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Neagley. It’s pronounced “Neely” but after that, honestly, it’s very simple. Neagley is Frances Neagley, Jack Reacher’s friend and former colleague in Reacher (pronounced “Reacher”, though as rarely as possible for our guy is a man of big arms but few words). That’s the hit series starring Alan Ritchson and his arms as the eponymous hero, a monosyllabic meat-mountain around whom a bestselling series of crime novels by Lee Child has revolved for the last few decades.
Reacher is a former military police officer who now goes about breaking the heads and faces of those he deems deserving – “a sort of artisanal fascist”, as the novelist and devoted fan Paraic O’Donnell once matchlessly put it. Neagley was his right-hand woman in the days when he put together a special investigations unit to – uh, investigate special things, I guess? Details do not matter much in Reacher. The whole thing is designed to slide seamlessly out of your mind the minute the credits roll, leaving you restored and refreshed by an hour off from thinking about anything other than battered, groaning baddies. Sometimes the action pauses for a one-liner or a shot of Reacher’s bare bottom, but they’re quite restorative, too.
Neagley (Maria Sten) has put in several stints over Reacher’s four series and has now earned a spin-off. Hurrah for feminism! Because Reacher-the-programme is not broken, the makers wisely have not fixed it. Except for recognising that Sten is roughly the size of one of Ritchson’s arms and occasionally giving Neagley a baton with which to beat the living crap out of the latest deserving case, business proceeds as usual.
We open with her foiling a kidnapper’s attempt to flee with the ransom money she has delivered for a client. Reacher pops up briefly to lend a hand/fist because he’s a good friend and wants her spin-off to be a success, then heads back out on the road. She returns to life as a private investigator but is soon working pro bono to uncover the truth around her childhood friend Tommy’s apparent suicide.
Tommy (Jhaleil Swaby) was high on drugs when he walked naked into the path of a subway train. But Tommy never did drugs. His mother is sure of it. Neagley is sure of it, too. She thinks it is something to do with Echo Common, the cult-like commune Tommy had become involved with. Neagley, once she has decoded a clue left for her in Tommy’s last letter to his mother, thinks so too. She starts breaking faces to find out more.
I long for a life of such simplicity.
Meanwhile, the audience is introduced to a sharp-faced and even sharper-suited CEO of a big pharma company intent on creating a market for prescription psychedelic drugs. Could he turn out to be a villain?
The beauty of Lady Reacher – sorry, Neagley – is that, as with Original Reacher, you are never left to wonder for long. In fact, you can barely begin mentally questioning the moral virtue of a new character before you are rewarded with very clear proof of your suspicions – often by someone slicing the throat of a fleeting accomplice or bagman awaiting payment.
On we go. Neagley has an already established phobia about touching people (this allows her to be Reacher’s friend and never get in the way of that season’s bare-bottom instigator) and a dying dad. It is possible that we will plumb unprecedented psychological depths later in Lady Reacher – I’m sorry, I’ve done it again – by finding out what caused Neagley’s phobia, but if so I am sure her preferred form of therapy will involve breaking faces with a baton rather than putting any of us through a long dark night of the soul.
Neagley shares Reacher’s Sherlockian ability to deduce vast amounts of plot from clues that teeter on the edge of absurdity (buckwheat dropped from a wheel arch provides a location, sticky tape residue on a kitchen cabinet denotes an entire family structure and an ex-wife’s address, that kind of thing), so the juggernaut never stops moving.
What can I say? If you like Reacher, you’ll like Neagley – especially if, like its progenitor did, it gains more confidence and starts to allow a little levity to creep in. Relax, artisanal fascista – you’ve got this.
