LEFTOVER NINE
Haha! The opening shot is Spivey’s hole in the head. Reacher is incredibly consistent so far at beginning with the next beat in the story.
ONE
Reacher shines the flashlight on the dead guy on the ground, and back to Spivey filling the trunk space. He goes through everyone’s pockets and breaks their cell phones. Behind Spivey is a bag of spy equipment that Reacher looks into and tosses back.
Then he shoves the two dead guys on top of Spivey’s corpse, breaking the last man’s legs so that he’ll fit. (Crunch.) The trunk lid now closes.
Roll credits.
TWO
Panting, Reacher calls Finlay. They discuss Finlay’s discovery that Hubble quit the bank a year ago, and then agree to meet at the site of a reported burnt out rental car. It could be Joe’s. Reacher asks who else knows, and Finlay says, “Only those who need to.”
THREE
Cut to Reacher arriving in a rural area. Finlay, flashlight out, waits for him. Offering a french fry, Reacher eats throughout Finlay’s update. (He “worked up an appetite.” And Finlay disdains greasy heart attack food. Buddy cop stuff, lol.) This SUV has no plates and was covered with brush until last night’s rain. As Reacher peeks in the door hole he notices that the fire was set deliberately.
Headlights. Reacher pulls out his gun as a car arrives. It’s Roscoe in her Chevy truck. Looking at the wreck, she wonders if they can get a VIN off of it. Reacher shows an old Army trick: ketchup and salt will clean metal. (Aha, lol. The french fries have many purposes in the scene!) Yup, there’s the VIN. Finlay will have his FBI friend Picard run the number. They must continue pretending for Teale that they’re not investigating this case.
FOUR
Roscoe asks how it went at the Blue Cat and Reacher admits Spivey was dead. More buddy cop schtick as Reacher plays word games with Finlay about the two South American corpses. Now he’s off to dispose of the bodies, and Roscoe is tasked with following him.
Trunk POV as Reacher and Roscoe look down at its contents. Flinching at the bent legs, Roscoe says it’s like Tetris. She notices the front side exit wounds, though; she now knows they were shot in the back. Reacher lied to Finlay because that’s “what he needed to hear.” Taking a beat, Roscoe asks, “What happened in Baghdad?” She insists on an answer.
Flashback. In fatigues, Reacher smiles down at children playing in a village’s bombed out hangar. They wave at each other. One night they weren’t yet home, Reacher tells in voiceover, and he went to escort them. In the hangar, the camera stays tight on Reacher’s face as we hear distress sounds. Back with Roscoe, Reacher says that three men were abusing the boys. “You can fill in the blanks.” He sent the boys home and faced the men. When they came after him, he shot them dead. (We can’t tell exactly what Roscoe thinks. It’s a tense scene with a lot of subtext. The issue ends up resolved between them, though, and they move on.)
Nighttime aerial shot of a city. (Atlanta, I assume.) Reacher monkeys with the security camera feed at the airport rent-a-car lot. When the guard leaves the gate to investigate, Roscoe drives the sedan with its trunk full of dead into the parking garage. She wipes down the car and removes the next car’s license plate.
While Reacher waits for her he notices construction workers moving concrete bags. He immediately flashes back to the Kliner employees loading feed. Roscoe, done, climbs in the cab and notices Reacher’s look. She still thinks keeping a few cows is not unusual. “It was a hell of a lot of animal feed,” Reacher says. (Again, lol.)
Still in the city, Reacher pulls over and changes his car’s license plate for the rental car’s that Roscoe grabbed. (He’s driving Hubble’s Jag, which is pretty noticeable.) He tosses the original plate into a bush.
Oh, they’re parked at a hotel. The two of them go to the front desk. When asked about his preferred bed situation, Reacher immediately volunteers “two queens”. All that’s available is a suite. Slapping down a wad of cash (which came out of the dead men’s pockets), he says, “No problem.” When asked for I.D., Roscoe flashes her badge and says, “Put it under Officer Eudora Welty.”
In the elevator, Roscoe asks where he got the money. It is counterfeit. Reacher doesn’t care, and he did recognize her fake name. He teases her that when she travels she probably uses Margaret Mitchell (which appears to be an accurate guess). He uses forgotten Vice Presidents and Yankee second basemen as his pseudonyms. She tosses out that she’d have signed them in as Willie Randolph if she’d known. (Haha, Reacher might be in love after that.)
(Welty and Mitchell I knew. I had to google Willie Randolph, lol.)
From a used room service tray on the hallway floor, Reacher takes the toothpicks. In their room, he starts jamming them in the door hinges as burglar deterrents. He uses a pants hanger to pin the drapes closed against a sharpshooter. And he pushes the head of his bed into an “unexpected” location.
His cell buzzes, and it’s Molly Beth. She has a voluminous pile of Joe’s files and she’ll fly in with it tomorrow. Reacher cautions her about them meeting where they can be recorded. They’re breaking a number of laws. Roscoe suggests Five Point station. When Molly Beth mentions she looks forward to finally meeting Reacher, he prepares to sign off. Roscoe stops him, reminding him that he wants to talk about Joe with her, too. As they exchange personal thoughts, Reacher says of Joe, “He was the only man I felt small next to.” Molly Beth fights the tears.
After the hang up, Roscoe sits next to him on the bed and tells about the deaths in her own family. She rubs his back, trying to comfort him. He heads for the shower. Whatever Roscoe wanted or expected, this wasn’t it.
SWITCH
Reacher stands under the shower flow as blues music plays, over. He lets it run over the back of his head. Through the glass door, he (and we) see naked Roscoe walk up. She steps in and kisses him. At a pause, Reacher says, “Who’s watching the door?” (Is it mock severe, or is he somewhat serious, lol?) She laughs, and we see them kiss passionately until the music ends.
FIVE
Sunrise over the city. In the hotel room, Roscoe dresses in her uniform. Oh, they’re here to talk to Jobling’s wife. Roscoe makes it clear that last night changes nothing. Reacher nods.
Knocking on a residential door, Roscoe introduces them as Officers Welty and Randolph to the woman who answers. She leads them into the kitchen where they meet Pete Jobling, Sr. (Wrong Jobling.) Reacher immediately lies and says that Pete Jr. is fine. The mom — nice people — gives them directions to Pete’s wife.
Cut to the police station. Teale, at his chief’s desk, polishes his glass-topped walking stick. Finlay enters, called in for an upbraiding about harassing Kliner. After humiliating Finlay a little, and waving his cane about, Teale redirects him toward the paperwork again. A call from Finlay’s dad breaks up the reprimand.
It’s not Finlay’s dad, though. It’s Picard talking in code about the VIN report. He’s at a cabin watching over the Hubbles. His information must be delivered in person, so he’ll have to leave. Against regulations, he gives Charlie Hubble a gun to protect herself while he’s gone.
Reacher and Roscoe are with Pete’s wife. She lives in a very nice house and is not surprised that her husband is dead. He was stealing from Kliner. In the garage are boxes of the air conditioner units he hauled. The wife is moving back with her parents until this house sells.
Away they go to meet up with Picard. In the car they discuss Pete. He didn’t make all that extra money selling appliances on the black market. It’s the counterfeiting. Reacher seems to accurately guess a lot of the situation. Pete would drive units down to Florida and come back with fake cash in the empty boxes, skimming some of the money for himself along the way.
SIX
Picard meets them in an urban alleyway. The car and its license plate, found separately in a motel, were a rental registered to Ron Hassey. “That’s Joe.” He used Yankee back-up catchers for his pseudonym. The motel is probably still in his name.
SEVEN
At the motel, the clerk says that “Hassey” left a briefcase and garment bag behind that were picked up about twenty minutes ago by a “maybe-Hispanic” fellow. Roscoe frets that the important information in the briefcase will be long gone. Reacher, not worried, goes into the dumpster to look for the garment bag. There it is, and a slip of paper is hidden in a side pocket. It has a torn corner that matches the piece found with Joe’s body. As they contemplate the note, shots ring out. It’s the black sedan, and they dive for cover.
The South Americans brake and keep shooting. Reacher, shooting back, goes one way and Roscoe the other. He tells her to split up the attack, but actually he waves the paper about and lures them both after him.
EIGHT
Gun out, Roscoe is able to duck away as the car follows Reacher. He leads them between two out-buildings, and they crash. Unable to open the doors, they lean out windows to shoot at him. Turning, he nails the one in the sun roof with his last bullet. The other guy, lamenting his dead buddy, climbs through the window and chases after.
Reacher ambushes him and they fight. It’s pretty even, until Reacher lands a solid head butt. The man gets up and aims his gun. As he starts to monologue, a shot from the side blows his head open. It’s Roscoe who comes up and slaps Reacher’s face. She’s figured out that Reacher enticed the men to follow him. A bit of a personal exchange, and they’re moving on.
As they drive in the Jag, Finlay calls for an update. How did those men get to the motel first? Looking out his office window, Finlay says that Stevenson took the Picard phone call and forwarded it. Anyone could’ve listened in. They speculate that Stevenson is dirty. He somehow got Joe’s fake name and alerted Kliner. Roscoe suggests an abandoned farmhouse she knows where the three can meet. She’ll text him. The atmosphere in the car is a little cold, and Reacher asks if she’s still mad at him? He went with his instincts, just like he was taught.
Flashback. Young Reacher and Joe face the ramifications of their fight with Bully Curtis. A Marine captain meets with their parents on the porch while the boys overhear his warnings. Curtis’ dad can’t touch the boys, they’re minors. But he will find a way to bust the father down a rank and transfer them out of Okinawa. Dad’s whole career is about to be torpedoed.
When the boys come to the porch after, the dad confirms that what the officer said is true. They feel terrible, and Dad says, “You should’ve thought of that.” Young Reacher wants to take responsibility, but Joe stops him. “Your instinct was to keep your mouth shut. It was the right one. Now stay out of it.”
Back to grown Reacher and the farmhouse meeting. The note lists three unknown phone numbers, Joblings’ garage, and “Gray’s Kliner file”. They already looked in the garage, and Roscoe knows of no Kliner file. She went through all of Gray’s things when he died. Each one of them picks a phone number to call.
Reacher gets the Tennessee E.P.A. Roscoe gets the voicemail of a Princeton economics professor due back in three days. Finlay’s number is the economics department at Columbia for another professor on leave for the same European conference. As they wonder over these disparate and strange clues, Reacher throws in the cows again. Get over it, Roscoe says. “It was a hell of a lot of animal feed,” Reacher retorts.
NINE
Molly Beth arrives in an hour; Roscoe and Finlay must keep up appearances with Teale. But they need someone to go to Memphis for the E.P.A. lead. Reacher calls a private investigator he knows. Answering the phone, Neagley sits on her couch, notebook ready. When she hears that Joe is dead, she offers to talk. “We just did,” Reacher says. (Neagley, who’s a wonderful character, gives him some flak and doesn’t take his attitude personally.)
Finlay drives them to meet Molly Beth. (The Jag and its bullet holes can’t go unnoticed anymore.) On the way we get some buddy cop schtick over Finlay’s love of the band .38 Special, lol.
At the train station Molly Beth disembarks. She looks up, sees Reacher at the top of the concourse, and smiles. (He looks like Joe.) Carrying a big case, she motions toward the escalator. As they wait at the top, she never arrives. They separate, with Reacher going down the up escalator. From the train platform, he sees the case in the tracks. It’s empty, and Reacher heads down the tunnel.
There she is, sitting on the worker’s ledge. She’s been shot in the torso. She calls Reacher “Joe” as she dies in his arms. Close on Reacher’s reaction shot. Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
All the beats are here and in the right order, but the size and shape of them are a bit weird. I mean, look at that Nine! It’s practically a short film.
The key for me is the Three/Six. Introduce the VIN, resolve the VIN. When Picard tells them the information the VIN has revealed, that’s the Six. Those are fixed points, around which I can begin to construct the rest of the Enneagram.
What do you think is the meaning of that title, “In A Tree”? In the last episode we saw a strong connection between the title and the Eight. All I can think of now is the old schoolyard tease: Roscoe and Reacher sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Is their physical consummation the point of this title? I can’t find any other connection. It does, however, suggest the Switch. Two pretty people having sex isn’t normally a critical beat in storytelling anymore. Perhaps the title, and this Switch placement, are asking us to reconsider that assumption. Another clue: Reacher decides at the Seven to risk himself and protect Roscoe. I suspect that’s just in his nature, to always take the heat. However, Roscoe in the Eight expresses how much that angers her. They slept together and she said it changed nothing, and now Reacher’s potentially acting chivalrous. As a police officer she likes being able to protect herself and others. She seems to want respect and trust for her skills. And she seems to want to never look vulnerable. All of this, for me, reinforces the theory that this episode is focused around their relationship.
One other very interesting thing is happening in this structure. The Two — “only those who need to know” — is belied at the Eight when they obviously have a leak by someone who doesn’t need to know. Because I’ve seen the whole season, I know who the leak is. Watching again, it strikes me as obvious. The episode is about laying pipe for the identity of the leaker, without telling us forthrightly who it is. It’s like there’s an Enneagram under the Enneagram. Interesting. We watch the story along with the characters, who are ignorant at this point. But when we know the trick, we watch a different story playing in parallel.