Reacher Episode 4.1: Federal corruption, a gay-subtext sidekick, a lethal library, and The Girl. With Reach backside and Indonesian d*cks

  

Reacher, on Amazon Prime, stars the hunky gay ally Alan Ritchson as a drifter with a tragic past who helps the helpless, sort of like the Lone Ranger, but with more angst. There aren't any identified gay characters -- Amazon is not known for its inclusivity -- but I've found gay subtexts in several episodes, so I'm reviewing Episode 4.1 (2026).  At least Reach Boy will take his shirt off.

Link to the n*de photos

Scene 1: Reacher is on a subway, eating a cheese steak (so you know he's in Philadelphia). He cruises a mousy-looking middle-aged man. Into ratboys, Reacher?  No, he's using his Sherlock Holmes skills to figure out the home country, job, and psychological profile of the other passengers.  For instance, that woman crying and muttering to herself, her hands inside a blue purse: a suicide bomber!

He approaches and tries to talk her down, but she keeps crying and tells him to leave.  The train jolts, and she pulls out a gun.  Reacher thought it was a bomb. 

"I can help.  I was a cop before I became a drifter."

 "No one can help me now." She shoots!  Why do that on a subway?  

Scene 2: Reacher is interviewed by two detectives. The Bad Cop claims that they're going to arrest him for murder, but he realizes that they're just stalling.  Good Cop: "The feds are coming down from DC to ask you some questions, if you wouldn't mind sticking around."

"Ok, if you bring me a cheese steak." 

Left: Reacher in his underwear modeling days.

Another problem; He saw four other passengers in the subway car, but they only found three.  What happened to Ratboy? 

While he's waiting, we meet the victim's brother Jacob, still in shock.

Scene 3: Three feds arrive. He surmises that they're the B-team, roused from their beds to interview the last person to speak to the dead woman.  They won't tell him their agency or their names, so he calls them Snap (Jason Diaz, top photo), Crackle (Michael Gaty, left), and Pop.  The mascots of Kellogg's Rice Krispies.  Is that still around?

Left: Michael Gaty is gay in real life, but his character doesn't say anything identifiable.

They accuse Reacher of treason, and asked if he received anything from the victim. Nope.  

"Are you sure you didn't receive something, and hide it, planning to come back later?"

Nope.  "What are you so concerned about/"

They won't say, so he leaves.

But he's not done.  Two more guys get out of their car, speaking Indonesian (Armando Alera, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends, and Joe Labelle).  They ask  if she gave him anything. 

"No."

"Did you give the flash drive to the police?"  Didn't you hear what he just said?

They attack, so he clobbers them and walks away.

Scene 4: Jacob (Chris Marquette), the victim's brother, is in the coffee shop across the street. Reacher approaches him. 

"My adopted sister couldn't have done that, because she was a happy person.  She loved her job (Human Resources at an Army base), she loved her son (football star at Temple). Everything was perfect."  Hint: the important part is "adopted."

Reach asks if she had any enemies?  No -- the father of her son left when she got pregnant, then died in a car crash.  "I helped raise Ben."

You don't mention a wife and kids, Jake Baby.  For a 40-year old man, that's a clear queer code.

Son Ben doesn't know about his mother yet, since Jacob can't get ahold of him.  He's not answering his phone.  Well, it's only about 6:00 am.  He's probably still asleep.

Ben, played by Denis Wong (the one wearing clothes),  will appear in Episodes 2-4.  Looks like an ongoing story arc this season.

While they talk, the background song is "Morning, Noon, and Night," by Joe Turner:

Sit down baby, let's have a little drink
Love you, pretty baby, morning, noon, and night.

Come on, Reach, the guy just lost his sister.  This is not the right time to ask him out.

The Indonesians are back, so Reacher buys the flash drive of a coffee shop patron.  "You wait here and try to get in touch with your nephew.  I'll be back in 90 minutes.

There's a n*de Indonesian dude on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Indonesia is one of the most diverse countries in the world, with over 60 ethnic groups. mostly Austronesian (Javanese, Sundanese).  98% are Muslim.  The Indonesian language is a lingua franca formed from a standardized Malay. 

English: Get on your knees

Malay: Berlutut

Indonesian: Berlutut-lah

English: I have a big one

Malay: Saya mem-punyai zakar yang besar

Indonesian: Saya punya zakar yang besar

More after the break

Josh Henderson plays bad boys, gets tied up, but is too small or fundamentalist for n*de photos. With Vartan and Hutcherson to make up for it

  

I don't know what to think about Josh Henderson's whitebread name, generic handsomeness, and mildly muscular physique.  You can feel the privilege radiating out from his self-assured high-school jock smirk.  I don't know if I want to kiss him or slap him.

Link to the n*de photos

Or tie him up.  You know he'd make a good b*ndage bottom (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

According to his IMDB biography, Josh was born in...ugh...Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma.

His career started shortly after he graduated from Tulsa Memorial High School in 2000, on the talent show Popstars. This gained him a record contract, but the company went bankrupt before his record could be released.

So it was on to guest spots on Maybe Its Me and Do Over, and a starring role in the second season of  One on One (2002-03): A a sportscaster named Flex overprotects his teenage daughter, and disapproves of her relationship with the son of his hated rival.  Guess who plays the son.

Leeches (2003) is one of David DeCoteau's "gay people don't exist, but here are some guys hugging in their underwear" movies.  (They also get tied up and attacked by leeches.)

Josh's next major role was in Season 3 of Desperate Housewives (2006-07).  He played Austin McCann, the bad boy nephew of Edie Britt. He moves in with his fun-loving aunt and starts a relationship with the girl-next-door Julie, but an affair with a neighbor leads to a breakup, and he leaves Wisteria Lane forever. But Julie isn't exactly chaste: she goes on to have an affair with a married man, and gets (censored) after a  hookup with a friend (Charlie Carver, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

In Step Up (2006), Channing Tatum (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) plays a juvenile delinquent who becomes a dancer and meets The Girl, but she still has feelings for her ex-boyfriend. Guess who.

More after the break

Grit: Beefcake and Bonding in an Attic in Rural Indiana

Every summer, and sometimes at Christmas, we visited my Grandma Davis in Indiana.  She had an attic full of old magazines, and my brother and I used to spend rainy afternoons there, leafing through half a century worth of browning ephemera.

Today I get the impression of someone who longed for an urbane, sophisticated life as an artist in Jazz Age New York, but somehow found herself in a farmhouse in rural Indiana, with a husband who was gone weeks at a time, and spent her life lapsing between attempts to rebel and attempts to adapt:

Rebellion:  Nash's, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post

Adaption: Better Homes and Gardens, The Farmer's Wife, Grit

Grit?

Who would name a newspaper after that gross stuff that gets in your eye after you sleep?

Maybe it was grits, the gross Southern food made out of boiled corn.

It was like a tabloid newspaper, with lots of human interest stories: a blind guy who works as a postal carrier, a woman who found her lost wedding ring in an egg laid by her chicken, a traffic accident that reunited a father and his long-lost son.

Nothing that took place anything near a city: in the world of Grit, no settlement with a population over 2,000 exist in the U.S.

No foreign countries exist, either.  Or black people.  Or Jews.  Or women who weren't housewives.  Or gay men and lesbians.

But -- there were a lot of cute 4-H Boys holding up prize sheep, providing a hint of beefcake on rainy rural afternoons.

Here's a shirtless boy in a bunkhouse at the Millstone 4-H Camp in Ellerbee, North Carolina, 1961.

There were also pages of comic strips, some the old-fashioned dinosaur strips familiar from the Rock Island Argus -- Blondie Prince Valiant, Out Our Way -- and some even older.

Beefcake titles like  Jungle Jim, Mandrake the Magician, and Flash Gordon.

Very nice physique, for a guy from the 1930s with his head wrapped in a plastic bag.

Here's an ad from Grit about selling Grit.  

$6 in 1956 is the equivalent of $50 today.  Not a bad source of income.

Grit was founded in 1885 by German immigrant Dietrich Lamade.  It was especially popular in the 1930s and 1940s, with over 400,000 weekly subscribers, competing favorably with newspapers that wouldn't deliver to rural areas.

The decline of the rural population after World War II, and competition from radio and television, led to a nosedive in subscriptions.  By 2000, there were less than 10,000 subscribers, mostly elderly.

Under new management, Grit has rebranded itself  as a bimonthly blog and print magazine for food and gardening enthusiasts, with articles on free range chickens, hybrid tomatoes, and lawn mower maintenance.






The new Grit is more inclusive, with racial and religious minorities, urban dwellers, and gay men and lesbians:

"Who do you call when you have an animal in trouble?  The ladies next door are at work, and I can no longer phone the gay guys down the street because they have me blocked since we had a shouting match about being invited to a Pampered Chef party, so I call the SPCA."

 It has over 150,000 subscribers.

Felix Beauperin: French theatrical actor has some queer codes and looks nice beneath the belt, but has he appeared in anything I can stream?

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I don't usually profile the European actors who appear on the n*de celebrity subreddit: if their work is not available for me to stream, how can I check for gay content?  But Felix Beauperin is so cute, and is so impressive beneath the belt, that I'm going in anyway.  

Nice backside, too.

The n*de scene is from Le banquet d'Auteuil, performed at the Theatre 14 in Paris in 2015, and released on video in 2016: Famous playwright Molière (Jean-Baptiste Marcenac), tiring of his wife cheating on him, invites protégé Michel (Felix) and his friend Chapelle (Hervé Lassïnce) to dinner at his country home in the village of Auteuil (now in the 16th arrondissement, near the Eiffel Tower).  Some men from his acting troupe shows up to mock his bourgeouis jealousy.  While not fully clothed.

In the clip I watched, Michel orders two of the actors to kiss.

Background note: Molière is more famous in France than in Britain and the U.S., but you may have seen his Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, or The Imaginary Invalid.

Felix is primarily a theatrical actor.  His most recent productions include:

En Thérapie, an adaption of the Israeli tv series BeTipul, about a psychologist whose life is falling apart.  He plays Thomas Castellane, a surly patient. 

This guy looks nothing like the n*de dude above, but Felix posts him on his Instagram, so...

Le Petit Coiffeur:  Lies, secrets, and forgiveness in a hair salon in Chartres, 1944 -- just after the Liberation, when Allied forces defeated the Nazis in France.  Felix plays Pierre, a young hairdresser.  In an interview, he talks about his character's love for his mother and brother, but doesn't mention being gay.

Potiche, about chaos in the Pujol family when Mom Suzanne has to take over as head of the umbrella factory.  Felix plays her son Laurent, a fey art student with an absent fiancée (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

Left: Laurent was played by Jérémie Renier, in the 2010 movie version. 

Life is a Dream, by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Prince Sigismond of Poland (Felix)  has been imprisoned in a tower by his father.  He briefly escapes, but Dad re-captures him and convinces him that it was all a dream.

More after the break