Jack Reacher is back, and apparently someone decided the first three seasons had not broken enough bones yet. The opening episodes of Season 4 have arrived on Prime Video, and the violence is, in fact, on another level. There are long fight scenes, blows that seem to hurt through the screen, and that very particular logic of this universe in which Alan Ritchson walks into a room, quickly calculates how many people he is going to have to take down, and we already know the real question is not whether he will succeed, but how each poor idiot made such a terrible life choice.

The curious thing is that it still works. Maybe even better, precisely because Reacher has never been embarrassed by its own formula.

Season 4 adapts Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child’s 13th novel, published in 2009. The story begins with Reacher encountering an apparently disturbed woman on the subway. Something goes terribly wrong, and what could have ended as an isolated tragedy opens the door to a conspiracy involving authorities, political secrets, and much larger interests.

As happens in almost every season, Reacher arrives alone, comes across a problem that theoretically has nothing to do with him, realizes something is wrong, starts asking questions and quickly concludes that certain people have done things they should not have done. From there, he spends the following episodes imposing a very personal form of justice.

None of this is exactly a surprise. And that is an important part of the show’s success.

There is a difference between a predictable series and a series that knows its own identity. Reacher often walks dangerously close to the first category, but so far it keeps saving itself through the second. The show knows exactly what it is, who its protagonist is, and, most importantly, who is sitting on the other side of the screen.

Jack Reacher is an almost primitive male fantasy. He is physically invincible, intellectually above average, does not need a steady job, owns almost nothing, answers to no one, and can simply walk away when the mission is over. He enters places where institutions have failed and solves problems through a combination of deduction, a personal moral code, and wildly disproportionate physical force.

It would be easy to make all of this unbearably solemn. Alan Ritchson understood that the character only works because there is also a small degree of absurdity built into the equation. Reacher knows he is enormous. We know he is enormous. His enemies, inexplicably, still think picking a fight with him is a good idea.

The dryness of Ritchson’s performance creates much of the show’s humor. He does not wink at the camera, does not turn Reacher into a parody, and does not try to convince the audience that we are watching some profound deconstruction of contemporary masculinity. There is an almost old-fashioned precision to the premise: someone did something wrong, Reacher is going to find out who, and people are going to end up badly hurt in the process. In Season 4, much more badly hurt.

The violence in Reacher has never tried to be realistic in the strictest sense. There is something almost cartoonish about the character’s physical endurance, but the new fights feel deliberately more aggressive. There is less distance between Reacher and his opponents, more hand-to-hand combat and an obvious concern with making every impact feel particularly unpleasant.

It is impossible to watch the opening episodes without noticing the escalation. The show seems to have concluded that, if this is one of its main attractions, there is no reason to pretend to be restrained after four seasons.

But there is a limit, and perhaps that is exactly where this new season becomes interesting. Because constantly increasing the brutality raises the same question that haunts big action franchises: where do you go next? If every fight has to surpass the last, at some point the spectacle risks swallowing the character.

The plot is also more complicated. Gone Tomorrow offers a more intricate conspiracy than some of the earlier stories, and that creates an interesting contrast with Reacher’s essential simplicity. He is a direct character placed inside a narrative that keeps trying to hide more and more layers.

That combination does not always work perfectly. Sometimes the investigation seems to exist mainly to delay the moment when Reacher can finally solve everything in the way we already know he will. But perhaps that predictability is less a flaw than a contract.

Because Reacher has a quality that is becoming increasingly rare in streaming: it does not seem to be trying to win over a different audience every season.

The show knows who came to watch. It does not suddenly try to turn Reacher into a man tortured by existential crises just to prove it has depth, nor does it dismantle the character in the name of some reinvention considered mandatory after a few years. There are emotional consequences, relationships and losses, but they all happen within the logic established from the beginning.

Reacher is still Reacher. That could be laziness. In many shows, it would be. Here, it has become part of the agreement with the audience. Maybe that is why the repetition still feels comforting rather than exhausting. You know Reacher will find corruption, that someone will underestimate him, that there will be a moment when an opponent looks at this nearly two-meter-tall man and still decides to go after him. And you know, obviously, how that is going to end.

The series does not depend on surprise to work. It depends on execution, and Alan Ritchson remains essential to that. There is something extremely difficult about playing a character who rarely loses control, rarely shows fear, and enters virtually every situation knowing he is the most physically dangerous person in the room. Without some humor and some humanity, Reacher would be nothing more than a machine. Ritchson manages to preserve just enough of both to prevent that from happening. Simplicity, then, is not necessarily a limitation. It can be a choice.

There are better-written shows, more sophisticated shows, more ambitious shows, and certainly less violent shows. But few are as efficient at establishing a promise and delivering on it. Jack Reacher will show up somewhere. Something will seem wrong. He will start asking questions. Dangerous people will mistakenly conclude that they can intimidate him. Some will make the even bigger mistake of trying to beat him up.

And Reacher will solve the situation. In Season 4, with more violence than ever. It can be repetitive. It can be absurd. Sometimes it is both at once. But as long as the series understands that its formula needs to be executed with conviction, rather than used as an excuse to do just anything, we will probably keep watching. Because after four seasons, apparently no one has yet told the villains that provoking that man is still a very bad idea.