Reacher Season 3 Actor Explains Episode 5’s Major Death: It’s ‘Horrendous’

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Reacher Season 3 Actor Explains Episode 5’s Major Death: It’s ‘Horrendous’

Reacher Season 3 Episode 5, titled “Smackdown,” became available for streaming on Prime Video on March 6, 2025, and features the death of a major character. In a new interview, Actress Sonya Cassidy, who plays Special Agent Susan Duffy in the show, reflected on this new development and how it will impact her character.

Sonya Cassidy on Steven Eliot’s death in Reacher Season 3 Episode 5

A member of Duffy’s team, Daniel David Stewart’s rookie DEA agent Steven Eliot, is killed in Reacher Season 3 Episode 5. Eliot makes a fatal mistake in agreeing to John Cooper’s (Ronnie Rowe) insistent request to hand over a cigarette. As Eliot ignites a lighter, Cooper spits alcohol at him, burning his face. Afterward, the bodyguard kills Eliot by stomping on his face multiple times. While speaking to TVLine, Cassidy called Eliot’s death “horrendous” before explaining the effect it would have on Duffy and the rest of her team.

“It is unimaginable to lose one of your team, someone who was so young…,” Cassidy stated, adding that it also was “a tragic sign of where they’re at at that point” in their investigation of Anthony Michael Hall’s Zachary Beck and Brian Tee’s Xavier Quinn.

Cassidy continued by noting that her character and her team were dying, losing to their adversaries, and were nowhere near locating Duffy’s CI Teresa. She added, “So in that moment, we’re at a crossroads with Duffy. She’s like, ‘Do I continue doing this? How much longer do I keep trying?’ But she is so determined and driven that she chooses the path of, ‘His death cannot have been for nothing, so let’s just f—— do this.’”

Despite the setbacks, Cassidy stated that Duffy was still determined to finish her mission. “‘I [Duffy] am not walking away from this, I cannot walk away, having lost a young man’s life and still having not having found Teresa,'” she said.

Notably, Eliot (book spoilers ahead) appears in Persuader, the Lee Child book the show is based on. He doesn’t die this early in the narrative there, but it still occurs.