Reacher Season 2 Premiere Recap: Who is Hunting Down the Special Investigators?

Prime Video’s ‘Reacher’ returns with a second season with a brand new case for the titular character in a completely different setting. Having moved on from Margrave, Reacher is enjoying his nomadic lifestyle until he gets a message from an old friend, which pulls him into a world of danger and intrigue. Much like the last season, the stakes are high, and the case is personal for him, which gives more space for his backstory to be explored, giving us insights into Reacher’s past connections and relationships and how they come into play as the investigation unfolds. SPOILERS AHEAD

Reacher Season 2 Episode 1,2,3 Recap

It’s been months since Reacher heard from Neagley, which is why, when she sends him a coded message, he knows that something bad is happening. It turns out that Calvin Franz, one of the members of his team, back when he was still working as a Special Investigator for the military, has been killed. Reacher flies to New York to meet with Neagley and start the investigation, which reveals that Franz might have been killed because of a case he was working on. It’s also clear that the people he pissed off are very powerful, very dangerous, and looking for something Franz had, considering how they ransacked his home and his office.

Before he was killed, Franz had contacted other members of the team, excluding Reacher, who doesn’t have a phone and no other means of contact. Whatever case he was working on, it was with two other members of the team, who were also missing. This makes Reacher and Neagley realize that the team itself might be under attack, and someone is seeking them out and killing them.

Franz and the other two were killed first simply because they were much easier to find. Two other members, David O’Donnell and Karla Dixon, show up, and the four discover new connections that lead them to interesting theories. Dixon’s arrival also brings to the surface Reacher’s feelings for her, which he hadn’t previously acknowledged when they were working together because he was her boss. But now, they are both free to explore all that was previously left unsaid.

Reacher Season 2 Episode 3 Ending: How was Swan Connected to New Age?

To find out why Franz and the other two members of the 110th were killed, Reacher and his team know that they have to find out what they were working on. Talking with their family and friends, it’s clear that Franz, Sanchez, and Orozco were working on a case together, and it wasn’t in line with the cases they regularly handled. Whatever it was, it put the target on the back of the entire 110th, which means that Reacher and his team spend most of their time fighting off assassins who have been sent out to kill them. Meanwhile, Reacher also makes trouble after he unknowingly attacks NYPD officer Russo, the detective trying to solve Franz’s murder case.

While fending off the assassins, Reacher and his team discover that one of the killers has the card of a company called New Age Industries in his pocket. To know how he was connected to the place, they visit it and inquire about it. They receive an address, but the way it is handed to them makes them suspicious of a trap, and they turn out to be right. The address was deliberately given to them because someone in the company, most likely in the place of higher authority, wanted them to go to the place together so they could all be eliminated simultaneously.

Of course, whoever planned the attack didn’t consider the fact that they were going after highly trained individuals. What it does confirm is that New Age is somehow connected to Franz’s case; all they need to do is find out how. For that, they’ll need to visit the place, but because there is already a target on their back, they can’t simply walk into the building, ask questions, and not raise any red flags. So, they break into the place in the dead of night to get their hands on anything that might seem important and discover something quite unexpected.

After their time in the 110th, all the team members took different jobs, depending on their expertise, to keep themselves afloat. Neagley and Franz became private investigators, Reacher preferred not to have a job and just travel around the country on his own, and Tony Swan took a job at New Age Industries. Reacher and the team knew that Swan was missing after they found his dog dead from dehydration inside the house. But while the fate of the rest of the members was clear, there was no sign of Swan. Though his dead body is not found yet, Reacher is sure that Swan is dead, and his connection to the New Age makes things all the more interesting.

There are only two ways that things could have gone. Swan was working at New Age, and when Franz started investigating it, Swan had to stop him because that’s what his superiors wanted. He ratted out on his friends, who were killed because of him. This scenario, however, is quite unlikely, considering how close the 110th had been to each other and how they’d remained in contact with one another (except, of course, Reacher). They were too close to each other for Swan to have betrayed his friends like this. This leaves the only other possibility.

Swan was working at New Age Industries when he found out about the company’s corrupt practices. It was most likely that he would call Franz and the others for help, and in doing so, they all fell at the hands of the enemy. Another scenario in the same situation is that Swan went missing before Franz got involved. Perhaps it was his disappearance that made Franz call every other member of the team for help, possibly because he discovered that he, and Swan before him, had stumbled on something much bigger than either of them had expected.

It is also possible that Swan might already have been working an agenda when he joined New Age. Before Dixon showed up to help the team solve the case, she’d been working deep undercover. Perhaps Swan, too, was working undercover at New Age and was sent by whatever agency he was working for to gather evidence against the company and bring it down once and for all. It’s possible that someone in the agency was corrupt, which is why he had to reach out to his old friends for help in figuring out how to tackle things because he couldn’t trust anyone at his job.

Any number of things could have happened with Swan, which snowballed into Franz and the rest of the 110th getting caught up in all this. A few things that are clear are that New Age Industries isn’t up to anything good, and whatever Swan, Franz, and the others were looking into had something to do with the mysterious “A.M,” who has arrived in New York, in relation to the case. A clear picture of the true nature of the events is yet to emerge, but it’s clear that Reacher and his team will have to keep fending off assassins while trying to get to the bottom of it and hope that they don’t lose another one of them in the process.