Reacher Season 5 Officially Breaks a 4-Season Trend With Alan Ritchson’s Most Unusual Enemy Yet

Reacher has had four seasons in which he has chased after and finally tracked down and battled his enemies. Alan Ritchson’s towering drifter has gone against corrupt politicians, a defense contractor, smugglers, and people who have power and people who will carry out their dirty work for them. Season five starts with the same old pattern. Reacher visits a new town and finds himself involved in another missing persons case.

That familiar setup hides a different kind of enemy this time around. Season 5 adapts Lee Child’s Make Me, in which the trail leads Reacher into the dark web (via Amazon News). The criminals still have guns and a place he can reach, but their operation begins online. Before Reacher can confront them, he has to find out who they are and what they are hiding.

Season 5 Takes Reacher’s Fight to the Dark Web

The dark web is nowhere on Reacher’s mind when he steps off the train in Mother’s Rest. In Make Me, the novel, he stops there because the town’s name makes him curious. Then he meets Michelle Chang. Played by Amanda Ip, Chang is a private investigator searching for her missing colleague, Keever. Reacher has time to spare, and the locals seem unusually reluctant to answer questions. That is enough to keep him there. 

Keever’s disappearance sends the pair well beyond Mother’s Rest. In the novel, their search leads them to a journalist and, eventually, someone who can help them investigate the hidden parts of the internet. Reacher can follow a suspect or get answers out of a thug. But neither will tell him who is behind an anonymous website. He needs help to find the people he can confront. 

It is an interesting change for a character whose enemies have, until now, largely operated in places he could walk into. The novel still gives him armed criminals to fight. Finding out what they are protecting is the harder part.

Make Me’s Grisly Ending Poses a Challenge for Season 5

Alan Ritchson as Reacher | Credits: Amazon Studios

The answer waiting in Mother’s Rest is horrific. The criminals use a dark web site to offer what appears to be a peaceful death to suicidal people. Once those people arrive, they are murdered on camera, and the recordings are sold online. The missing person case has led Reacher to an operation built around exploiting people at their most vulnerable. 

That leaves the show with a difficult adaptation choice. Revealing what happened to the victims is central to the book’s ending, but showing the murders in detail could make the series resemble the spectacle its villains produce. The discovery of the operation, and Reacher’s response to it, may carry more weight than graphic footage would.

There is also no neat victory here. Reacher can reach the people running this site, but destroying one operation will not erase the market for it. Reacher can win this particular fight, while knowing the wider problem remains. We don’t know how much of this ending the show will keep. While the show has had its share of gore, this might be the darkest ending in terms of subject matter, provided Amazon keeps it.

Should Season 5 keep Make Me’s disturbing ending? Let us know in the comments.

All seasons of Reacher are available to stream on Prime Video.