Reacher season 4 keeps tightening the screws with episode 4, “Karambits and Pieces,” an hour that finally starts connecting the dots between Anna’s death, that missing jump drive, and a shadowy Indonesian war criminal named General Putra. If you’ve been waiting for this show to start paying off its slow-burn setup, this is the episode where things click into place.
Sampson’s Confession Changes Everything
Reacher Season 4 Episode 4 opens in the shadow of Cahill’s death, and it’s clear nobody’s handling it well. Sampson is visibly rattled, off his game enough that he even snaps at Springfield, which tells you how deep this rattled him. Elspeth tries to talk her husband down, coaching him not to make any public statements while emotions are running hot, but Sampson brushes her off and instead pulls Reacher aside to a bar for a private, off-the-record conversation.
What Sampson reveals there is the missing piece the show’s been dangling for weeks. Years back, he and his team were sent into Indonesia alongside a group of scientists searching rainforest plants for a malaria cure, with Sampson’s unit responsible for keeping the scientists safe and smoothing things over with the local government. Cahill oversaw the whole operation, and in return for the cooperation, the US agreed to train Indonesia’s special forces, with Sampson personally running the program, teaching everything from guerrilla tactics to weapons handling. One of his star pupils was a young officer named Putra.
Here’s the part that turns this into a real problem: once the Americans went home, Putra used everything he’d learned to become a straight-up war criminal, and Sampson knows that if his name ever gets tied to Putra’s rise, it torches every bit of political goodwill he’s built. That’s the real reason Sampson brought in “Snap, Crackle and Pop” earlier in the season, not to help Reacher, but to steer him toward the drive so it could quietly disappear back into a Pentagon vault. Reacher, being Reacher, has other plans. He wants to see what’s actually on that drive before anyone else gets their hands on it.
Tamara Infiltrates a Government Records Facility
Meanwhile in Washington, Tamara, Jacob, and Russell think they’ve cracked why Anna was sneaking around a nondescript government building, it’s a document destruction site, where paperwork over a decade old gets digitized before the physical copies get burned. That smokestack they’d noticed earlier suddenly makes a lot more sense once you realize shredding isn’t really an option for this level of classified material.
Getting inside takes some nerve. Tamara lifts a parking pass off an employee who happens to park nearby, with Jacob running interference as the distraction, and it works well enough that she waltzes straight into the building and logs into Anna’s old computer. For a few tense minutes she’s flipping through file after file, and it’s genuinely impressive how far she gets. Then she hits a wall: one specific document has been deleted entirely. Before she can dig deeper, the real employee shows up and Tamara gets made, chased out of the building with Jacob and Russell scooping her up for a getaway that only works because building security is embarrassingly lax.
A Warehouse Freezer Fight and a Broken Timeline
While all that’s happening, Reacher gets cornered by CIA agents who chase him down to the docks and corner him inside a warehouse, which, of course, is exactly the situation Reacher wanted. He clears the room, goon by goon, capped off by a genuinely fun fight sequence inside a freezer that ends with Reacher walking out the only one still standing.
Back in Philly, Tamara fills Reacher in on what she found, including that one file that never made it to the government server. The theory forming is that Anna may have loaded those very documents onto the missing jump drive herself, which would explain why it’s the only copy in existence and why it’s suddenly worth killing over.
Things start snapping into focus when Reacher learns the others got stuck in the same brutal traffic jam Anna hit on the night she died, the same route, the same delay. Suddenly her choices that night make a lot more sense. The working theory: Anna had a deadline to hit for whoever she was meeting to hand off the drive, but her plans blew up when Ben got kidnapped and held as leverage to force the drive out of her hands. She tried to reach Ben, failed, and pivoted, grabbing a gun with the intent of hunting down whoever took her son. When Reacher identified himself as a cop on that subway platform, turning the gun on herself became her only way out of an arrest she couldn’t survive politically or otherwise. It’s a gut-punch of a reveal, retroactively recasting that subway shooting we’ve been chewing on since episode one.
The Drive, Lila Hoth, and a Body in the Morgue
The good news, relatively speaking, is that Anna ditched the drive before boarding that train, so it isn’t lost for good. Tamara pieces together from Anna’s car that she’d mailed it to Lila Hoth at her hotel. Reacher heads there to follow the lead and immediately picks up a tail. He wants answers about who these men are working for, but they end up dead before he can get anything useful out of them. When police flood the subway, Reacher grabs a walkie-talkie off one of the bodies and slips out through the tunnels, one step ahead of getting caught.
At the same time, Jacob gets the call every family member dreads: Ben’s body has turned up. He was dumped in a dumpster, and, chillingly, his throat was cut with the same style of curved knife used on Mary. Jacob, Tamara, and Russell head to the morgue together, and watching Jacob process his nephew’s death is one of the heavier beats of the episode.
Reacher, catching wind over the radio that armed men are closing in on Lila, can’t get through to warn her in time. She walks into her motel room to find them already waiting. As Lila and Amisha brace for a fight, the mortician back in Philly drops a detail that reframes the whole hour: that curved knife style is tied to Indonesian martial artists, which points squarely at General Putra having a hand in all of this. And then, almost as if the show wanted to mess with us directly, the next shot cuts straight to Amisha Hoth holding a curved knife of her own. Coincidence? I doubt it.
By the time Reacher reaches Lila’s motel room, the men are already dead, throats slit exactly like Mary and Ben. Philly PD arrives moments later to find Reacher standing over a pile of corpses, and from where they’re standing, this doesn’t look good for him at all.
Reacher Episode 4 Review: Putra’s Shadow Finally Comes Into Focus
This was a genuinely strong hour for Reacher, and it’s the first episode this season that felt like it was actually assembling a full picture instead of just teasing one. Sampson’s backstory with Putra gives real shape to a threat that’s mostly existed as a name whispered in the background, and Jacob getting the news about Ben lands with a weight the show has earned through a handful of quieter character moments this season.
What I appreciated most is how the episode ties Anna’s final night together without over-explaining it. We already knew she died on that subway platform, gun in hand, but stitching in the traffic jam, the kidnapping leverage, and her failed attempt to save Ben gives that death a shape it didn’t have before. It’s not just “tragic backstory” anymore, it’s a fully reconstructed sequence of decisions, and that kind of retroactive clarity is hard to pull off without feeling like a cheat. This one didn’t feel like a cheat.
The Putra reveal is where things get genuinely exciting going forward. Given how directly Sampson connects to him, and how neatly that curved knife detail lines up with Amisha brandishing one of her own, it’s safe to assume whatever’s on that drive references Putra directly, which is exactly why he wants it buried so badly. Whether Amisha’s knife means she’s trained in the same discipline or something far more sinister is going on with her specifically, the show is clearly setting up a bigger confrontation than “recover a flash drive.”
If I’ve got one nitpick, it’s the government building infiltration. Tamara getting in and out with barely any resistance, not flagged the entire time she’s poking through classified files, stretched credibility a bit even by this show’s standards. It’s a minor gripe in an episode that otherwise moves with real purpose, packing in a solid action beat in that freezer, a genuinely moving morgue scene, and a cliffhanger that’s got Reacher standing over three dead bodies with cops closing in. Where this goes next is anyone’s guess, but “Karambits and Pieces” has me fully locked back in.
Reacher Season 4 Episode 3 | Reacher Season 4 Episode 5
