I really liked the first season of Reacher. I thought the second was already more average, and now, watching the fourth, I have the feeling the series has started to become a victim of its own formula. What used to be simple, direct, and efficient has become overly complicated, fantastical, and, at times, strangely devoid of tension.

Reacher was never realistic, nor should it be. Jack Reacher is practically a force of nature, a huge man, absurdly intelligent, capable of walking into a room, calculating who poses a threat, and solving half the problem before everyone else has even understood what is going on. That exaggeration has always been part of the fun. The difference is that, in the first season, Reacher was extraordinary inside a relatively normal world.

Margrave worked because there was a clear mystery, a small town, local corruption, his brother’s murder, and characters Reacher actually formed connections with. Roscoe and Finlay were not there simply to move the plot forward; they helped reveal who this apparently impenetrable man really was. There was humor, irony, chemistry, and even a certain vulnerability, however discreet.

Now everything seems to have to be bigger. The conspiracy expands, agents appear, politicians get involved, there are secret operations, national threats, betrayals, and new explanations in every episode. Instead of the mystery pulling us into the story, sometimes we are simply forced to sit through lengthy exposition just to understand who is deceiving whom. When everyone is suspicious, everyone knows too much, and everything can be part of a conspiracy, suspense stops being suspense and becomes confusion.

There is also a curious change in Reacher himself. Alan Ritchson remains physically perfect for the role, perhaps even too perfect, but I increasingly get the impression that he is playing everything on autopilot. In the first season there were small variations, a smile, a provocation, some irony, an unexpected reaction. Now we know the look, the pause, the posture, and we can practically predict when the dry one-liner will arrive, followed by the inevitable beating.

I am not sure the problem lies entirely with Ritchson, because the writing has also begun demanding less and less from him. When a character turns into a brand, there is always the danger that his most popular traits will become mannerisms. Reacher is no longer simply Reacher; he constantly has to remind us that he is Reacher, the man who walks in, looks around, calculates, hits someone, and leaves.

And apparently part of the audience is feeling something similar. The season started with a fairly enthusiastic reception, with some fans even talking about a recovery after the previous seasons, but that enthusiasm has faded as the plot has become more complicated. The complaints that are beginning to appear focus precisely on too many convenient twists, too much conspiracy, and a Reacher who seems less interested in investigating than he once was.

Perhaps that is what bothers me most. Jack Reacher is not interesting simply because he can beat five men at once. He is interesting because he has usually already figured out why those five men are there before he starts beating them. His intelligence has always mattered as much as his size.

When the series forgets that, all that remains is the fantasy of the invincible man. That is why I still think the first season found the perfect balance. Reacher was huge, but the story did not need to be. The mystery was small enough for the characters to matter, and precisely because of that, it felt much bigger by the time we reached the end.

Perhaps Reacher’s problem is that it discovered that Reacher works. And once it discovered that, it started repeating the formula until what once felt like personality became a pose. In the end, Reacher works better when he has to save a small town. Not when he has to save the world.