This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Reegs head to Margrave for the first episode of Prime Video’s Reacher, “Welcome to Margrave”, starring Alan Ritchson as Lee Child’s wandering ex-military policeman, blues enthusiast, pie-denied murder suspect and extremely large problem for corrupt small-town criminals.
The dads start with their own Reacher experience. Sidey has not read the books and is watching the series for the first time, Dan once started one but did not finish it, and Reegs is currently listening to Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel, on audiobook. This naturally becomes a brief celebration of audiobook actors, a debate about whether Ritchson has borrowed from the narrator’s delivery, and the important possibility that Jack Reacher might be read by Alan Carr or Julian Clary in another, better universe.
The episode itself wastes no time establishing the essentials. Someone is murdered in the dark by a professional-looking killer, the body is beaten after the shooting, and then Reacher arrives in town as a pair of boots, shoulders and pure physical inconvenience. He spots a man being aggressive to his partner outside a diner, says almost nothing, and the man wisely decides that perhaps today is not the day to find out what happens if you square up to a human wall.
Reacher then enters the diner, orders the famous pie he has been told about, and is arrested before he can properly eat it. The police cannot get handcuffs around his wrists, so they use cable ties, which tells you most of what the show wants you to understand about Alan Ritchson’s version of the character. Detective Finlay, a Harvard-educated outsider in a tweed suit, interrogates him, only for Reacher to dismantle the murder theory, explain that there were multiple people involved, and profile Finlay’s life with the calm confidence of Sherlock Holmes after a very aggressive protein phase.
The dads follow the plot through Hubble, the terrified banker who confesses to a murder he clearly did not commit, the mysterious phone number hidden in a shoe, Chief Morrison’s suspiciously convenient evidence, and the decision to send Reacher and Hubble to prison for the weekend while the police chase bus-company footage. In prison, Hubble immediately becomes fresh meat and Reacher immediately becomes the one person you would want standing between you and everyone else. He gives Hubble practical advice, refuses a cavity search on legal grounds, and then demonstrates his conflict-resolution style: a tiny bit of verbal warning followed by broken noses, eye gouging and very efficient shower-room violence.
The appeal, as the dads see it, is not subtle but it is very effective. Reacher is huge, clever, calm, decorated, right about nearly everything and capable of doing horrible things to people who have earned them. Reegs describes him as a hulking serial killer crossed with Sherlock Holmes, while Dan lands on “Sherlock Schwarzenegger.” The show leans into that fantasy rather than apologising for it, especially once Finlay discovers Reacher’s military-police background, secret medals and experience leading the 110th Special Investigations Unit.
The first episode ends by making the case personal. After Reacher and Hubble are released, Reacher is allowed into the morgue, where he studies the body and realises before anyone says it out loud that the murdered man is his brother. It is a strong cliffhanger, and Dan admits it worked well enough that he and his wife carried on through the whole season together, partly because the show keeps dropping just enough cliffhanger bait to make the next episode very easy to press.
There is also the unavoidable comparison with Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, though the dads try not to completely give away the film-review conversation. Alan Ritchson feels much closer to the book’s conception: enormous, intimidating and physically central to every scene. Reegs likes the way the character’s size informs his philosophy, especially the idea that Reacher hates seeing bigger people push smaller people around and exists to push back harder. That gives the violence a simple moral shape, even when the show is gleefully pulpy about it.
Verdicts land warmly. Dan thinks the series is predictable and guilty-pleasure television, but also very watchable and stronger than the film version they are about to discuss elsewhere. Sidey is a little weary of the mysterious stranger arriving in a small town as a one-man army, but thinks this is a good version of that setup, likes Ritchson, and may download more for a no-Wi-Fi trip. Reegs is firmly on board, praising Ritchson, the character and the way the later seasons apparently widen the idea of who Reacher is beyond medals, machine guns and being very difficult to handcuff.
So the Bad Dads verdict on Welcome to Margrave is a strong recommend: pulpy, chunky, well-shot Amazon action comfort food about a giant clever man arriving in a corrupt town, not getting his pie, and making that everyone else’s problem.
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