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The best (and most straightforward) part of “Reacher” season 3 is the introduction of Paulie (Olivier Richters), a guy whose main thing is that he’s big and strong. He is the Bane to Reacher’s Batman, the only true obstacle in the way of Reacher’s scheme to take down the season’s main villain Quinn.
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To make everything more intense, season 3 establishes that Paulie isn’t just strong enough to beat up Reacher — he’s a bad person in general. When Beck’s crew discovers that one of the maids (Annette, played by Caitlin McNerney) is an undercover agent, Paulie kills her off-screen in response. This decision proves both cruel and stupid, as Annette surely could’ve told them some important information if Paulie had let her live long enough for an interrogation. (You can argue that maybe Paulie killed her quickly to spare her from torture, but I don’t think that’s what the show was going for.)
As hard as this may be to believe, Paulie was even more evil in the books. There, Paulie tortures and regularly sexually abuses Elizabeth Beck, the wife of Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall). He also apparently raped Beck’s son Richard, and at one point tries to force Richard onto his own mother. It’s unpleasant stuff to say the least.
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In the show, Elizabeth is established to have died years ago, long before Quinn forced the Beck family into business with him. This means that Paulie’s disturbing behavior towards her is cut entirely from the show, as is any hint of Paulie assaulting Richard. Some fans feared this meant the show would make up for this by having book Paulie treat Annette in a similar way, but instead the show removes the sexual abuse aspect altogether. Although book fans of any franchise typically hate when an adaptation changes stuff, few Reacher fans seem upset about this particular adaptive choice.
Cutting Elizabeth Beck: probably for the best
There are a lot of easy arguments in favor of cutting Elizabeth out of the TV show. The first is that she doesn’t get to do much in the book; she’s there to be tormented and to be unhappy with her family’s situation, a role that’s already taken by Richard. The other argument is that scenes of sexual assault simply hit differently on screen. They’re harder to stomach when you can hear and see what’s happening, as opposed to reading about it at your own pace. That’s not even going into the strain on the actors — rape scenes are often hard to film for a lot of emotional and practical reasons. So if there’s an option to cut all that out from the show, it’s hard to blame the writers for taking it.
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The other argument for cutting Elizabeth is that the main goal of her storyline, to cement the reader’s hatred for Paulie, is something that didn’t require any sexual violence to accomplish. Viewers hated Paulie simply because of the way Olivier Richters played him, and they feared him because they could see with their own eyes how big he is compared to Reacher. In that insane, climactic fight scene between them in the season 3 finale, TV-only viewers had no trouble at all rooting for Reacher to take him down.
It helps that the show’s plans for Paulie’s death scene were not quite as brutal. In the show Paulie still seems to have the upper hand until the last moment, before his machine gun backfires and kills him. In the book, Reacher kills him slowly. He breaks Paulie’s hands, gouges his eyes, and spends another page or two forcing him to walk to the rocky shore, where Reacher shoots him and lets his body fall into the water. It’s a meaner death befitting a meaner character. TV Paulie is a fun, love-to-hate PG-13 villain, whereas book Paulie is a darker, realer, R-rated creep. For the more cartoonish version of Paulie we got in the show, a cartoonish death was a better fit.
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