Jack Reacher creator Lee Child once had a dark ending in mind for the novels, which Amazon's adaptation can still use as a series finale.
It's difficult to predict how long Amazon's Reacher is going to run, but if it follows Lee Child's original plan, there's already a perfect series finale. By design, Jack Reacher is a series that's welcoming to newcomers. Readers could start from the very first novel Killing Floor, or skip straight ahead to book 23 Past Tense and still fully understand the titular loner. By the end of each novel, Reacher has moved on from a given town and situation, and it's rare for characters to carry over from one story to another. This approach can also work in favor of Amazon's Reacher.
The first season of Reacher adapted Child's Killing Floor, but the next series will jump to an adaptation the of 11th book Bad Luck And Trouble. Lee Child is set to turn over the character to his brother Andrew, with the duo co-writing some Reacher novels together first. That wasn't the original plan, as Child once revealed to The Guardian that his initial plan was to end the series by killing Reacher, but that the fanbase's love for his literary creation convinced him to back off that plan. That said, if Amazon's Reacher manages to run for at least four or five seasons, maybe Child's pessimistic ending could be revisited.
According to Child's aforementioned Guardian chat, he doesn't "like Reacher that much," partly because he feels writers who fall in love with their characters become too protective, and the books suffer. Still, he had plans for a final novel titled Die Lonely, where Reacher "... would die in a blaze of glory or noble self-sacrifice." The author envisioned a scenario where Jack has either got to give himself up or a person he's protecting, "... and obviously he’ll give up himself and bleed out on some filthy motel bathroom floor.” Longtime readers would have hated it, but if the books had to end, it's not a bad way to close.
Having Reacher die while being true to his inflexible moral code sounds exactly the way it should end. The success of Reacher's first season suggests it has the potential to keep running for at least a few years, and it's not as if there's a lack of source material to pull from. The show can also do something the Lee Child book series can't do either, which is to give the character a definitive ending. For that, the showrunners could work with Child to draft out his abandoned finale plan and kill off his creation with dignity. Of course, there's no way of knowing how long Amazon's adaptation will last.
0 Comments