The second season of “The Terminal List” opens on a sailboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 172 days after James Reece (Chris Pratt) finished his list, with a man who is still arguing with a hallucination of Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch), the friend he killed at the end of the first season, while a brain tumor does the rest of the damage. Prime Video released all eight episodes on Wednesday, October 21st, four years after the first run, and very little of what follows looks like that boat. It is a bigger, louder and much more crowded show, adapted from Jack Carr’s second novel, “True Believer”, and the reviews disagree about whether those three things add up to better.
Collider, ScreenRant, TV Guide and CBR all came down on the side of better, and CBR’s review carries the headline “Better Than Ever”. JoBlo’s reviewer, who found the first season “average”, liked this one more than that season and more than the prequel series “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf”. Leisurebyte went the other way with a review headlined “Stale and Repetitive Sequel”, Midgard Times called the season “spectacularly unremarkable”, and FandomWire sat somewhere in the middle, praising a “pulse-pounding” thriller that, in its words, “trades emotional depth for international intrigue”. The fairest reading may be that both camps are describing the same show: a thriller that starts slowly, spreads itself across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Washington, and saves its biggest turns for the last three episodes. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for all eight episodes of “The Terminal List” season two, including the finale.
The fairest reading may be that both camps are describing the same show: a thriller that starts slowly, spreads itself across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Washington, and saves its biggest turns for the last three episodes.”
The first episode, “Romulus S.V.”, splits its hour between Reece’s boat and Washington, where the reporter Katie Buranek (Constance Wu) is defending him on television while her employer, Voltstreem Media, is being taken over by a billionaire media mogul named Vasili Adrenov (Costa Ronin), who is trying to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. A bomb and gunmen kill 113 people at a Christmas market in London, according to Review Geek, and when drones hit Adrenov’s motorcade, the CIA starts looking for the old comrade it blames, Mohammed “Mo” Farooq (Dar Salim). Reece, meanwhile, survives a storm and makes landfall in Mozambique. The second episode, “Warrior in a Garden”, parks him at a game reserve that belongs to the family of his friend Raife Hastings (Tom Hopper), where he helps train the staff against poachers until a gunfight leaves one of them badly wounded and Reece takes him to a hospital knowing it will blow his cover. By the end of the hour the CIA has found him.
While Reece hides, Raife is discovering that a shipment of drones he sold for Ukraine is one short, and when the same kind of drone turns up in the attack on Adrenov’s motorcade, his questions get his legal shipments shut down. In “Shooter Ready”, the CIA’s offer arrives through Reece’s old friend Freddy Strain (Gabriel Luna): a full pardon and surgery for the tumor in exchange for help finding Mo, whom Reece refuses to believe has turned. The operation is run from a black site in Morocco by Jules Landry (Luke Hemsworth), a returning character from “Dark Wolf”, and when the site comes under attack a cultural adviser dies smothering a suicide bomber and Reece recognizes some of the attackers as men he helped train in Iraq. Raife asks Katie for help, and she confronts a wealthy political donor who links two senators to the missing weapons. He dies in a car crash after a phone call that mentions something called Kestrel.
“Into the Labyrinth” moves to Beirut, where Reece slips away from his own team and lets Mo’s people take him. What Mo tells him is the season’s first big turn: he has been working undercover for the CIA all along, it was Landry who put him inside the terrorist network and gave the orders, and that makes Landry the mole the team has been hunting. Review Geek adds that Mo warns Reece of an attack on the scale of September 11th. In Washington, Katie, who is being made editor of Voltstreem, goes to an archive for a report on Kestrel and is shot more than once in the parking lot, and Raife arrives in time to kill the attacker who was about to finish her. It is probably the best use of the show’s split structure so far, because the two halves of the story are finally pulling on the same rope.
The fifth episode, “Frogman Sh$t”, is where the pieces start to meet. Raife gets the wounded Katie to a friend who can treat her away from a hospital, then visits an imprisoned former CIA man named Jed, who tells him that Kestrel was a shelved CIA program for arming militias in hostile countries and gives him a name to chase, Oliver Grey (Jeremy Bobb), a CIA analyst, because someone has quietly revived the program. Reece and Freddy watch a compound where Mo is due to meet the terrorist leader Amin al-Nawaz (Shadi Janho), and Landry turns up too and exposes Mo as a traitor. Freddy shoots al-Nawaz as he leaves, and Reece pulls Mo out. It is a clean, satisfying action episode, and it also ends the first villain before the real one has been named, which is a gamble.
“Rats in a Maze” is the season’s ugliest hour. Reece, Mo and their team capture Landry and spend most of the episode interrogating him. CBR says Hemsworth has “one of the most brutal scenes in a modern television series”, Review Geek calls the extended interrogation sequences particularly brutal, and Midgard Times lists a man alternately exposed to heat and cold as a form of torture among the season’s painful moments. What they get out of Landry is that two snipers are heading for Odesa, where a Ukraine-Russia peace summit is about to take place, and that the man behind it is a Russian ultranationalist known only as the Colonel. According to Review Geek, Landry also says the whole operation was built to target Reece personally. That recap has Raife following Grey to Athens, where Grey kills a weapons exporter before Raife can reach him.
The seventh episode, “Every Bullet Has Its Destiny”, puts Reece and Freddy in Odesa, where they work out that the Colonel is Ivan Zarkov and race to stop an assassination at the peace summit. Review Geek’s recap has the shooters hidden in a shipping container aboard a cargo ship, roughly 3,700 meters from the stage, and Reece fighting his way out of booby-trapped tunnels, and it calls the hour “arguably the strongest episode of the season”, comparing the hunt for the sniper to “The Day of the Jackal”. The shots land anyway. Russian President Drozdov is killed, Freddy dies trying to stop the shooters, and in the last scene, Review Geek says, Grey addresses Adrenov by another name, Mishka, a reveal that both that recap and Cinemaholic read as proof that the peacemaker was part of the plot all along. Review Geek also points out that Freddy, unlike Ben Edwards, never betrayed Reece, which is part of why the loss lands.
The finale, “Fathers and Sons”, opens with Reece’s goodbye to Freddy, a presidential pardon, an offer of surgery and a promise to find everyone responsible. Working with Raife, he realizes the Odesa shooting was a coup rather than another terrorist strike, meant to install new leadership in Russia, and the trail leads to Adrenov, who is using Voltstreem to blame the CIA and Ukraine for the killing. After a confrontation at an abandoned factory in Ukraine, Adrenov tells Reece that Freddy was never the target: the sniper was meant to kill Reece, as revenge for something his father did. Before he can say more, Reece kills him with his hatchet. Cinemaholic reads the moment as Reece answering a personal taunt with fury instead of strategy, and it is hard to argue, since a captured Adrenov would have been worth far more to the CIA than a dead one.
The real twist arrives a month later at Langley. In 1972, Reece learns, his father, Thomas Reece, killed two Russian military advisers in Vietnam, and one of them was the Colonel’s brother and Adrenov’s father, so the Colonel spent decades planning a revenge that would put his nephew in power with Thomas Reece’s son watching. Thomas never abandoned the family, either: he kept working for the CIA until he was assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1997, and his name is now on the agency’s memorial wall beside Freddy’s. Then comes the last hook, because Grey is wearing Thomas’s watch in an old photograph. Reece puts his $4 million into a trust for Freddy’s son, Katie hands him her finished book and goes back to field reporting, and the season ends with an MRI before surgery and Grey settled into a new home in Saint Petersburg. The show never says whether the tumor is gone, although Cinemaholic and Comic Basics both note that the novel confirms it is.
Where the season loses people is in the architecture. TV Guide argues that the events of “Dark Wolf” play so heavily into the story that “Dark Wolf is basically Season 2 and this is really Season 3”, and CBR and Collider both treat the prequel as recommended homework. ScreenRant liked the season but felt the series “could have benefited from spreading out the larger moments that get relegated to its final two episodes”, and Collider calls the plot “a bit more muddled than its predecessor”. Those complaints are real, and a season built to set up a third one may always spend its best material late.
Executive producer Jared Shaw told The AU Review that the show runs on an “80/20 rule: 80% authenticity and 20% Hollywood hot sauce”, and Pratt told ScreenRant that Reece begins the season as “a guy whose body has not died yet, but whose spirit seems to be willing to let go”. Prime Video has not announced a third season, Comic Basics notes, and it quotes showrunner David DiGilio telling TV Insider “if we’re lucky enough to get a third season” the next book is waiting. The Colonel, Grey and the surviving sniper are all still at large, which makes the pitch easy, and a Reece with a new list may be the version of this show that works best.
What Do You Think? Does the move from revenge to redemption give “The Terminal List” a story worth the four-year wait, or did the show lose something when Reece stopped being the hunter? Is “Dark Wolf” fair homework for the main series, or a sign that the franchise has too many moving parts? And should Reece’s tumor be gone, or is the season better with the question left open?
See you on the next binge!
