I recently finished the second season of Reacher on Prime, and while not having read Lee Child’s books based on the character Jack Reacher, I have really appreciated the ethos of the show. A lot of smart people I know are meanwhile baffled as to why Reacher is so damn popular, and I realized that the series’ popularity says a lot about modern life in America.

Don’t get me wrong, the primary appeal of Reacher is still the fact that it’s a genre best summarized by one of my favorite editors: “Big man hit things.”

Big men are fun and violence is fun as long as it’s on the screen, and you don’t have to overthink it.

There is also a curious blankness about Alan Ritchson’s portrayal of Reacher, in a way that allows the character to become a kind of Rorschach test, or a cypher. As a viewer, you can tease out whatever you want. Maybe Reacher is your libertarian fantasy. Maybe Reacher is just hot. Maybe you like his stubbornness, or his seamless ability to deal out vengeance and get back on the road again, pass like a knife through other people’s lives and be on his way.

Still, it’s also no coincidence that people respond very strongly to Reacher as he battles corrupt, murderous cops, duplicitous FBI agents, and oily lawmakers with spurious agendas.

“Trust no one” was a tagline that invited us into the world of government conspiracies decades ago when The X-Files became a huge hit. Reacher inhabits a society where trusting authority is similarly dangerous, but the conspiracies themselves are less elaborate — they just come down to greed, maybe a bit of sociopathic bullshit, but mostly greed.

Reacher is all classic action on the surface — elaborate fighting sequences, twists and turns, dastardly villains — but look under the hood and what drive this engine are problems we regularly worry about: small-town cops drunk on power, crumbling infrastructure and the devil’s bargains local governments may enter for the sake of repairing it, a government contract farmed out to shady assholes, the ever lurking but hard to define threat of terrorism.

None of this is fantastical. The first season in particular dealt well with the claustrophobia inherent in corruption, the way it squeezes you from all sides, but the second season, while more elaborate and thus less believable, still took potshots at the familiar sleaziness of powerful congresspeople and the mobster-like attitudes that can be found in well-funded police departments in this nation.

I really understood why Reacher resonated with me so much when I sat down to watch Netflix’s American Nightmare, a documentary look at how police and the FBI woefully and maliciously mishandled the case of a rapist-turned-kidnapper in California.

As the documentary keeps hammering home, if you’re white and from a nice neighborhood and are the victim of a terrible crime, you might expect law enforcement to help you.

In reality, that’s far from guaranteed. And as American Nightmare makes clear, both the police and FBI will have impunity in the end.

There’s a reason why the documentary’s language is so generalized; this nightmare is American, because it affects us all. It makes us doubt our institutions, our media, and even our neighbors.

The victims at the center of the story are failed by almost everyone around them. The bad guy is ultimately punished, but his enablers are not.

Reacher is the juggernaut that says, “Fuck that.” Some people believe he appeals to our inner sense of lawlessness, but considering his vicious need to protect children from predators and his disdain for the material trappings of life — the guy travels with a toothbrush, that’s about it — I think that reading is wrong (and just as wrong if we consider him to be the above-mentioned libertarian fantasy).

I think Reacher instead embodies a very powerful human need for justice — and our understanding that true justice is often inconvenient.

In our daily lives, we make do with the tools that are available to us. In our TV lives, we watch Reacher burst through a wall to deliver justice anyway.

It’s a good feeling. I hope it lasts through season three.