The penultimate episode of Reacher Season 4 delivers a relentless, explosive hour as the season's motives finally click into place. Episode 7 opens with Reacher, Tamara, and Jacob's lives hanging in the balance and ends with Sampson, once on the verge of becoming the next president, potentially sacrificing himself to save the masses from a weapon of mass destruction.
The installment delivers on action, quippy one-liners, and a notable kill count. As some viewers predicted, Springfield comes to Reacher and Tamara's aid just as they face near-certain death. Springfield has been mildly annoyed all season, put off by Reacher's very existence because he has brought nothing but trouble to Sampson, who is moments away from becoming the next leader of the free world. But Springfield comes through in a clutch, standing aside to let Reacher do what he does best with Ahlquist.
Tamara Greene continues to stand out as a true ride-or-die partner. She lets Reacher do what he has to do, and when she is not standing back minding her business, she is leaning forward and enabling his shenanigans. Her line "Snap that shit" will go down as one of the season's best.
The expository dumps involving Ahlquist and flashbacks are heavy-handed, but effective enough. Viewers still get to watch Reacher snap Ahlquist's fingers and listen to him spill his guts long enough to not actually care when it is time for him to die. Sampson is, in fact, a Boy Scout as far as politicians go, and he really had no idea what was going on with Putra and the deal struck with the military.
The US military did help train Putra's army, but covert operations were also happening behind the backs of the lower-level foot soldiers. Ahlquist was the chemist on a separate mission to make a weapon of mass destruction, the worst possible thing the world could feasibly face, all so he could reverse-engineer it and come up with an antidote or precaution against it. Sampson knew nothing about this other operation happening under his nose that violated international law, and Cahill was the one who kept it from him.
Ahlquist admitted that his blind spot was disregarding the "grunts," looking at the soldiers as less than and beneath them, unintelligent beings who somehow would not know what he was doing. His viewpoint of the "trained monkeys" around him fueled much of what he did. He took the same work he was doing to create a weapon of mass destruction and used it to create pesticides for profit, hailing himself as a hero for feeding all of America.
The flashbacks reveal a strategic effort to get a photo of the formula for the weapon, which is why that picture was so important. Years later, thanks to technology, anyone who got ahold of that file would have the formula for the deadliest weapon of mass destruction in history. If it fell into the wrong hands, the world could be collectively doomed. Amisha and Lila are essentially picking up where Putra left off, trying to secure it, and their exchange with Djibouti was to get a suicide bomber willing to test it out in a massive form so they could sell it.