[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Reacher Season 4 and Neagley Season 1. Read at your own risk!]
One bit that’s always been frustrating about Reacher is that Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) is maybe a little too well adjusted. We’ve dealt with his childhood with his brother in Season 1, we’ve learned all about his old Army buddies in Season 2, and we’ve seen him deal with those who were closest to him dying. But he always just solves whatever the conspiracy was and moves on, never to talk about the bad stuff ever again.
It’s a similar thing with Reacher’s pal Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), who has haphephobia — a condition in which she cannot stand for others to physically touch her — but otherwise has always been exceptionally normal and without any other obvious hangups. But that changed in Reacher Season 4 and the first season of the Reacher spin-off Neagley, as both of those characters have to deal with past trauma that’s making their lives difficult in the present.
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Reacher learns from his biggest mistake
With Reacher it was subtle. In the opening scene of Season 4, he sees a woman, Anna Merrick, in distress on a subway train, and he immediately thinks she’s a suicide bomber. When she responds by shooting herself in the head, Reacher realizes immediately that he took the wrong approach, but he insists that she had several of the signs of a potential suicide bomber. When he tries to make up for his mistake, he overcompensates and trusts somebody he shouldn’t, and it makes things worse.
Later in the season, in the seventh episode, Reacher and his crew are hunting an actual serial killer at a party hosted by Congressman Sampson (Marc Blucas). He and Sampson go over the list of signs to watch out for in a suicide bomber, and it’s true that Anna fit a few of the criteria — she was upset, she was wearing a big coat in the summer, and she had a bag in her lap. But the situation didn’t make sense for Anna to be a bomber — Jack himself pointed out that the train wouldn’t have been much of a target in the middle of the night while he was trying to talk Anna down. Jack doesn’t usually make this sort of mistake unprompted, and so this plays like a trauma response, his body responding to stimuli like he’s still in the Army on the lookout for stuff that people in the Army watch out for.
He never really talks about it that way, though he’s clearly learning from the experience over the course of the season, working it out internally. The last scene in the season finale is the bookend for this lesson, as he sees another person looking sad and miserable on the same seat in the same train, and he sits next to her and offers her half his cheesesteak instead of being weird about it. He’s discovered that he can help people in ways that don’t involve violence or acting like a cop, and that should allow him to make deeper connections with other people moving forward.
Neagley learns about her past
The first season of Neagley is more straightforward with its discussions of trauma, because that’s actually what the entire season is about. The villain is an Elizabeth Holmes-type pharmaceutical executive named Pierce Woodrow (Matthew Del Negro) who dreamed up a psychedelic-based treatment for PTSD in a marketing meeting and spends the whole season trying to strong-arm the folks at the farm into inventing it for him.
Neagley herself becomes involved because her childhood best friend Tommy, who’d been seeking relief from some trauma Neagley doesn’t know about, ended up as one of Woodrow’s test subjects and died. Neagley later learns that Tommy had been sexually assaulted when he was a child, and that Neagley’s father — who had been a cop — murdered the predator who had hurt Tommy. Neagley actually witnessed the murder, and her father tried to tell her that it’s OK, that no predator is going to harm her. But he expresses it in an intense, awkward way, telling her over and over that “no one touches you” — this mantra stuck in Neagley’s head, and was the source of her haphephobia, which has made her hate being touched by anyone ever since that night.
It’s a tale as old as time: A parent tries to save their kid, and ends up harming them instead. Neagley’s father had promised Tommy’s parents that he would never reveal what happened, so he never did anything that might have helped Neagley deal with her haphephobia — he even lied outright and told her that she’d always been that way. She’d been unable to even begin to address the problem because she’d been gaslit over decades into thinking that some part of her was just inherently rotten. Her father meant well, but — just like Reacher did with Anna Merrick — he handled it poorly and created an entirely new problem that didn’t exist before.
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And this had consequences for other people, because it’s the reason Neagley often treated the folks she worked with like pawns — she was unable to connect with other people on any deep level. It’s why she repeatedly throws Keno (Jasper Jones) into the fire without any regard for his safety. She doesn’t know how to make friends, or how to trust other people.
But once she found out about her past, and the cause of her haphephobia, it finally unlocked that part of her. She bought Keno an apartment so he wouldn’t have to live on the streets anymore, and she’s probably gonna start dating her new pal Hudson (Greyston Holt). Neagley has regained a piece of her humanity that she didn’t know she’d lost.
After these two seasons of TV, during which both Reacher and Neagley had these moments of enlightenment without any help from the other, I’m suddenly a lot more interested in seeing these two have another adventure together. They are best friends, after all, and they clearly have a lot to talk about. While it’s more likely that Season 5 of Reacher will simply move onto a new story without looking back at this one, as it usually does, a boy can dream.
ReacherSeason 4 andNeagleySeason 1 are now streaming on Prime Video.
