approaching, looks around the diner, deduces that the cops are coming for him, and places his hands on the table as not to give the cops a reason to shoot him. All of this without saying a single word. This establishes most of his core character in a couple of minutes: his solitude, his very intimidating presence, his sense of justice, his situational awareness, his calm under pressure, and his taciturn nature.
  • Later on, when Reacher is being interrogated by Finlay and he speaks for the first time, he makes some impressive deductions about the murder, based on just a few details that Finlay gave him. He also corrects Finlay on the terminology he uses. This proves to Finlay (and the audience) that he's actually a brilliant and meticulous investigator.
  • Finlay's first scene has him entering the lobby of the police station when an officer is trying to intimidate Reacher into talking by threatening to toss him in a holding cell. He reminds the officer of Reacher's constitutional rights and the necessity of following strict protocol when handling him. One of the other officers mutters an insult at Finlay under his breath as he walks away that alludes to his Boston background. This establishes that Finlay is a by-the-book officer of the law that contrasts with the more unrefined cops in Margrave, and that he doesn't fit in with the rest of the force, nor is he particularly liked, and is an out of towner.
• The first flashback to the 110th's first day working together in season 2 serves as this for several of them, but especially Franz and O'Donnell. For Franz, we see him awkwardly introducing himself to Reacher, bringing with himself a box of office supplies for his first day, follows Reacher around as he gets himself settled, struggling to not address Reacher as "Sir" while being unsure why Reacher would recruit him, establishing him as a plucky, well-meaning Nice Guy who has high admiration for Reacher and was something of The Heart of the unit (all of which makes his brutal murder all the more immediately tragic). O'Donnell meanwhile is the only one in the room talking, and talking a lot, casually lampshading the odd bunch the 110th are, makes a couple of somewhat mean jokes at their expense and rolls with their retorts, all the while casually playing with a switchblade, establishing him as a Deadpan Snarker and The Lancer with a Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic among the unit, and one with a favoured weapon.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: KJ takes it hard when he learns his father was killed, blaming Finlay for not doing a good enough job of protecting him. Except it's all an act. KJ was the one who killed his father because he thought he was weak and wasn't capable of doing what was necessary to maintain their operation.
• Eviler than Thou: KJ proves that he is this to his father, killing him in a gruesome manner in order to take control of his operation.
• Evil Gloating: KJ does this when he thinks he has Reacher dead to rights in their final battle, relaying a story about how he snuck up and killed a rhino in Africa under similar low visibility conditions. However, the rhino was not able to set a trap, whereas Reacher was...
• Evil Virtues: KJ's sole redeeming trait is that he isn't a coward. He never backs down from Reacher's intimidation or even after being beaten up by him and faces him head on in the finale, despite the disadvantage and even after everyone else has been killed.
• Eye Scream: Reacher shoves his thumb in a prisoner's eye during the fight in the head and later, Teale is shot through the eye by Roscoe, the aftermath clearly shown.
• Face of a Thug: Detective Russo in season 2, played by Domenick Lombardozzi who has often been typecast as bent cops (or at least ones prone to Police Brutality) and thuggish criminals. He's an honest cop who considers bending the rules and insinuations of him being corrupt to be a major Berserk Button as bent cops killed his (honest) cop father in his childhood. However, because he looks like a bent cop, Reacher assumes first that he's hired muscle tailing them for the Big Bad and later struggles to trust him with the case.
• Fan Disservice: A naked man is shown with his dick out, but it’s not Reacher. Instead it’s the town’s corrupt police chief, Morrison, who was nailed to a wall, sliced up with knives, and had his balls cut off and shoved down his throat.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • KJ Kliner never drops his polite tone but it's always laced with condescension and smugness as he is eager to let people know they can't touch him. Even after he's gone off the deep end, he never drops his manners, even as he tries to kill Jack.
  • Kliner is quite magnanimous and friendly to people, but it's a transparent mask and quickly fades when people prove willing to stand up to him.
• Fire-Forged Friends:
  • Reacher and Finlay are this by the end, with both admitting they couldn't have seen it through without the other.
  • From their brief interactions, this appears to be the case for Reacher and Neagley. Naturally, Reacher doesn't like showing affection, but it's quite clear based on their interactions they trust each other implicitly and Neagley immediately comes to his aid after his "luck" comment in the finale.
  • Season 2 repeats the first example with Detective Russo, who by their last interaction is clearly approaching genuine friendship with Reacher. He even offers to let him take the first swing in their promised fight.
• Foil: Reacher and Finlay to a "T." Reacher is a loner, Wandering the Earth Cowboy Cop, with a Limited Wardrobe of jeans and a t-shirt who plays by his own rules and doesn't care who gets in his way if it means stopping the bad guys, even if it means dropping a few bodies along the way. Finlay is a Harvard educated By-the-Book Cop who wears tweed and tries to keep the body count to a minimum. Reacher loves fast food and meat, while Finlay prefers healthier alternatives and is a vegetarian. It even extends to their taste in music, as Reacher loves the blues while Finlay is a fan of 70's and 80's rock.
• Forced into Evil: The only reason Paul Hubble went along with the villains' financial scheme is because they threatened him and his family. He did try to get word out to what was happening to Reacher's brother Joe, but this only resulted in Joe being killed.
• Forced to Watch:
  • This is a hallmark of the techniques used by the Venezuelans. Not only do they torture people to death, they do it in front of their families so they'll have to watch each other die slowly. Stevenson is bound to a chair, has his eyelids taped open, and surrounded by mirrors so he is physically incapable of not watching his wife being tortured to death. The former police chief met a similar fate, if not quite so elaborate.
  • Paul Hubble is locked in a barn and forced to watch a man be tortured to death to show him the consequences of defiance.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The villains seems to have a surprisingly large reach and insight into Reacher and his allies' attempts to uncover the truth, ranging from being able to intimidate a policeman in another state into killing his partner and attempting to kill Reacher and Neagley as well, to tracking down Hubble's family at the FBI safehouse Picard stashed them at. It's noted that their plans would require a corrupt FBI agent on the inside to prevent any investigations into their international counterfeiting operation and the finale eventually reveals The Mole, Picard himself.
  • Picard notes several times that he warned Finlay not to take the Margrave posting when the former continually runs into opposition from the locals and his own allies inside the force. It's given a different aspect to it once its revealed that Picard is The Mole for the counterfeiters, and didn't want Finlay investigating the town or he'd have to kill him.
  • Early on, Reacher gets into a brief knife fight with what appears to be a random thug Spivey hired to kill him, only to later reveal that said thug was actually a trained ex-soldier from his fighting stance, hence him being able to land several cuts on Reacher during the fight. When Reacher punches KJ for spray-painting the word "WHORE" on Roscoe's car as a harassment tactic to antagonize Reacher through his friends, during the ensuring beatdown, KJ grabs a nearby knife and adopts a similar pose, visibly struggling to not attack Reacher with it when his father interferes to diffuse the fight and order Reacher out of town. It's later shown that KJ is one of the primary hitmen in The Conspiracy, having learned the art of torture and murder from their Venezuelan partners, and is a great deal more psychotic than he appears to be on the surface.
  • When Reacher and Finlay first meet, Reacher deduces that Finlay's wife has either divorced him or passed away. He concludes divorce based on the fact that it's the more likely option for someone of Finlay's age, and Finlay never corrects him. Later, when Reacher mocks Finlay's wife for leaving him, Finlay gets incredibly upset and tells Reacher to keep his wife's name out of his mouth. Finlay's reaction is understandable given that Reacher assumed wrong, and Finlay's wife did pass away, and he blames himself for not being able to save her.
  • Reacher notes that Kliner's farm has an unusual amount of animal feed, even for a pasture farm with 116 cows on it. It later turns out the animal feed contains a absorbing agent that they use in tandem with their specialized chemical that can bleach the ink off of the US dollar bills to allow the paper — one of its unique identifying markers — to be re-used to create counterfeit $100 'super-bills' that can pass for the real thing. They do this to avoid the resulting pollution that almost got them caught before in their previous location.
  • To make Roscoe behave, Teale threatens to drown Hubble's kids in the bleaching chemicals used in the counterfeiting operation; Reacher later dunks KJ headfirst in a vat of said chemicals, only to take him out and throw him into a burning stack of boxes, setting him on fire.
  • After Reacher and Roscoe meet up with Picard to find out what happened to Joe Reacher's notes, they are quickly ambushed by the Venezuelans right after they discover the hiding place where Joe had stashed them. They wonder how the Venezuelans were able to find them so quickly, and reason that it was due to Stevenson being The Mole inside the police department. Later on, after Roscoe takes over watching Charlie Hubble and her kids from Picard, they are again tracked down by the Venezuelans in short order. The reveal of Picard working for Kliner's forces shows that this was due to him tipping the bad guys off on where to find Reacher and his associates.
  • In Season 2, Special Investigator Swan is given focus in the flashback in Episode 3. Reacher will later find and steal a picture at the place that they break into showing that Swan works there.
  • The villains of Season 2 are participating in a far-reaching scheme involving the sale of top secret US military technology on the international black market and colluding with international arms dealers, but the mooks they keep sending after Reacher and the Special Investigators are street level thugs (at one point they resort to sending a biker gang after them). This foreshadows the fact that Langston and his team are all former NYPD that took early retirement to avoid an Internal Affairs investigation. The reason they keep sending street level thugs after Reacher and his friends is that they are jumped up dirty cops who are out of their league, those being the kind of lowlifes they leaned on back when they were cops.
  • The nature of the Season 2 bad guys is also subtly hinted at in another way in the first episode of the season by the fact that Detective Russo and Saropian both follow Reacher and Neagley in a way that is shown in identical manner, hinting at the fact that they have the same NYPD training.
• Friend on the Force: Picard is this to Finlay. He's also The Mole, working for the bad guys.
• Friendly Sniper: The sunny-natured Neagley is an amazing shot, turns out.
• Friend to All Children: Downplayed, but Reacher is noticeably more soft-spoken and less taciturn when around Hubble's two young daughters than he is with most adults.
  • This also extends to dogs; Reacher is shown being very fond of dogs and in both seasons, he ends up hurting someone because they hurt a dog. In season one, he happens past some jerk who inherited a dog he doesn't want that he neglected to the point the dog was starving and had bruises around his neck from his leash. Reacher warns the guy to take care of the dog or it won't be pretty. The guy doesn't listen and gets himself a nice punch in the face and Reacher gives the dog to Finlay. In season two, they find one of their friends' homes and the poor dog died because he was kidnapped, so no one was there to feed it or give it any water. Reacher is so angry about it that he doesn't think first and beats up the person he knows is tailing them, only to find out the guy was a cop, not a hitman.
• Funny Background Event: When a prison gang leader threatens to sexually assualt Hubble, Reacher takes care of that in his standard way. He then demands one of the man's flunkies give over his sunglasses to replace Hubble's broken pair, and as this is happening, another flunky is standing very very still with his eyes flicking from side to side, as though he's looking for a way out.

G - L

• Gender-Blender Name: Officer Roscoe Conklin. Reacher at first assumes Roscoe is her last name and is clearly a bit surprised, noting that he never met a woman named "Roscoe" before.
• Genius Bruiser: Jack is as big as a house, can take apart multiple opponents with alarming ease, and is able to make brilliant deductions based on only a limited amount of evidence. In the first episode of season 1, Jack is able to conclude that there were three people responsible for a suspect's death based solely on hearing a brief description of the victim and how he was disposed of.
• The Ghost: Joe Reacher doesn’t make a physical appearance, aside from his younger self in Reacher's flashbacks and brief shots of his arm and his forehead in the present, until the season finale, where he’s shown in person during a flashback when him and Reacher visited their dying mother.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • Reacher is firmly on the side of good but he is abrasive, blunt, anti-social, often rude, has no issue intimidating and threatening even allies, and is perfectly willing to brutalize, seriously injure or outright kill opponents with no hesitation or remorse.
  • Reacher arranges a meeting at the law firm representing Kliner's business interests under false pretenses, then demands a file concerning the case from the lawyer he meets with, quickly resorting to beating and choking the guy to secure his compliance. Once he coughs up the file, Reacher threatens to kill him painfully if he looks into him any further. The firm itself and the lawyer in particular, by all appearances, have nothing to do with the conspiracy; Reacher just needed the information and got it in the most expedient manner available to him. The lawyer's only crime was unknowingly representing criminals.
  • Reacher's team are much more amicable than he is, but just as prone to ruthlessness. It's most strikingly demonstrated in the second season finale, where they execute a defenseless A.M. and the last two remaining members of the conspiracy. They were admittedly bad people, but it's still very cold-blooded.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Reacher's preferred style of fighting is to simply use his hands and feet to brutally demolish opponents. Given his size, strength and fighting skill, he can usually get by without weapons. However, this preference comes back to bite him near the end when facing Kilner's nephew Dawson who nearly kills Reacher with a crowbar and Reacher's skill can't make up for being unarmed.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Kliner Sr's Venezuelan partners who are providing the muscle for his money laundering operation, relying on his system to create counterfeit bills they need to finance their criminal operations in the south, and whom are behind the main incentive for the villains to commit such over-the-top murders as a warning to keep their operation in line when Joe's investigation threatens to derail their promised reward. Despite being the main driver behind the counterfeiting operation, it's ultimately still their American partners whom are the main antagonists that Reacher has to deal with, as whomever they are is simply too far out of his reach to realistically enact retribution against.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: When going over the murder in the first episode, Reacher points out the bullet is 9mm and "95 grain, subsonic." 95 grain bullets are supersonic with a standard powder charge, as their light weight increases the velocity. Bullets must be heavier to be subsonic, with subsonic 9mm ammunition typically being 147 grain and designed specifically for use with suppressors.
• Hand Cannon: When Reacher is finally given a gun by his allies, he's presented with a Desert Eagle of all things, one of the largest semiauto handguns in existence. Reacher quickly demonstrates the sheer power of the thing by testing it out on a tree stump and blasting a sizeable hole through it. While it's still quite impractical compared to more sensibly sized guns, Reacher's enormous size and strength enables him to deal with most of its worst drawbacks (namely, weight and punishing recoil). It might also have been a deliberate pick by the showrunners because anything smaller would've looked like a toy in his hands (notably, throughout season 2 he's largely using modest handguns like Glocks and Berettas, and they do in fact look like toys in his hands).
• Hates Being Touched: Revealed in season 2 to be an issue with Neagley. Besides revealing that she's asexual, but she's shown to be uncomfortable shaking hands, standing close to men flirting with her, and general intimacy. When Russo, dying, holds his hand out for her, she has to psyche herself up to take it so he can at least die in comfort.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: Reacher dresses practically in work clothes and boots. He occasoinally has to don a suit and, while doing so begrudgingly, looks good in them.
• Heroes Love Dogs: Reacher gets repeatedly sidetracked by the plight of a mistreated dog. Finlay is annoyed at first, but eventually takes up the dog's cause as well.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Russo in season 2, episode 6. Pinned down by three hitmen armed with automatic weapons, with limited ammo, and knowing that when they eventually kill him, Marlo's daughter, who he's protecting, will be next, he instructs her to run before coming out of cover to draw their fire away from her, and manages to take two of them down with him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • KJ gloats in the final battle that he'll find Reacher in the low visibility conditions due to a similar experience hunting a rhino in Africa, where he was able to sneak up on the animal because it didn't know where KJ was in the fog. Reacher sets a trap for KJ, luring him into a specific area to get the drop on him, essentially reversing KJ's situation with the rhino. Reacher then dunks his head in the same chemical bleach his family used to remove the ink from the $1 bills for their counterfeiting operation, and tosses him into a pile of burning money.
  • Ultimately this is what brings down the entire operation. They decided to frame the first easy target they could for the murder of Joe Reacher, unaware that the drifter they try to pin it on is both Joe's brother and a One-Man Army Genius Bruiser who wouldn't have bothered them had they not gotten him involved. He wouldn't have even learnt that the murdered man was his brother had dragging him into the situation not put him in a position to identify his body.
• Hollywood Silencer: Invoked and subverted. Reacher tapes a plastic water bottle over the muzzle of his gun and then threatens to shoot a man in the leg if he doesn't discreetly call for his friend. When the man complies, Reacher points out that a flimsy layer of plastic won't muffle a gunshot, having used the guy's perception of a silencer to psych him out.
• Honest Corporate Executive:
  • As shown in a flashback, currency manager Paul Hubble only got involved in the counterfeiting ring after he was tricked into moving dirty money for a seemingly legitimate purpose and is horrified to find out (even before being forced to witness a murder to warn him) that his new boss means business. Despite the risks and being offered four times his previously salary, he never becomes comfortable with the racket and tries to tip off the authorities the first chance he gets.
  • While Finlay is posing as a junior employee to pump Hubble's former boss at the bank for information, she seems respectable and accommodating and mentions that she didn't lay Hubble off even though his division of the bank was doing poorly.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Reacher is of course fully aware that Roscoe can take care of herself and that KJ was setting him up by painting "WHORE" onto her truck. Reacher doesn't give a shit; he still goes inside and whups KJ's ass anyway just to defend her honor.
  • Young Reacher beats the holy hell out of a kid for picking on and taking advantage of a mentally challenged child. Unfortunately, the kid is the son of a Brigadier General who has the power to ruin the career of Reacher's father. Reacher is given the opportunity to apologize for the assault, which might at least ease the effect his actions will have on his dad, but he refuses, feeling that he was justified in his actions, and makes it clear that the only thing he regrets is not beating him harder.
• Hostage Situation: Defied in the season finale. Though the bad guys promise to at least spare the children if the good guys cooperate, everyone involved is well-aware they aren't going to spare anyone and plan accordingly.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Reacher's basic modus operandi. He'll do whatever needs to be done to resolve the situation. He'll take cheap shots, lie with ease to avoid distracting conversations, use counterfeit money to purchase supplies and get information, and even shoot people in the back. As he states, this isn't the movies — if he see's an opening, he'll take it.
• Idiot Ball: Quite a few characters hold it throughout the series. One notable example comes when Reacher grabs it: despite having a civilian woman on an open phone line, he accepts a call from the cop watching her daughter, which of course leads to the woman overhearing that the girl is in danger, which leads to her asking Reacher what's going on, which leads to Langston realizing she's talking to someone he can't see and that it's a trap. If Reacher had simply walked a few steps away, that might not have happened.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Reacher takes out a carjacker and rescues a small child. When the grateful mother asks who he is, Reacher replies "Someone who prefers not getting involved." After he just involved himself.
• Innocently Insensitive: Reacher doesn't necessarily mean to rub people the wrong way, just his direct, to-the-point attitude and style tends to alienate more than endear.
• Insistent Terminology: When Finlay calls him a vagrant, Reacher corrects him and says he's a hobo^note hoboes are distinguished by being travelers who are willing to work wherever they stop.
• Irony:
  • Discussed a few times regarding Reacher and Finlay's music preferences; Reacher, a white man, is a big fan of black blues singers like Blind Blake, while Finlay, a black man, finds the music irritating and gets sick of it quickly. Finlay himself, meanwhile, is instead a fan of white rock singers from the 80s and 90s, such as Kansas (of Carry On Wayward Son fame), music which Reacher thinks is shit. Both of this results in Reacher explaining to Finlay (again, a black man), how important and influential blues music is to African-American culture, while Finlay gushes to Reacher about how he appreciates how much white boys can rock out, with the other mutually expressing bafflement at the other's enthusiasm for their chosen genre.
  • When Reacher realizes that he and Hubble have accidentally (on purpose) been placed with the lifers instead of a cell for those awaiting arraignment, he warns Hubble that someone like him (clearly weak, nebbish, and easy to intimidate) is going to be treated like currency by the other inmates. Hubble worked as a currency manager for Kliner industries before getting arrested.
• It's Personal: Played with in the series premiere. Throughout the episode Reacher protests that he has no personal stake in what is happening in Margrave and he just wants to get out of town as soon as possible. Then he finds out that the murder victim is his brother and he realizes that it has been personal all along and he vows to kill everyone responsible.
• It's Personal with the Dragon:
  • Once KJ is revealed to be Joe's killer. Jack even stays behind in a burning building filled with volatile chemicals just to make sure he's dead, and pointedly gives him the most painful, drawn-out death he can as the circumstances dictate.
  • This ends up also being the case for Roscoe, who winds up fighting Teale, who murdered her police force mentor and made it look like a suicide, and Finlay, who fights his Evil Former Friend Picard.
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Kristin Kreuk appears as Charlie, the wife of Hubble. Kreuk's most famous role is Lana Lang in Smallville, which featured Reacher himself, Alan Ritchson, as Aquaman.
• Jerkass: Langston is already evil, but in contrast to his Affably Evil partner A.M., Langston is quite coarse and rude even to his own men.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Reacher is blunt, taciturn, anti-social and often insensitive and intimidating but he's not a bad guy at heart. He is capable of being very kind to those he gets close to and even total strangers, he has a soft spot for kids and dogs and he isn't totally insensitive and is able to tread lightly when necessary. He also tells Roscoe that if anyone could've gotten him to settle down, it would've been her and grows to like and respect Finlay, telling him he couldn't have succeeded without him.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: KJ is a slimy creep, but he's genuinely devastated when his father is killed, seemingly showing he has some redeeming qualities. Except as KJ reveals in the season finale, he killed his father to take over the counterfeiting operation and is positively gleeful about it.
• Karmic Death:
  • KJ is tricked into an ambush set by Reacher who uses the animal feed his father brought in to use in the counterfeiting process, then has his head dunked in the bleach used to strip the paint and markings off the $1 bills, then pushed into a burning pile of counterfeit money, essentially meeting his end by the tools of their operation.
  • Invoked by Reacher in season 2 when he's asked by Langston what he wants. Reacher simply responds, "To throw you out of a helicopter," as was done to his friends. Unsurprisingly, Reacher makes good on that promise.
• Knight Errant: Reacher was specifically created to be this. While he's not actively seeking to right wrongs wherever he goes, nor will he allow them to go unpunished.
• Ladykiller in Love: O'Donnell is stated to have been a rake in the 110th's haydays, once supposedly claiming that the only people who'd ever call him "daddy" are the ones who're sleeping with him. By the present day, he's been "domesticated", being Happily Married with three kids who he clearly adores. The rest of the unit are still in disbelief.
• Lancer vs. Dragon: In the season 1 finale, Kliner's Co-Dragons Picard and Teale are dispatched by Finlay and Roscoe, respectively. Meanwhile, Reacher kills Kliner.
• Last-Name Basis: Reacher is always addressed as "Reacher". Flashbacks show even his own mother and brother called him that. He even corrects people who refer to him as "Mr Reacher", preferring to just be addressed as "Reacher". Flashbacks to his military career show that he didn't even like being addressed as "Major Reacher" or "sir" and insisted on just being called by his last name. The other members of his unit also go exclusively by their last names with one another.
• Lazy Alias: Roscoe checks into a hotel using the name Eudora Welty, a famous writer. Reacher lampshades this, and says that he uses forgotten vice-presidents and Yankees' second basemen.
• Lethally Stupid: Senator Malcolm Lavoy took a large bribe to get New Age government funding for the Little Wing project. Neither he or his political advisors seemed to consider how dangerous that type of technology would be in the wrong hands. If he done a security check on New Age, he would have discovered that its security team was composed of shady ex-cops and was a massive security risk. Even when he discovers the danger, his first reaction is to try and cover everything up rather than calling in Homeland Security and potentially save thousands of lives.
• Life Saving Misfortune:
  • When Reacher and Hubble are dropped in the general prison population, a prisoner crushes Hubble's glasses just to be petty. Reacher kicks the guy's ass then demands the sunglasses of one of his cronies, which he keeps for himself. When the goon squad attacks them in the showers, they focus on Reacher and ignore Hubble because they were instructed to target the guy with glasses. Reacher would have had a hard time saving Hubble and fighting off the goons, as opposed to focusing his full attention on them while Hubble cowers in the corner.
  • In the following episode, Reacher and Roscoe leave town to go to a bar so as to not upset the locals. A rainstorm floods the bridge into town, so the pair stay at a motel for the night. When they return to Roscoe's home the following morning, they find that the killers broke into the place expecting one or both to be present.
• Lightning Bruiser: Reacher's large size belies blistering speed, as he is able to move around quickly to fight multiple opponents while avoiding most attacks.
• Limited Wardrobe: Justified in-universe. Reacher travels with only what he's wearing at the time, and if he needs to change clothes he just buys something new at a local thrift store. In fact, he considers carrying a spare change of clothes to be the start of a slippery slope towards settling down.

M - R

• Manchild: As tough and intelligent as he is, it's also clear that Reacher isn't very mature. He has a bad habit of acting on impulse and doing whatever fits his "tough guy" persona even if it just makes things worse for him and has difficulty processing and showing emotions, has a disrespect for rules and authority that often comes across as just being contrarian for it's own sake, can be brash and insensitive, makes assumptions about people he dislikes, is quick to use violence as a first and only resort and his lifestyle is as much about his disinterest in obligation as it is rugged independence. This becomes a lot more notable in the second season when he's with his old unit who are also very smart and tough but also have stable lives and impressive careers and he works with Russo who is constantly annoyed with his macho attitude and tendency to go off half cocked because he wants to play cowboy and seems more interested in that than actually discovering the truth.
• Man on Fire: How KJ meets his end. Reacher overpowers him and starts drowning him in one of the chemical vats used in the counterfeiting operation, before hauling him up for air, shooting him a venomous Death Glare and then pushing him into the nearest pile of flaming money to go up like a Roman Candle.
• The Man in Front of the Man: The mysterious ringleader of the villain's operation is revealed in the final episode to be KJ, Kilner Sr's Spoiled Brat son. His father was the one who arranged the operation in the first place, but KJ turns out to be a great deal more bloodthirsty and ruthless than his father, having participated in or caused most of the vicious torture and gruesome deaths throughout the show, including Joe's, and eventually murdered his father to take over the operation entirely. Everybody who learns this, from Reacher, to Finlay to Hubble, is taken aback that he's not just the rich kid riding his successful father's coattails that he appeared to be from the outset.
• Mean Boss: Langston repeatedly insults and berates his men for any failures.
• Menacing Hand Shot: In the pilot episode, just before the brawl in the prison head starts, the camera lingers on a shiv in the right hand of a prisoner standing behind Reacher.
• Mistaken for Cheating: In "What Happens in Atlantic City", Dixon recounts an incident in which she found texts on her ex-fiance's phone from what she thought were to another woman but were actually to his niece who was visiting him. Despite this, Dixon still broke up with the man because she felt relieved when she thought he was cheating on her and realized her heart wasn't really in the relationship.
• Mook Horror Show:
  • Reacher vs the "cleaners" in episode seven. Given that they had just tortured and killed a young couple that were expecting their first child in an inhuman fashion, even for them, it's hard to feel sorry for them as Reacher picks them off one by one.
  • Reacher again in season 2, episode 6, vs Langston and his goons. Like the above, given what Langston had done so far, you're probably cheering as Reacher drags one into the shadow like a horror movie monster.
• Mr. Fanservice: Reacher likes wearing t-shirts to show off his bulging biceps and we even see him stripped down to his underwear in the first episode, and a few more times after.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Roscoe is played by the lovely Willa Fitzgerald, who gets a brief topless scene when Roscoe joins Reacher in the shower, and herself strips down to her underwear in the second episode.
  • Neagley, downplayed compared to Roscoe, but we also get a scene where she casually strips off her clothes and underwear to change out of wet clothes in front of Reacher (who is similarly stripped down himself). Sure, they're Platonic Life-Partners, but it's also revealed that Neagley is asexual: the reason she had no compunctions about being nude in front of Reacher is because he's well aware of this fact and she knows she can trust him. In season 2, she's forced to wear a dress when attending a performance, which O'Donnell compliments despite Neagley hating having to dress anything other than casual.
  • Dixon, slightly more than Neagley; she's shown in flashbacks dressed in more formal officer attire than the army fatigues of the rest of the unit, including wearing heels and figure shaping skirts, while in the present, strips down to her underwear for sex scenes with Reacher, and regularly wears low plunging tops that show off her cleavage. She's not quite on Roscoe's level, as she's yet to have a full on topless scene, but she also gets a scene in a dress that shows off her figure quite well.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • The villains of Season 1 are fond of not only killing those that fail them, but doing so in an over the top and brutal way in order to keep everyone else in line. This is arguably Deconstructed, because such an extravagant murder method for the sake of leaving an intimidating warning makes it clear that something is going on, and indeed, the methods used are recognisable enough for Reacher to begin forming an idea of who's involved from his military experience allowing him to identify the Venezuelan style of brutal execution used. He even identified that Kilner Sr had his throat slit in a manner designed to both kill efficiently whilst leaving the victim in excruciating agony, one of their hallmarks.
  • Ironically, this is also Reacher's blasé assessment of how he's going to sort the problem out: find out who exactly is involved, kill every last one of them, and then move on. It works very effectively.
  • The Big Bad Duumvirate of Season 2, A.M. and Langston, tend to resort to murder to cover up their conspiracy. Langston toys with this; he eventually realizes trying to kill Reacher is more trouble than it's worth and offers to pay him off if he'll leave their operation alone. Since Langston had murdered one of Reacher's team, Reacher tells Langston he'll only be satisfied by killing him.
• Mythology Gag: In season 2, when discussing who might have a grudge against the Special Investigators, Reacher says he recently encountered James Barr and that "[Barr] owes me a favour". This is the plot of the novel One Shot, which was subsequently adapted into the first Jack Reacher movie.
• Neck Snap: During the cleaner’s assault on the Hubble house, Reacher drags out the driver of their truck through the window and then stomps on his neck.
• New Old Flame: Dixon in season 2; she's very much The One That Got Away (because as her boss within the unit, he was reluctant to pursue a relationship because it'd be inappropriate), and both her and Reacher clearly still have a spark. After cleaning some wounds together, they quickly end up sleeping together.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • The money Kliner gives to the city's budget is the only reason Margrave was able to afford a highly competent Boston detective with 20 years of experience, who ends up being a key ally that helps Reacher bring the Kliner's operation down.
  • The string of suspicious and ridiculously brutal murders only serves to make the coverup as obvious as possible.
  • In season 2, the efforts to kill off Reacher's old unit only serve to draw them to the culprit that much quicker, not that they wouldn't have come to the conclusion without the help.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Subverted by Langston. He spends most of his screentime staying in his office while ordering his men to go after Reacher and looks out of shape, but when the time comes that he has to face Reacher in a fight, he proves a competent brawler and holds his own quite well.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • A very unfortunate case with the honest cop who helps Reacher and Neagley talk to his C.I. to investigate a lead on the counterfeit ring. The bad guys found his partner off-screen and threatened him and his family, so he shoots the honest cop in the head and is about to pull over to kill Reacher and Neagley as instructed, but Reacher manages to kick through the police car's grate and they're driven into the river. The cop knows that he's a dead man for failing to kill them and chooses to stay in the car and drown rather than let the killers find him.
  • Joe's secretary, Molly, also becomes a casualty when she offers them the files he was working on before he was murdered. She dies in Reacher's arms and he takes it very personally, especially when he finds out that KJ is the one who killed both her and Joe.
  • Russo recounts how his father, an honest cop in the NYPD, was killed for refusing to go on the take with the other bent officers. Russo himself would then follow a similar fate, being killed while protecting a young girl from the armed thugs, in the same episode he confronted his captain over his own corruption.
• No OSHA Compliance: The warehouse has fire extinguishers but no fire suppression system to speak of despite its size. Then again, when you're running a large-scale counterfeiting operation, it's understandable things might not be up to code.
• Not Hyperbole: When Hubble tells Reacher what his criminal bosses threatened to do to him if he jeopardizes the operation, it sounds too absurdly over the top...and then we see the Morrison crime scene, where it is played out to the letter. Since Hubble isn't a law-breaking citizen, he had no reason to get so specific and graphic with the method of death, which ties into the later reveal that he's already witnessed one such unfortunate victim killed in this manner in Venezuela, as a warning from Kliner Sr's partners to keep his mouth shut.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Two examples: in KJ and his cousin Dawson. KJ is presented as a spoiled rich who runs errands for his criminal father, and Dawson seems to just follow him around, shooting mean looks. As it turns out, Dawson is sufficiently Axe-Crazy to be a serious threat. He kills a substantial number of people and comes dangerously close to taking Reacher out in single combat. And far from being his father's lackey, KJ was the one conducting a campaign of torture and murder to protect their counterfeiting operation. He ends up killing his own father to take control and become the true Big Bad of the season.
• Not Staying for Breakfast: Averted. At the end of season 1, Reacher is shown fully dressed and gathering his things while Roscoe is still asleep in her bed. While he does leave Margrave, it's later in the day, and they part in the city square.
• Oblivious to His Own Description: In the final battle, KJ rants to Reacher, as he hunts him in a smoke filled warehouse, how this situation is similar to the time he hunted a rhino, whom according to KJ, lumbered through life doing whatever he wanted, unaware that he was being led to a trap; KJ was obviously associating Reacher with the rhino, but not only is he like the rhino in his story, who did whatever he wanted without thinking of the consequences, but he’s also unknowingly being led to a trap himself, set up by Reacher.
• Odd Couple: Finlay is a By-the-Book Cop trying to live a quiet life in a small town by following the rules of law. Reacher is a wanderer Genius Bruiser who goes and does what he wants, regardless of what stands in his way. Played with in that circumstances force the pair to work together as it becomes clear as The Conspiracy unfolds that they are part of the limited people they can trust in this circumstance and they need each other's skills and resources.
• Oh, Crap!: A pissed off Reacher confronts a man who has been following him and Neagley. He kicks the guy's car hard enough to trigger the airbags and then punches the man unconscious with a single hit. He then realizes that the man was a NYPD detective following them because he was investigating the same case they are. Reacher now has to flee New York before he is arrested for assaulting a police officer.
• One Last Smoke: Right before assaulting the warehouse that he knows is filled with armed mooks, Finlay nabs a cigarette from a dead mook and lights up, figuring that there's a good chance he's about to die anyway and having been battling the urge to smoke for the last week under all the stress of the investigation. He ends up surviving the attack.
• Out-of-Character Alert:
  • Finlay makes a point of not only not swearing, but criticizing others for swearing as he feels it is a sign of a limited mind. It makes his cursing out of Kliner all the more shocking, which shows just how much Kliner pissed Finlay off.
  • Neagley realizes that Reacher is in trouble simply by asking how he knew a suspect was dirty by him saying it was a "Lucky guess." This is because Reacher doesn't like to guess, nor does he rely on luck, as he only relies on the cold hard facts. Neagley states Reacher saying that was pretty much a cry for help.
• Outside-Context Problem: Reacher is this to the villains. He was just a nameless drifter passing through town, who knew nothing of their larger operation. After Reacher learns about the death of his brother, he successfully manages to destroy the entire operation and kill off most of the heads of the conspiracy within a week and a half.
• Outside Ride: Reacher clings to the landing gear of a helicopter and manages to hang on until the bad guys open the cargo ramp, allowing him to climb inside.
• Pants-Positive Safety: In Seasons 1, Reacher carries his Desert Eagle tucked in his waistband at the small of his back. Although no sensible person with firearms training would ever do that under normal circumstances, it's justified in his case because he simply doesn't have a holster he could put it in, and it's still better than shoving it in his pocket.
• Papa Wolf: After disappearing (and being presumed dead) for much of season 1, Paul Hubble shows back up in episode 8, and despite never having fired a gun in his life, headshots one of the Venezuelan mercs while rescuing his daughters.
• Patricide: KJ does this to his father.
• Pet the Dog: Reacher literally does this to a dog tied up in a yard that has no water. He later returns to make sure the animal is being fed, and Finlay ends up seizing the dog since the owner is abusive.
• Pintsize Powerhouse:
  • KJ's cousin Dawson is one of the smallest of the badguy's henchmen, and Reacher seems to assume he's a weak man clinging to his more charismatic cousin, but he's also the one who comes the closest to actually killing Reacher in a fight because he has a crowbar and a truckload of determination.
  • Roscoe is 5'5", and her short stature is commented on at least once, but she's an Action Girl who herself manages to down several of the Venezuelan mercs and personally kills Teale.
  • O'Donnell isn't particularly imposing and especially contrasts heavily with Reacher. But he can fight alongside him and the rest of the unit just fine, and in a brief scuffle with Reacher when neither realised who the other was, it's shown that he was one move away from a fatal attack Reacher had no means to block.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Neagley and Reacher; they're clearly as close as family, closer even as they appear to have zero compunction about stripping naked in front of one another and don't even react to the other's state, but there's zero attraction on either side and Neagley herself appears to be a minor Shipper on Deck for Reacher and Roscoe.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Intentionally invoked by the dirty Margrave authorities. Once Morrison is dead, Teale appoints himself Chief of Police specifically to steer the investigation away from the suspects he already knows are responsible. He then finds an excuse to fire Roscoe for a minor mistake and later cans Finlay once he realizes they're going behind his back investigating the real clues instead of the fake ones he's given them. In the end, though, Finlay goes rogue to help Reacher and Hubble save his family and Roscoe, so Teale's efforts were in vain.
  • Mostly averted in season 2. Det Russo is competent and his investigation into Franz's death is progressing at a good pace given he lacks the background knowledge the Special Investigators have. He is able to track Reacher down and detain him as soon as he arrives back in New York City. Once he and Reacher cooperate, Russo could have blown the case wide open if it was not for the fact that the Denver cops do prove themselves to be useless in running a covert surveilence operation.
• Police Brutality: And how. But forgetting the Dirty Cop list, when Finlay is in Spivey's place looking for him, the two cops who sneak up behind him somehow don't notice his expensive three-piece tweed suit and proceed to beat the living tar out of Finlay before hauling him in for the B & E. Afterward, they find out he's the Margrave police captain and insist that he should have identified himself, implying it would have made a difference in their response. Finlay, through Tranquil Fury, tells them it shouldn't have mattered.
• Prison Rape: "Fatso", the overweight prison gang leader in season 1, has every intention of doing this to Hubble. Reacher thinks otherwise.
• Pursued Protagonist: The first few seconds show informant Pete Jobling running through a cornfield before being shot in the back.
• Putting The Band B Ack Together: Season 2 has Reacher and Neagley reassembling their old investigations unit when one of their own is found dead and more have gone missing.
• Real Men Don't Cry: Reacher's brother, Joe, taught him from a young age not to cry in public. In a flashback, Reacher holds back his tears while visiting his dying mother and only starts crying when Joe gives him the go ahead when they're in private.
• Retired Badass: Roscoe reads out Reacher's bio, which details dozens of investigations, a 100% prosecution rate, and acts of heroism in warzones. Reacher's actions in Margrave show that he hasn't slowed one bit since leaving the Army.
• Retirony: Stevenson and his wife are murdered right after talking about quitting their jobs and moving out of Margrave in favor of a better town.
• Revealing Cover-Up: The string of murders, starting with Joe, only serve to make it obvious someone is trying to tie up loose ends.
• Revenge Before Reason:
  • Subverted. When Finlay warns Reacher not to go off and kill Kliner Sr before they get all the information about his operation, Reacher tells him he has no intention of doing that just yet, as simply killing Kliner wouldn't put a halt to whatever he's doing and thus wouldn't properly avenge Joe's death. Reacher intends to first dismantle whatever is going on, then he'll kill Kliner.
  • Reacher and his unit in season two are absolutely going to find who murdered the other members of their unit and they are going to put the fear of God in them before they end their miserable lives, especially since said members were tortured before being killed. They acknowledge this could land them all in jail, but they don't care because, and I quote, "You don't mess with the special investigators."
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Det. Russo finds out the hard way that throwing sarcastic rhetorical questions at Reacher is a bad idea.
  Det. Russo: You wanna to drive?!
  Reacher: YES! [Puts his foot over Russo's on the pedal and grabs the steering wheel]
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • When Reacher meets Finlay, he believes that his gaudy suits in a quaint Georgia town is due to the fact that his wife isn't around to help with his fashion choices. Reacher assumes this is due to Finlay being divorced due to his reaction when in reality it's due to Finlay's wife having died prior to the series. Finlay merely never corrected Reacher when he assumed he was alone due to divorce.
  • Reacher correctly figures that Margrave is a key location for an international counterfeiting conspiracy but his reasoning is backwards. The money isn't printed in Venezuela, smuggled to Margrave and then distributed across the US. The money is altered in Margrave, smuggled to Venezuela, and then distributed internationally.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In season two, Reacher and his unit find out three or four members have gone missing with at least two confirmed dead and the third missing, so they set out to find their murderers and get revenge for their fallen comrades. To give you an idea of just how pissed off they are, when they find the nest of Mooks who assisted with trying to kill them the other night, they toss a fucking pipe bomb into their townhouse and then murder every last person inside with extreme prejudice. Reacher actually accidentally gets in trouble after going to one of their homes and finding that their poor dog died of starvation and thirst because after he was kidnapped, no one was around to take care of it, and Reacher assumes the guy tailing them is one of the hitmen, so he goes over to the car and beats the living shit out of him...only to find out the guy is an NYPD cop. Whoops. That's the downside to a rampage after all—he wasn't cool-headed enough to assume the guy was a cop due to being angry about his dead friend and the innocent dead dog.
• Running Gag:
  • Reacher being really bothered by the Kliner farm having too much feed for the number of cows in the pastures, to the point where several other characters express frustration with his focusing on it. He's of course completely correct — they're using the feed as part of the counterfeit ring when bleaching the printed bills, to clean up any chemical spills and thus keeping the EPA from coming to town. The farm has 116 cows, just shy of the 120 that would subject it to state inspections, so the operation keeps it below that number and successfully covers up where the bills are processed.
  • Reacher really just wants one damn slice of peach pie — though, note, it should be referred to as cobbler— and in the season 1 finale, he finally gets it. But in typical form, his only comment is, "I've had better."
  • Barely an episode goes by without someone commenting on Reacher's hugeness, usually in an amusing fashion.

S - Z

• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: During his time with the 110th, Reacher ordered a raid on a military drug smuggling operation despite being specifically ordered by his CO not to pursue it because it would embarrass the recently-promoted colonel who had it happen under his nose. As a result, their unit is disbanded and unofficial punishments are said to be forthcoming.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • As soon as he wises up to the scope of the shadiness going on in Margrave, Reacher wants to immediately leave town and not get involved. He changes his mind when he finds out the dead body is his brother Joe.
  • Jobling's widow leaves her home and the state almost as soon as Reacher and Roscoe inform her of his death, wanting nothing to do with the criminal activities that got him killed. This saves her life when the bad guys burn her house to the ground to destroy any evidence Jobling might've stashed in it.
  • Downplayed, but Stevenson and his wife decide to move closer to her parents in a different town as bodies keep piling up and it becomes clear that the investigation will likely lead to the end of Margrave as they know it. Sadly, before they get a chance, the hit squad comes after them for information they don't even have, and they're both killed.
  • In season 2, when Neagley and Dixon go to question Ambiguously Evil executive Marlo Burns, they find her house abandoned, with signs of frantic packing, a bag full of money left lying in a closet, and a jewelry box left behind, all indications that Burns fled with the bare essentials. A later episode reveals that she was really running from the villains and left behind the money to signal that she was refusing to help them anymore.
  • When one of the hit men hired to kill Reacher's team at Franz's funeral sees his colleague get headshot by Neagly from twenty or so yards away with a handgun, he takes off running for his getaway car.
  • In "The Man Goes Through", Lieutenant Marsh a Dirty Cop who suspects Reacher is onto him and may come calling as part of his Roaring Rampage of Revenge, is packing his possessions to go on the run when Reacher gets the drop on him. As a Death by Materialism Brick Joke, unlike Burns, he takes the time to pack his bag of bribe money and other valuables when there's a chance he might have gotten away if he hadn't lingered that long.
• Self-Made Orphan: KJ is revealed to be Kliner Sr.'s assassin. He felt his dad was too weak to run their operation.
• Setting Update: The Killing Floor was published and set in 1990s. The first season updated the time period to the 2020s and changed Reacher's back story so that he served in the Global War on Terror while his mother is the child of a French Resistance fighter rather than being a former member herself.
• She Cleans Up Nicely:
  • Not that Neagley has ever looked homely, but the team has to dress up for a black tie event and Neagley has to look the part, so she wears makeup and a lovely dress...and is ungodly annoyed by having to wear it and to look utterly gorgeous even though she totally is. Two of her teammates are rendered speechless when they see her and she just reiterates that she doesn't want to hear one word about it from them.
  • Reacher when he has to impersonate an FBI agent and wears a jacket and tie. Not that he's a bad-looking guy but Neagley, O'Donnell and Dixon lampshade how good he looks wearing a classy suit as opposed to his normal drifter attire. Reacher himself takes no joy in this and hates the more formal wear, ditching the suit the first chance he can.
• Sherlock Scan:
  • Reacher can deduce minute details just through observation, such as when he is able to figure out that Finlay is a Harvard graduate, an ex-smoker, and estranged from his wife after spending just a few minute together in a conference room. And just like Sherlock, Reacher can get things wrong since he usually goes by an assumption of details that are close to being right, but not exactly, and can let his own biases cloud his judgement. Case in point, he based his deduction of Finlay's marriage based on his age (as a younger man, divorce was the more probable scenario than being a widower), and Finlay's reaction seemingly confirmed his logic. Finlay later reveals she had passed away. He also completely overlooked KJ as a threat, seeing him as just a Spoiled Brat and being blinded to how dangerous he actually was, considering him a mere lackey for the new leader of the operation like Teale, rather than the actual leader.
  • In season two we are shown why Reacher assembled his Special Investigators group. Reacher is amazing at spotting clues but he has blind spots and can't be an expert on everything. When he teams up Neagley, their effectiveness increases greatly because they pick up on things the other missed. When four of the Investigators get together, they start cracking through clues extremely fast.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The soft-spoken, overweight coroner disappears from the plot after the conflict starts to come to a head.
• Shoot the Builder: In the season two premiere, after AM buys some counterfeit passports, one of the forgers boasts that they're flawless and "No one will know who you are." AM replies, "But you'll know," and then slits the forger's throat before stabbing his partner.
• Shower Scene: Reacher has two; one of the romantic variety, the other where he's cleaning off blood after demolishing the Margrave kill squad. The towel rack politely hides everything below the waist in the second one, but there is still plenty of Fanservice to be enjoyed.
• Single Tear: Reacher sheds a single tear in a flashback after visiting with his dying mother.
• Smarter Than You Look:
  • Reacher is written off quite easily as just being a big, dumb ox. Few are prepared for the fact that he is an analytical genius with a keen eye for details and Spotting the Thread.
  • KJ has this in the opposite way; due to his unimpressive build and casual arrogance, people are quick to assume he's just the smarmy Spoiled Brat son of Kliner Sr, and Reacher is quick to confront him under the belief he's a simple would-be "Alpha Male" sort. Reacher is visibly surprised when KJ then lists private information about Reacher's own service record, and is a few times caught off-guard by both how smart and how sociopathic KJ actually is. Reacher is still way out of his league, but the underestimation gives KJ a surprising advantage.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Season 1: The Margrave counterfeiting ring tries to pin Joe's murder on a seemingly random outsider who just showed up in town. Unfortunately for them, not only is said outsider (Reacher) a highly trained and effective criminal investigator, his being arrested leads to him learning that his brother was murdered and the circumstances of the murder don't add up, which leads to a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, with nearly everyone in the counterfeiting operation being killed and the operation dismantled. Reacher even flat-out says at one point that if the cops hadn't arrested him, he likely wouldn't have found out Joe was dead for years, as they had grown apart.
  • Season 2: The hitchhikers who went off the trail at the Catskills and stumbled upon Franz's body. If it weren’t for them, his body would have gone unnoticed for months or even years, certainly too late for Reacher or the Special Investigators to have ever been able to do anything to foil his murderer's plans coming to fruition in the next few weeks.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • Reacher is arrested under suspicion of murder, and Finlay reads off a brief description of the incident to him. Among the details are that the killer used subsonic rounds from a silenced pistol and didn't leave his brass behind, the body was beaten heavily after being shot dead, and the body was hidden under some cardboard boxes but was discovered a few hours later. From this information, Reacher points out that three different people must have been involved in the killing, as the details showcase someone hyper-competent (the kill was very precise and well thought out), someone psychotic (assaulting the body after death), and someone semi-competent (savvy enough to realize the need to hide the body, but foolish enough to do a bad job of it). Therefore, Reacher is almost certainly not the murderer, or at the very least there are two other people involved still running around free.
  • Reacher notes that Kliner Sr is bringing in a lot of animal feed, and the operation to unload it is unusually efficient. Finlay and Roscoe write it off as Kliner Sr owning a large cattle farm and that's just what people in Georgia do, but Reacher points out that Kliner's farm isn't that large with only 116 cows, which would put it just under the limit where federal regulators would come in to inspect the operation. Reacher's instincts turn out to be correct, as the animal feed contains a specific ingredient necessary for the counterfeiting process, meaning the cattle were just a cover for the mass purchase of raw materials.
  • Joe's punchlist specifies that "Joblings' Garage" is an important location, but the investigation turns up nothing at Pete Jobling's house. Late in the investigation, Reacher remembers that Pete's wife never took his last name, but Joe clearly wrote the apostrophe after "Joblings", meaning the important location is a house where there are two Joblings, meaning Pete's parents. Sure enough, a box filled with counterfeit bills is hidden in their garage.
• Sociopathic Hero: Reacher has a strong moral code and often sets out to right wrongs wherever he finds them. He’s also deeply anti-social, blunt, at times manipulative, and is quick to acts of ruthless (often lethal) violence for which he shows no remorse or psychological trauma.
• Southern Gentleman: Played cringing-levels of straight with Teale, down to him wearing an all white suit and having a white hair and beard like Colonel Sanders and carrying an outdated cane with a fake diamond on the handle. It's so distinct it actually makes him identifiable as the one who killed Roscoe's mentor, as the diamond handle on the stick matches the injury he sustained prior to his death.
• The Starscream: KJ killing his father and taking over the operation.
• Strong and Skilled: Just like the books, Reacher is both very strong and an extremely skilled combatant who is well-versed in numerous fighting styles, favoring Krav Maga, Muay Thai, Aikido, Judo, Karate and Wrestling.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • After almost an entire season of Reacher effortlessly demolishing mooks, during his fight with Dawson at the Hubble house, Reacher actually loses the fight and is almost killed. Why? Because when swung around by a reasonably strong person, a crowbar is a devastating weapon, and all the advantages in the world in size, reach and hand-to-hand combat skills are only going to take a man so far if he is unarmed.
  • While Reacher is an skilled fighter who can demolish pretty much any regular thug he fights with ease, other trained soldiers are a different matter. While his size, strength and speed give him a considerable advantage, he still struggles more against someone who knows how to fight than he would against regular criminals who he can take down in seconds and even more so when facing multiple opponents at which point Reacher only wins through assistance or separating and fighting them one at a time.
    • Similarly, while Reacher's size is commented on multiple times, and he does demonstrate feats of impressive strength, this is typically done in casual, non-combative methods, and his fights are instead won by skill, and other skilled fighters do surprisingly well against him despite the size disadvantage. While size and strength aren't useless by any means, skill and experience will very quickly close that advantage immediately; of note, the average height of a US servicemen is between 5'6-6'1 (so basically, the average height for non-servicemen), as the US military does not make an effort to prioritise physically stronger/larger recruits when the training regime is already specifically designed to turn anyone able-bodied into a trained killer.
    • As tough as he is, Reacher is not invulnerable. During one fight, his opponent recovers the gun he had and holds it on Reacher which forces Reacher to surrender and he is only saved by Roscoe shooting the other man dead. He is similarly shown to be taken aback and wary after attacking KJ when KJ pulls a knife on him and before recognizing one another, O'Donnell is able to end their fight by simply holding a knife to Reacher's femoral artery, a wound which would cause Reacher to bleed to death as quickly and easily as anyone else.
  • Roscoe getting her ass kicked while fighting Teale in the finale. She is faster than him and more than half his age (and she demonstrates some skill when fighting), but she's also tiny and barely weighs 100 pounds, so he easily throws her and tackles her before she wises up and handcuffs him to a nearby bar to even the odds in her favor. Teale stupidly thinks he can outdraw her and gets shot through the eye for his trouble.
    • In the same episode, we see Neagley also get into a hand-to-hand fight with one of their mooks and she does far better despite her opponent being in better shape than Teale; though Neagley is also a woman, she's much taller and visibly more athletic than Roscoe, while the mook she fought was of average height and size, making the size/weight gap far less significant. As Neagley is also a trained special forces vet, she's trained specifically to kill men in armed combat and has much more experience at this than Roscoe, who though a demonstrative Action Girl is still just a cop in a small town that seemingly didn't have much crime.
  • The villains in the first season have relatively recently taken to regularly using extreme violence in order to remove enemies and make an example of those who oppose them. This draws heavy attention to them, makes them more enemies than they can chew off (including Reacher himself due to his brother now being a murder victim) and makes it increasingly obvious who is/was involved in their conspiracy (and that such a conspiracy exists in the first place). Furthermore, whereas before they were simply being investigated, it's now increasingly acceptable to deal with them via violence as well, placing even their own lives in danger. It turns out this is due to KJ Kliner performing a de facto (and later actual) coup on his father, who KJ mocks for preferring more quiet criminal methods. As it turns out, having an actual psychopath run such an operation does not end well. In less than a year of their takeover, KJ and Dawson had to burn through all of the resources KJ's father spent decades building to fight off the numerous foes and public infamy the Margrave operation had drawn, and in the end it still collapsed.
  • Reacher demonstrates an impressive Sherlock Scan from time to time based on his background as a military investigator, but like the great detective, he's not always correct in his deductions — he's often close, but sometimes the actual facts are not quite what he assumes they are, since he's partially guessing the context from an outside perspective. For example, he assumed Finlay's wife had divorced him, when she had actually passed away. And whilst he's fairly open-minded and non-judgemental, Reacher does have a few biases that can offset his deductive prowess. He assumes that KJ is an arrogant Spoiled Brat, which is true, but that blinds him to how dangerous KJ is besides just being a rich kid riding his dad's success. Season 2 clarifies that part of his reasoning for setting up the Special Investigators unit was his acknowledgement of this, as Reacher doesn't possess Encyclopaedic Knowledge allowing him to single-handedly understand all the ins and outs of every crime to fully comprehend it, so he recruited people from different fields of expertise to offer their insights to cover for this.
    • Another case is his guess that Neagley, who he otherwise correctly knew would be staying off the radar and would avoid all tourist spots, would be staying in a lower-cost motel due to having grown up poor. Instead she's happily staying in a much fancier hotel as she can afford such luxuries now; he assumed that her background would make her frugal and that she would share his own minimlaist approach, but in actuality, it made her appreciate what she can afford to do now and take advantage of her higher income to treat herself.
    • Reacher misses the fact that a key is a standard USPS PO Box key. He lived on army bases most of his life and never had a PO Box himself or had to access one. Neagley on the other hand, instantly recognizes it since she works as a private investigator in New York, has seen lots of keys liek that and probably has a PO Box of her own.
  • This is the reasoning behind the location chosen for the Cruel and Unusual Death method used by the villains in season 2. Being dropped out of a helicopter hundreds of feet above the ground is not always guaranteed to be fatal, despite the odds, and it is possible to survive the landing. To remedy this, they intentionally dump them in the woods around the Catskill Mountains, away from the hiking trails, to ensure that even if the unfortunate victim survives the fall, they won't be found, and will either die of their injuries, exposure or wild animals in their immobile state.
  • A minor case in Season 2. Reacher's life as a wanderer going from place to place and having no social media means by which he can be contacted or tracked, save coded messages sent via the bank account he withdraws money from, means he is very out of touch even with his closest friends form the Army. It was noted to be complete serendipity that he happened to turn up nearby so soon after Joe's death to learn about it, and when reuniting with the Special Investigation unit, he discovers one of their members had died in a car accident the year before, and nobody bothered to contact him about it because it wasn't an emergency. Likewise, save for Neagley, none of the others were aware Joe had died because Reacher never broadcast that information.
  • Reacher sees somebody watching his old friend's house, having just discovered evidence that he was likely murdered at some point from the corpse of his pet dog inside, having died of dehydration. With both of his BerserkButtons firmly pushed, he marches straight up to the tail and starts applying his usual method of dealing with the villains....only to discover afterwards that the guy was a legitimate NYPD cop Working the Same Case. Rushing off to manhandle people you suspect is involved in The Conspiracy doesn't actually mean they are, and Reacher lands himself in hot water by not verifying whom to target first, like he did back in Margrave.
    • Reacher decides to skip town for a bit until the heat dies down, but when the trail leads back to New York once more, his car is promptly stopped by a cop and he is arrested soon after. The detective tracked Reacher down, figured out that he was driving a rented car and put a BOLO out on the car. Not all police are incompetent or ineffective at their jobs, they just have more restrictions to abide by than Reacher has the patience to deal with.
  • Reacher prepares to load up on weapons for himself and his team before being told he has to go through the proper channels for gun ownership, only skating around through some careful use of legal loopholes and bribing the owner of the store to not ask questions. Even then, the crew are aware that getting caught with their weapons could get them serious jail time.
• Suspicious Spending:
  • Reacher and Roscoe investigate the second murder victim and discover that he was a truck driver with a huge house who also paid off his parents' mortgage. When they confront his widow, she admits that she always knew that his money could not have been obtained legally and she suspected that he was stealing air conditioners that he was supposed to be transporting. Reacher and Roscoe quickly realize that the guy had way more money then he could obtain from stealing a few air conditioners every month and he was likely skimming counterfeit cash off the top of the shipments.
  • Reacher quickly realizes that there is something off about Margrave because it is much nicer looking and well-maintained than a small Georgia town like that should be. Kliner's foundation donates a lot of money to the town and makes sure that the town stays prosperous. This way the locals have a strong disincentive to look closer at Kliner's operations.
  • Kliner is very careful with his spending and hired Hubble specifically to make sure that all his financials look above the board. Reacher becomes suspicious when he realizes that certain aspects of Kliner's operations, like his cattle herd, are right below the size limit where they would attract additional government oversight. Reacher correctly concludes that these are the areas requiring further investigation.
  • Reacher notes on several occasions that Kliner's foundation spends a lot of money on animal feed despite only owning a fairly small herd of cattle, which no one else seems concerned by. The feed is used to mop up spills from the chemicals used to bleach the $1 notes used in the counterfeiting operation, and the herd was just a decoy to ensure that no one local would ask too many questions, as cattle farming is common in the area and they'd just chalk it up to that. Reacher took note of it because he's not local.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: This is how the arms dealer A.M. meets his end at the end of season 2, when Reacher, Neagley, Dixon and O'Donnell all fire their pistols at him at point blank range at least half a dozen times each. By the time they're done the man's torso has so many holes it looks like a sieve.
• Token Evil Teammate: Swan is suspected of being this to the 110th, as he is employed at the villain's company, is the only member they can't account for, the circumstances of his disappearance don't match the deaths of the others, and there's at least one past incident where he seemed willing to skim a brick of drugs for quick cash. Reacher refuses to believe it, but Neagley surmises that he is only reluctant to consider the possibility because he would then consider himself partly responsible for the deaths of his friends, even though he shouldn't. Subverted with the reveal that he's innocent.
• Time Skip: Season 2 is set two years and seven months after the end of season 1. At one point, Reacher references an offscreen adventure during the time skip that covers the events of One Shot, the book that was adapted previously for 2016's Jack Reacher (and as such, the series can avoid rehashing that story).
• Town with a Dark Secret: Margrave appears to be a friendly little town that has benefited from the Kliner Foundation making it their home base and saving it from economic ruin. In reality, it's a cover for an international counterfeiting ring. The currency is printed in Margrave and distributed in Venezuela, and the people in charge use deadly means to keep a tight leash on their operation.
• Too Dumb to Live: The bad guys from season 2 and every single mook they send after Reacher and his friends. Langston, who is a former NYPD Dirty Cop and not ex-military, keeps underestimating Reacher and turns out to be completely in over his head.
• Trap Is the Only Option: In season 2, Langston kidnaps Dixon and O'Donnell, demanding Reacher surrender himself so he'll stop interfering in his plans. Reacher acknowledges that Langston isn't gling to spare anyone, but it's also the only way they can rescue the hostages and find Langston's buyer. He prepares contingencies ahead of time.
• Trapped in Villainy: Hubble never wanted anything to do with the criminal conspiracy. He was forced into it through a combination of trickery, coercion and witnessing a man get brutally crucified, castrated, and murdered right in front of him.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: KJ reveals he spent time in an asylum as a kid at his father's doing, indicating he's been showing sociopathic tendencies since at least adolescence. Reacher only quips in response that the treatment didn't work.
• Truer to the Text: Alan Ritchson is both taller and more muscular than Tom Cruise, making for a Reacher much closer in build to the books than his depiction in the 2012 film^note Studio executives were very aware of fan backlash to Tom Cruise's casting and put a lot of emphasis on candidates' measurements, especially how tall they were in their bare feet.
• Underestimating Badassery:
  • Despite being 6'5" and built like a tank, it's astonishing how many people seem to think they can push Reacher around or intimidate him. Justified in that while he is large, his opponents aren't usually prepared for his intelligence, combat skill, speed, or his willingness to fight dirty.
  • Reacher underestimates KJ and Dawson, dismissing them as spoiled brats who are used to hiding behind money and whose arrogance far outweighs their actual competence and bravery. Reacher is genuinely blindsided by how dangerous, cunning and surprisingly brave they turn out to be.
• Use Your Head: Reacher loves using headbutts in fights. Appropriate, given how effective they are at ending a fight quickly.
• Villainous Crush: KJ makes it clear a few times he's interested in Roscoe; in fact it seems his initial hostility towards Reacher is less down to the fact he's a potential wrench and more the fact he's got chemistry with Roscoe. He writes "WHORE" on her car, but while it's an attempt to get Reacher in trouble by antagonising him in the hopes he'll respond in broad daylight, it seems he chose this method specifically because he resented that Roscoe didn't reciprocate his feelings. Notably, while going after Reacher in the climax, he compares him to a rhino KJ had killed during a safari, saying that it did whatever it wanted in life, including fucking whoever it wanted (and this is after Reacher and Roscoe have slept together).
• Villainous Valor: It's hard not to respect Dawson for being willing to face down Reacher despite being much shorter, less muscular and nowhere near as skilled a combatant, showing that, whatever else he might be, he's no coward. To say nothing of the fact that he comes closer than anyone else, even trained soldiers, to killing Reacher through sheer brutality and persistence. KJ himself is also not lacking in bravado, wanting to kill Reacher personally and not backing down, even after Jack has wiped out his whole operation.
• Violence Really Is the Answer: Reacher is basically completely right — just killing everyone involved with the counterfeit scheme works wonders. The only problem will presumably be what the Venezuela thugs do when they find out who Reacher is and will probably want revenge for him torching their operation.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • Reacher and Finlay develop this dynamic over the course of the first season.
  • In Season 2, it's made clear that the Special Investigators have this. Reacher and O'Donnell especially; the two insult each other at every turn.
• Walking the Earth: Reacher leads an itinerant life. He never stays in one place long and hops from town to town as the mood strikes him with nothing but the clothes on his back and his toothbrush, passport, and wallet in his pockets. He doesn't even carry extra clothes with him, preferring to buy new ones as needed and donating the ones he was wearing or just throwing them away.
• Wardrobe Flaw of Characterization: Finlay wears expensive suits that are a bit too gaudy for a police detective, especially one in a small town in the Deep South. Reacher surmises that it's because Finlay's wife isn't around to correct his fashion mistakes.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": Finlay decides to adopt the dog he and Reacher rescued and names him Jack since Reacher doesn't like to use his first name anyway.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The show doesn't make it clear exactly where in Georgia the town of Margrave is located. It's an hour away from Atlanta, but also close enough to the Alabama border that Conklin can take Reacher to a bar there and expect to be back in the same evening.
• White Bread and Black Brotha: Inverted with the white Reacher and the black Finlay who more or less fulfil the opposite stereotypes: the former is The Drifter, prone to being somewhat impulsive and reckless, while being built like an armoured vehicle and nearly unstoppable in combat, while the latter is a Harvard-educated, bespectacled and besuited, vegetarian By-the-Book Cop.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The cartel has no issue whatsoever threatening the children of people involved to guarantee their cooperation and KJ is practically gleeful at the thought of killing Paul Hubble's two young daughters, largely out of pure sadism.
  • Langston is willing to pit a hit on children, but to the credit of the hitman, he at least acknowledges it's dirty business and doesn't take any pleasure in it.
• You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With: The prison gang leader who attempts to sexually assault Hubble pulls this when Reacher interferes, asking "Bitch, do you know who I am?" Not only does Reacher not know, he doesn't care, and savagely beats the man unconscious in barely three seconds.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Langston's last desperate gamble to save his life is offering to give up A.M. as long as Reacher spares him. Reacher doesn't even entertain the thought, because he doesn't need to: Langston's pilot knows the rendezvous location.
• You Killed My Father: KJ was responsible for Joe's death.
• You Will Be Spared: Subverted when the bad guys successfully capture Finlay, Roscoe, and Reacher. While they will keep them alive for now because they need Reacher's cooperation, both sides hold no illusions that they won't be allowed to live. Instead, the motivation is that Hubble's wife and children will be spared. That, too, is then subverted, as Reacher is well aware no witnesses will be allowed to live and plans accordingly.

---