Halfway through the new “Terminal List” trailer a stretcher is carried past a line of paramedics in high-visibility jackets, and across the bottom of the frame a BBC News banner reads ATTACK IN LONDON KILLS 113. It is a small piece of set dressing and it is also the whole pitch for season two, because the first season of this show was a revenge story that took place almost entirely inside one man’s grief. Prime Video put the trailer out on 17 September ahead of a 21 October return, and the thing it is most concerned with is making James Reece somebody else’s problem again.
The season runs eight episodes, with the first four arriving together on the premiere date, and David DiGilio is still running the show he adapted from Jack Carr’s novels. Chris Pratt returns as Reece. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Terminal List” season two trailer, including the offer the government makes to Reece, the location the season moves to, and how much of this footage has already been seen.
The first season of this show was a revenge story that took place almost entirely inside one man’s grief.”
We wrote about this problem in August, when the teaser landed, and the argument then was that “The Terminal List” had killed its own premise on purpose. Reece finished his list. The conspiracy that murdered his wife, his daughter and his platoon was dismantled by the end of season one, which is a satisfying place to stop and a very difficult place to continue from, and the teaser we saw at the time did not answer the question.
This trailer answers it, and the answer is a pardon. Somewhere past the midpoint a voice tells Reece that the president is willing to grant him a full pardon for his crimes and give him his life back, which is the single most important sentence in the cut, because it converts a fugitive into an asset without asking him to apologise for anything he did.
The justification is handed to somebody in a briefing room, and it is the kind of line a show writes when it wants the audience on board with a morally awkward recruitment. “James Reece made a career out of putting terrorists in the dirt. He may be exactly what we need for this fight.” That is the season’s thesis delivered as a personnel recommendation, and it works precisely because the first season spent eight hours proving the first half of the sentence.
Around it the trailer builds an argument about scale. One voice notes that the latest attacks suggest someone bigger is funding and arming these operations, and warns that it is only a matter of time before this hits home. The London chyron is what “hits home” looks like, and the cut puts Tower Bridge on screen at dusk shortly afterwards, lit up and entirely peaceful, which is a fairly old trick and an effective one.
Geographically, this is a much wider season than the last one. There is a desert compound shot from above, a North African or Middle Eastern courtyard with a figure walking away down a whitewashed arcade, a European city seen from a rooftop with red tiles running to the horizon, a military funeral under a row of flags, and a stretch of English high street filmed through a windscreen. Season one was California, Wyoming, and a great deal of forest, shot close and kept small. This one has a travel budget, and it wants you to notice.
Pratt is playing two versions of the man across the cut, and that is the most interesting craft decision on display. In some shots he is bearded, weathered, and standing on a beach in the flat, unhelpful light of somewhere he should not be, which is the fugitive. In others he is clean-shaven in a plain blue t-shirt, sitting indoors, looking down at nothing, which is the grief. The trailer cuts between the two without explaining the order, and it never settles whether the beard belongs to the past or the present.
Here is the measurement nobody else has run on this trailer, and it is the reason the cut feels bigger than it should. We downloaded both the 20 August teaser and the 17 September trailer, sampled each at two frames a second with the letterboxing cropped away, and compared every frame of the new cut against every frame of the old one. Excluding the YouTube end screens, which are identical on every Prime Video upload and will wreck this measurement if you leave them in, 24 of 220 sampled frames were recycled.
That is eleven per cent, which leaves eighty-nine per cent of the sampled runtime unseen before this week. Read it as a share of runtime, not as a shot count, since frames inside a single shot are near-identical by definition, but the direction is not in doubt. The teaser ran seventy-seven seconds, this trailer runs a hundred and thirty-five, and Prime Video has spent that extra minute almost entirely on material nobody has watched.
The handful of shots that do repeat are worth naming, because they tell you what the marketing considers load-bearing. Pratt looking down in the blue t-shirt is in both. So is a child’s crayon drawing laid on a table beside a pistol and a pair of binoculars, which is the single most efficient image the show has ever cut. A hangar with an aircraft and a large painted letter W repeats, as does an older man in a suit under a chevron of ceiling light, and a Christmas market with a man watching from against a brick wall.
A word of caution about the dialogue, because this upload carries no proper caption track, and the automatic one is unreliable. It renders one line as a sentence about a liver that makes no sense in any context, and it produces a character surname that is simply wrong. Everything quoted here has been checked against the picture, or against lines clean enough to stand on their own, and anything garbled has been left out rather than guessed at.
What survives that filter is sharp. “I’m done running,” the line Deadline put in its headline, is the clearest statement of the season’s direction. “Let’s finish the list” is a deliberate, slightly cruel echo of a job the show already finished. Somebody tells Reece that he is dying, which probably means the brain tumour from season one has not been quietly retired. And an old colleague asks whether he is still the same James Reece from sniper school, which is the question the season is built around.
The best line lands near the end, and it is aimed squarely at the premise. A voice runs through the names caught up in whatever this is, pauses, and then observes that the common thread is starting to sound like Reece himself. That is the show conceding, out loud, that its hero is a magnet for catastrophe, and on the evidence of this cut it is probably a setup rather than a confession.
“The Terminal List” returns on 21 October on Prime Video, with four episodes at once and four to follow. The pardon is the hinge, London is the escalation, and the trailer is close to entirely new footage, which is not something a studio does when it is nervous about what it has. Whether a sanctioned Reece is as interesting as an unsanctioned one may be the whole question of the season, and this cut is careful not to answer it.
What Do You Think? Does a presidential pardon give “The Terminal List” a workable second premise, or does it soften the thing that made the first season work? Should a revenge show continue at all once the revenge is finished? And is moving the violence to London an escalation or a reset?
See you on the next binge!
