Reacher season 4 keeps its foot on the gas in episode 3, “One Small Step,” and this one might be the most consequential hour of the season so far. Between a CIA ambush, a journalist’s shocking confession, and a gut-punch of a cliffhanger, this episode does a lot of heavy lifting to set up where the back half of the season is headed. Here’s everything that happened, plus my take on where the story goes from here.
Russell Digs Up Cahill’s Delta Force Connection
Reacher Season 4 Episode 3 opens with Reacher and the crew heading back to Russell’s place, hoping he can dig up something useful on Nolan Cahill. Once Russell hears the full weight of what happened with Anna’s suicide, he goes after the story with the kind of hunger you’d expect from someone who smells a scoop. It doesn’t take him long to land on something significant: Cahill served on the same Delta team as Sampson, and it turns out Cahill was actually Sampson’s commanding officer back in the day.
Meanwhile, Jacob is unraveling. He’s letting his emotions run the show, and Reacher clocks it immediately. He’s worried Jacob’s instability could blow up the whole operation, and he tells Tamara flat out that if Jacob keeps spiraling, they may have no choice but to cut him loose.
CIA Goons and a Mystery Second Group Storm the Building
Just as Reacher’s ready to make his next move toward Lila, the CIA shows up outside Russell’s building. Turns out Russell brought this on himself, he’d posted about the thumb drive and Anna Merrick on 4chan, and that little breadcrumb was more than enough to draw attention. But the CIA isn’t the only problem. A second, unidentified group of soldiers arrives too, and they don’t waste time, they gun down the CIA agents and start clearing the building floor by floor.
Reacher does what Reacher does. He goes hunting for the soldiers himself, and after taking them down, he finds a note in one of the bodies’ pockets with two addresses written on it: Russell’s place, and Lila’s hotel. Both of them are targets now.
Tamara and Docherty Dig Into Anna’s Death
After Reacher leaves Lila a message to meet at a bowling alley, Tamara helps the group secure a new vehicle, and they make their way back up to Philadelphia. While Reacher goes to talk with Lila, Tamara swings by the police department to catch up with Docherty on where things stand with Mary’s murder investigation.
The case takes an odd turn here. The prints on the dead man found in the library basement don’t match anything found in Mary’s bedroom, which throws a wrench into the timeline. There’s better luck on Anna’s car, though, it’s been located, but only after being ditched in a secluded area.
When Tamara, Jacob, and Russell arrive at the scene, they find the car has been completely shredded and picked apart, almost certainly in a hunt for the missing thumb drive. Jacob, ignoring Russell’s objections, grabs Anna’s badge from the backseat. He’s clearly not backing off this investigation no matter how dangerous it gets.
That night, the trio brings everything to the police department to dig deeper into what Anna might have been hiding, and what they find is a big deal: Anna had Level 8 security clearance. Docherty notices them poking around and makes his position clear. He’s not going to rat them out, but he’s also not going to lie for them if someone comes asking questions directly.
Lila’s Secret and General Putra’s Connection to Sampson
Back at the bowling alley, Reacher finally confronts Lila, and she comes clean. She’s a journalist, and her real goal is exposing secrets tied to some of the most powerful people in the U.S. government. She also clears up a misconception: Amisha and Sampson were never having an affair. Their connection runs through something much darker.
That darkness has a name: General Putra, a man responsible for torturing Indonesian civilians, including both Amisha and Lila themselves. And here’s the gut-punch, Putra was trained by John Sampson. That’s the real reason Sampson was in Indonesia in the first place, not for some innocent assignment, but to teach advanced military tactics to soldiers who would go on to commit atrocities.
It all starts clicking into place. Anna apparently uncovered this information and intended to hand it over to Lila so she could break the story publicly. That also explains why Sampson’s Chief of Staff was on the train earlier in the season, someone was trying to intercept Anna before she could pass anything along.
Reacher hears Lila out and agrees to keep digging, but he’s careful to warn her that whatever’s actually on that thumb drive will determine what he does next. He’s not signing a blank check. And then, just as things seem to be moving forward, the rug gets pulled, Lila and the others are ambushed and held at gunpoint. Reacher springs into action on the way out, fighting off their captors, with Lila jumping in to help. They make it out mostly unscathed.
Back at the hotel afterward, Reacher and Lila end up together. It’s the kind of beat this show tends to lean into, and honestly, it felt inevitable the moment she started opening up to him.
Nolan Cahill’s Shocking Rooftop Fall
The next morning, Tamara, Jacob, and Russell head to a U.S. government facility where Anna used to work, determined to find whatever answers are left. Reacher, meanwhile, is in Baltimore tracking down Sampson directly. Sampson admits he was in Indonesia during Putra’s training, but he’s adamant that he never tortured or killed any civilians himself.
When Reacher presses him on Cahill’s role in everything, the two of them go find Cahill together. They track him down at a rooftop bar, drink in hand. Cahill tells Sampson he would’ve made a good President, then completely ignores every question thrown at him about the thumb drive. Instead, he turns, walks to the edge, and throws himself off the roof.
It’s a brutal way to end the episode, and it leaves a lot of unanswered questions hanging in the air.
Episode 3 Review: Cahill’s Suicide Changes Everything
Reacher Season 4 Episode 3 does something smart: it pulls Sampson out of the direct line of fire, at least for now, and repositions Nolan Cahill as the character with the most to hide. His last words to Sampson, that things don’t stay buried forever, hit different once he’s already stepped off the ledge. Whatever secret he was protecting, it was clearly heavy enough that death felt like the better option. That’s not a small detail. That’s a character telling us, without saying it outright, just how bad this is going to get.
Jacob continues to be the wildcard I’m most nervous about. We’ve had multiple warnings from Reacher about his erratic, emotionally driven behavior, and the show keeps reinforcing that he could get someone killed before this is over. I don’t think that’s an accident. It feels like the show is deliberately building toward a moment where Jacob’s recklessness has real consequences, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it costs someone their life.
Then there’s Anna. The more we learn about her, the clearer it becomes that “HR clerk” was never the full story, it was cover for something far more dangerous, something worth killing yourself over twice now, first Anna, then Cahill. That’s a heavy pattern for a show to establish this early, and it tells me the stakes are only going to escalate from here.
As for Lila, I still think there’s more to her involvement than what’s been shown so far. She’s clearly not just a bystander journalist who stumbled into this story, and the fact that Reacher is now emotionally entangled with her makes me think the show is setting up a much messier reveal down the line.
All in all, this was a tense, well-paced episode that finally started connecting the dots between Sampson, Putra, and Anna’s death, while leaving Cahill’s exact secret dangling just out of reach. The cliffhanger works because it doesn’t just end on shock value, it ends on a genuine question mark about what happens next. Bring on episode 4.
Reacher Season 4 Episode 2 | Reacher Season 4 Episode 4
