Season 4, Episodes 1 & 2: When the formula starts to wear thin

Season four of Reacher started off in a way that, for me at least, failed to live up to the excitement I was expecting from the show's return. Reacher is in Philadelphia this time and, as is almost always the case, he doesn't have to look for a case himself, since the case finds him. In a subway car he witnesses the suicide of Anna Merrick, a woman who just before her death seems to be afraid of something, and from there begins a mystery surrounding a lost USB that seems to contain information important enough that many people are willing to kill to obtain it. Reacher meets Anna's brother, Jacob, while Lila Hoth gets involved in the case, who claims that Anna was helping her prove that her biological father is the politician John Sampson. From there the assassins, government agents and the hunted begin, until Reacher ends up captured after it takes two shots of tranquilizer darts to bring him down.

The second episode, titled “Cage Fight,” picks up right there and, I admit, picks up the pace quite a bit. Reacher wakes up tied up in a room, with Tamara Green and Jacob Merrick also held captive, and quickly realizes that government agents are behind the kidnapping and are looking for the same USB. And somewhere here is one of the points that started to tire me the most. The scene where Reacher decides to knock them all out is almost cartoonish: he throws the desk at one, hits the other who ends up eating the anesthetic dart, is attacked by a third who stands up and after giving him a..head, leaves him SANE by throwing a chair at him (for god's sake he found him and fell like that? It wasn't a gaming chair either! And finally he walks out of the battle like it was just another day in his life obligation.The action remains impressive, but when the hero is almost always the outright winner in every encounter, the tension begins to wear off.And that's something I'm not the only one to notice, as even early reviews of the season include references to Reacher's superhuman endurance and the early signs of the familiar recipe wearing thin, although several critics still consider season four's battles to be among the series' best.

What impresses me the most, however, is the tone of the series. I don't have a problem with Reacher's humor, nor do I think the series should suddenly become a heavy and dark thriller with no breaths. But in the first two episodes there are moments where the exaggeration becomes so intense that the action loses the sense of danger it once had. In the first season it was fun to see Reacher walk into a space and know someone was going to get killed, and even in the second season, when he was in prison, that side of the character had more weight in the story. Now, after four seasons, the "he kills whoever he finds" is starting to feel more like a recurring joke than a tension-building element. Still, the mystery with Anna, USB, Sampson, and Nolan Cahill is interesting enough to make me want to see where it leads, and the fact that the season is based on Gone Tomorrow, the 13th book by Lee Child, shows there's enough material behind the story to grow into something bigger.

So far, the fourth season of Reacher has me more concerned than excited. It's clear that the series still knows how to deliver action, Alan Ritchson has now completely identified with the role and the second episode shows that the mystery can develop into something quite interesting. But on the other hand, I can't ignore that everything seems a little lighter, a little more exaggerated and in several cases a little more childish than I would like. Even the fact that there is almost no blood in most of the wooden scenes makes the violence seem more like choreography than actual conflict. Maybe that's the style the series wants to have now, and maybe the next few episodes will disprove me, but after the first two, I have a feeling that Reacher needs more than just one more guy to challenge him to nail. And that, for a series that once had such a nice balance between power, mystery, and tension, is something that's starting to bother me. I will watch the next episodes and come back