Prime Video’s Reacher reaches its midpoint with “Karambits and Pieces,” an episode that finally starts connecting the scattered pieces of Anna Merrick’s case while delivering one of the season’s sharpest turns. Based on Lee Child’s Gone Tomorrow, Season 4 has so far mixed political intrigue, a missing flash drive, and Reacher’s usual mix of investigation and violence. This installment raises the stakes by confirming a key death, deepening the Indonesia backstory, and recasting two characters who had appeared to be allies.
The hour picks up immediately after Nolan Cahill’s suicide. Congressman John Sampson, shaken, sits down with Reacher and begins filling in the history that has hovered over the season. In 1998, Sampson and Cahill were part of a U.S. team in Indonesia that trained local special forces, including General Putra, in exchange for access related to scientific work. After the Americans left, Putra turned those skills against civilians and became a war criminal. Sampson knows the connection, if exposed, would damage his political future. He wants the missing drive returned to the government. Reacher, characteristically, intends to see what’s on it first.
While Reacher works that angle, Tamara Green, Jacob Merrick, and Russell Plum trace Anna’s security badge to a government facility that digitizes and then destroys sensitive documents. Green uses a stolen employee badge to get inside, accesses Anna’s workstation, and discovers that one file was downloaded and then deleted rather than uploaded to the central server. The implication is clear: the flash drive may hold the only remaining copy. Green is discovered and has to flee, but the team now understands why so many parties are hunting the drive.
The episode also reconstructs Anna’s final hours. Heavy traffic on the same route she would have taken explains why she abandoned her car and boarded the subway. The team theorizes she mailed the drive (likely to Lila Hoth’s hotel) after Ben was used as leverage, then intended to confront his kidnappers. Reacher’s approach on the train, identifying himself as a cop, may have left her with no other exit. Jacob learns his nephew’s body has been found in a dumpster. The medical examiner determines Ben’s throat was cut with a karambit—the same distinctive curved Indonesian blade used to kill Mary Ellen Daniels. The weapon ties both deaths to the same cultural and geographic thread already circling Sampson and Lila.
Action sequences remain a series strength. Reacher evades CIA operatives in a warehouse fight that uses space and timing effectively. A later subway confrontation, in which he dispatches pursuers while protecting Lila, showcases the show’s willingness to mix brutality with practical problem-solving. The episode’s most memorable sequence, however, is the one that arrives at the Liberty Gardens motel. Men from the Big Red Machine confront Lila and Amisha, expecting easy victims. The women instead draw their own karambits. By the time Reacher bursts in, the attackers and the women’s bodyguards are dead. Philadelphia police find Reacher standing amid the bodies and take him into custody.
The twist is the episode’s most significant development. Lila and Amisha, previously presented as a journalist and her mother in need of protection, are revealed as far more capable—and far more implicated—than they appeared. The reveal arrives earlier than in the source novel, giving the remaining episodes a different shape. It also leaves Reacher in a familiar bind: he is once again the most obvious suspect at a crime scene he did not create.
“Karambits and Pieces” is a functional mid-season chapter that trades some of the earlier hours’ mystery for momentum. The infiltration of the government facility stretches credibility, and certain logistical conveniences (open parking spots, timely radio chatter) remain typical of the series. Yet the episode succeeds in making the conspiracy feel more concrete. Ben’s death gives Jacob a personal stake that had been missing, the karambit provides a physical link across murders, and the Hoth reveal forces a reevaluation of everything that came before it. Alan Ritchson continues to play Reacher as a man who solves problems with both intellect and overwhelming force; Sydelle Noel’s Green remains one of the season’s most useful supporting players.
The second half of the season now has a clearer antagonist dynamic and a protagonist in custody. Whether Lila and Amisha are the primary threat or merely another layer remains to be seen, but the show has finally given viewers a reason to question the people Reacher has been trying to protect. That shift, more than any individual fight, is what makes this episode land.
