Spoilers for Reacher Season 3, Episode 4 – “Dominique” – are ahead. If you have not seen the episode yet, you can stream it with an Amazon Prime subscription and catch new episodes on Thursdays.
Following Reacher’s epic three-episode return on the 2025 TV schedule, its fourth episode gave us a lot of lore to think on. This episode, titled “Dominique,” told us the story of Reacher’s former colleague Dominique Kohl, and it revealed the personal reason behind the titular character’s motivation for taking on the gig Season 3 is based around. It’s a vital episode, and Kohl is a vital character, as Alan Ritchson explained when he told me why Mariah Robinson’s performance as her “saved the entire season.”
I need to make this abundantly clear: Dominique Kohl is vital to Reacher’s story this season. In this flashback episode, it’s revealed that the two of them were working on a mission to take down Xavier Quinn. When they think they have him, Reacher sends Kohl to get him by herself, and that results in her death. So, Alan Ritchson’s character is out for revenge, and that becomes obvious, thanks to his performance and Robinson’s as Dominique.
Explaining that point further, Ritchson told me:
That episode is the heart and soul of this entire season. If we don't understand why he wants to go after the antagonist so bad – you know, he calls [him] the most evil guy he's ever met – this is the inciting incident for that. But it also helps us understand Reacher’s values, you know, and who he works with. I mean, this is the first teammate that he's ever adopted.
Dominique Kohl is a vital piece of Reacher’s mythology; she was his equal, and her death is a tragic example of the disastrous things that have happened on these dangerous missions. It's also an example of Reacher failing, and that guilt is driving him this season.
To succeed in showing us all that, Robinson had to make us love and respect Dominique immediately, which she did. She also had to prove that she was Reacher’s equal in terms of skill, and she did. This meant she had to crush the military dialogue and pull at our heartstrings, which was no easy task, as Ritchson explained:
And, man, she absolutely crushed that role. I gotta say, I've been in this business close to 20 years, I've worked on a lot of different things, I've met a lot of different challenges. You know, even with Reacher, there are some times that we've had to, with very little time to prepare, rip through just pages of complex dialogue. I don't think I've ever seen a more difficult role as an actor.
This is why the actress saved the season for Ritchson. He told me her talents made Episode 4 special. And to me, this story gave us the heartbeat for the whole season. It was a heavy lift, but she pulled it off with grace, as the Reacher star explained:
She, without a doubt, saved this entire season. I don't know who else could have done [it]. I mean, she was so incredibly talented, and she had the hardest, heaviest lift of the entire season and of any role I've ever seen in my career, face to face. And she really nailed it.
While being thrown into walls and fighting a 7’2” man this season is extra hard, Ritchson also didn’t downplay how challenging learning expositional dialogue and jargon can be.
Robinson had to do a lot of that alongside him to pull off this major episode about Reacher’s past, and the actor was blown away by how well she did it, saying:
I don't think people can appreciate just how difficult that kind of dialogue and that pacing and the military jargon and the speed at which she had to do it in the interrogation scenes, wildly, wildly difficult. [As] somebody who is pretty good at dialogue, I've never seen anything quite like it.
So, next time you watch this great Amazon Prime show, while you appreciate the action, also appreciate the other challenging elements of Reacher – like the technical dialogue and emotional beats. Alan Ritchson sure does, and I do too, especially after seeing Mariah Robinson smash her role as Dominique Kohl.
She was only in one episode, but in less than an hour, I fell in love with her, understood her deep connection to Reacher, and totally got why her death motivated Alan Ritchson’s character to take on the dangerous job he’s working right now.
You know what they say: she might be gone, but she'll never be forgotten.
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