Posted by A curiosity few people noticed in Reacher Season 2: Neagley uses two fake names for her and Jack Reacher, Sarah Connor, and Starlin Castro. Who are they?
Season 2 of Reacher landed on Amazon Prime Video in December 2023, allowing us to follow the adventures of the former army major and his mysterious collaborators. This time, the plot is based on another book by Lee Child, Bad Luck and Trouble, and involves the components of the infamous 110th Special Investigations Unit, a dedicated team Jack Reacher led many years before. It’s where Jack Reacher developed a close relationship with Frances Neagley, his most loyal collaborator.
As usual, the stories we see on TV often include hidden references, hints, and details we better take notice of. They call them easter eggs for a reason: inside jokes that not everybody initially understands. In the first episode of Reacher Season 2, there is an exciting one: when the New Age guys tail Neagley and Reacher, the boss, Shane Langston, asks one of his guys, Saropian, if he found them. Saropian answers that Neagley booked two rooms for her and Jack Reacher under the names Sarah Connor and Starlin Castro. At some point, Saropian asks, “Who’s Sarah Connor?” (in the English subtitles, she’s actually mentioned as Sarah Conner), and Langston answers, “I don’t give a s–t.” Of course, that left the viewers curious: who’s Sarah Connor?
As the conversation progresses in that episode, we immediately discover who Starlin Castro is: a baseball infielder who played for the New York Yankees in 2016-2017. It’s a curious choice, Starlin Castro is pretty famous in New York, and that’s the city where Neagley rented that room for Jack Reacher. A sort of provocation that perfectly fits the character and makes the other answer more interesting. Sarah Connor, the alias she used for herself, is one of the main characters in The Terminator: she’s the woman the antagonist wants to kill, protected by Schwarzenegger’s character. To close the circle, Robert Patrick, the actor playing Shane Langston in Reacher, is the same who interpreted the antagonist in Terminator 2, the one who wants to kill Sarah Connor in the franchise’s second movie. So hearing him while he implies he has no clue about who Sarah Connor is is quite hilarious.
You can refresh your memory about who Sarah Connor is in The Terminator with the iconic scene below from the first movie of the Terminator franchise.
Therefore, the aliases Neagley uses for Reacher and herself in New York tell us a lot about her self-vision and how she sees Jack Reacher. By choosing Sarah Connor and Starlin Castro as their aliases, we can understand that she sees Jack Reacher as a sort of celebrity and herself as a charismatic woman who can save the world: in The Terminator, Sarah Connor is the woman who will give birth to the son who’ll save the future world from the artificial intelligence Skynet.
Just a few people noticed the reference. It’s a juicy easter egg; it takes a small space in the plot, but that’s enough to make Reacher Season 2 particularly exciting, especially knowing the special connection Jack Reacher has with Frances Neagley.
