Not surprisingly, the Amazon Prime series Reacher was filled with a lot of twists and turns that kept fans guessing the whole way through. Some of them were complete surprises. But others were a bit more predictable, particularly for fans of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. One of the biggest swerves in Reacher went down almost identically to a similar angle involving Captain Holt and one of his oldest friends.
In the first season of the new series, Jack Reacher headed for Margrave, Georgia. He was following a tip about his favorite Blues musician given to him by his brother. Instead, Reacher found a massive plot that consumed the town and ultimately cost his brother his life. Despite the fact that he just wanted to keep walking right out of town, Reacher was essentially forced into dealing with the problem to solve his brother’s murder.
It wasn’t just the Reacher boys who were caught up in that mess. An entire town had been corrupted by the Kliner family and their massive counterfeiting scheme, one that was costing Margrave a lot of lives. But the tendrils of this massive, multi-million dollar plot extended well beyond the boundaries of one town. Those same tendrils reached into the depths of the US government, including law enforcement institutions like the FBI.
To protect the Hubble family, Finlay called in a friend of his from the FBI named Picard. His help was completely off-the-books, though the man seemed suspicious from moment one. Anyone who picked up on that detail was certainly right. It was eventually revealed that Picard was in the employ of the Kliners and had long been part of their vast money-making operation. Finlay, Reacher, and Conklin found out about his complicity the hard way.
A very similar situation happened in Brooklyn Nine-Nine in Season 3, Episodes 22 and 23. While trying to ferret out the mole Jimmy Figgis had planted in the FBI, Holt called in his old friend Bob Annderson. The FBI agent appeared to be helping them but was, in reality, in the employ of Figgis. This led to a whole series of shenanigans that came to fruition with the end of Jimmy’s operation as well as Holt and Peralta in witness protection in Florida.
The parallels between the betrayals on Reacher and Brooklyn Nine-Nine were almost immediately obvious. In both cases, an FBI agent from outside the trusted team was brought in for an off-the-books operation. They were both part of strange things going wrong on that same operation. And they finally revealed that they had both been corrupted by the main antagonist, becoming henchmen to those villains.
Admittedly, Bob Annderson’s turn on Brooklyn Nine-Nine was far more comedic than Picard’s on Reacher. At the same time, anyone who had seen the episodes featuring Annderson’s betrayal was almost immediately suspicious of Picard. A mysterious FBI agent who’s an old friend of a main character arrives on the scene to help out and everything goes sideways. These plot threads were almost too similar not to see the Reacher one coming.
About The Author