If you’ve been watching the third season of the popular Amazon Prime Video action-thriller series Reacher, keep an eye out in the third episode for scenes shot in downtown Millbrook — including a cameo appearance by Millbrook’s popular Pastry Peddler.
Based on the best-selling books by British author Lee Child, Alan Ritchson stars as the titular character Jack Reacher, a brawny yet astute former military policeman known only by his last name who becomes a drifter after leaving the army, using uses his expertise and physical strength and combat skills to solve crimes and right wrongs.
Millbrook is standing in for a town in Maine during the third episode of the third season, which is based on Child’s 2003 novel Persuader. The scenes were filmed on King Street in Millbrook last April.
The seventh book in the series, Persuader finds Reacher working covertly with Susan Duff of the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down Zachary Beck, a businessman who lives on the coast of Maine and is suspected of smuggling drugs under the pretext of trading in rugs, and to safely retrieve an undercover DEA agent who appears to have been discovered and kidnapped by Beck’s henchmen.
But Reacher’s primary motivation is more personal. He wants to exact revenge on Beck’s boss, a former military intelligence agent named Francis Xavier Quinn who Reacher thought he had killed 10 years earlier after Quinn brutally mutilated and murdered Dominique Kohl, a rising star in the military police under Reacher’s command.
Through an elaborate deception involving Beck’s son Richard, Reacher goes undercover to not only try to help find the missing agent but also to track down his villainous adversary.
In the third episode of the third season, entitled “Number 2 with a Bullet,” Millbrook is the real-life location of a fictional town in Maine where Reacher takes Richard (Johnny Berchtold).
The pair first visit the Time Warp Toys store (The Joneses Store in real life), where Richard buys a cap gun as a gift for his father. Later, while Reacher is otherwise engaged, Richard walks across the street as three men emerge from Ricky’s Hardware Store (Millbrook Home Hardware in real life). After the three men harass and assault Richard on account of his father, Reacher appears and steps in to dispatch the bullies.
Richard and Reacher then sit down on a bench in front of the real-life Pastry Peddler to have a five-minute conversation before leaving the town.
The filming of the Reacher episode in Millbrook is only one example of the picturesque town’s popularity as a location in the film and television industry.
Films shot in Millbrook include 2003’s The Music Man starring Matthew Broderick, David Cronenberg’s 2005 film A History of Violence, and 2009’s Let It Snow, among others. Along with Reacher on Amazon Prime Video, scenes have been shot in Millbrook for the Netflix series Jupiter’s Legacy (2020) and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2021), as well as for the Canadian TV series Murdoch Mysteries and Anne with an E.
The first three episodes of the third season of Reacher are now available on Amazon Prime Video, with additional episodes of the eight-episode series premiering weekly every Thursday until March 27.
