You can’t keep a good man down — especially not a mountain of a man like Reacher — and before he knew it, Reacher was a Major once again. This time, however, he was made the head of the 110th MP Special Investigations Unit, a team of officers charged with cracking the toughest internal cases the U.S. Army could throw at them. As /Film’s Michael Boyle has noted, Reacher’s Special Investigators appear to be a semi-fictionalized version of the real-life Army’s Field Investigative Unit, a group whose members “are of the highest caliber and have extensive investigative experience,” per the official Army website.
If his superiors believed burdening Reacher with more responsibilities and paper to push around would curb his anti-authoritative tendencies, they were sorely mistaken. Flashbacks sprinkled across “Reacher” season 2 shine a light on one particular drug bust that the Special Investigators carried out against the orders of their promotion-hungry Commanding Officer, who didn’t want the stain on his record that would come from them shining a light on the illicit operation. Far from the final straw, Child’s “Jack Reacher” novels detail similar incidents that deepened Reacher’s sense of disillusionment with the Army, culminating with the murder investigation that led to his departure (as chronicled in the author’s 2011 prequel book, “The Affair”).
In Child’s 2005 book “One Shot,” Reacher muses on how spending his early life in the cogs of the military machine led him to his vagabond lifestyle. (“I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.”) Armed with the skills he needs to right injustices as a civilian, Reacher set out on his own, transforming into the folkloric vigilante he’s known for being. Is that realistic? Absolutely not. But if you’re tuning into “Reacher” for verisimilitude, you’re in the wrong place, friend.