Taylor Kitsch and Chris Pratt are back in action for more thrilling covert ops thrills and chills in The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, streaming on Prime Video. Set five years before the events of season one, Adam Fresco asked: is there enough going on to keep viewers hooked? The answer: hell to the yeah.
Taylor Kitsch’s character Ben Edwards gets the prequel treatment in this spin-off from hit action series, The Terminal List. My biggest question going in was is there enough in Ben’s journey from Navy SEAL to covert black ops CIA operative to keep viewers hooked? The answer? A resounding, heart-pounding, “Hell to the yeah!”
Action-packed? Affirmative. Gripping? Absolutely. Bingeworthy? You bet.
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You don’t have to be an afficionado of The Terminal List, because the origin story told in Dark Wolf works as an introduction to the characters for newbies, whilst simultaneously offering a deep dive delight for ardent fans. Based on the bestselling novels by Jack Carr, this new venture into Ben Edwards’ backstory pulls double duty, setting up The Terminal List season two whilst also acting as a full-on flashback, filling in the backstories of central characters. That said, viewers new to the franchise won’t need to do any homework to enjoy the action, thanks to tight scripting, no-nonsense direction, and a committed cast.
Taylor Kitsch has long proved his dramatic chops in the likes of hard-hitting dramas American Primeval and Waco. Here, he brings convincing grit and realism to an action hero who is no hulking Jack Reacher, nor superpowered Steve Rogers, but a soldier pushed to the extremes, facing extraordinary odds, and rising to the occasion, no matter the physical and psychological damage. That’s what makes this drama so compelling. The characters aren’t invincible. They’re flesh and bone. Cut them and they bleed. Lie to them and their moral certainties waver. Betray them and they’ll seek revenge for what they believe to be right.
Set five-years before the events portrayed in The Terminal List, this new spin-off is no straight-up US military advert disguised as a serial drama. This is a genre show that embraces the murky world of covert military operations, intelligence and espionage. Ben, as portrayed by Kitsch, is no simple cookie-cutter hero, but a complex, morally compromised character pushed to the edge, where lines between right and wrong don’t so much get blurred as blown clean away.
As a backstory for fans of the original show, it serves as a solid exploration as to what drove Ben from military hero, to a questionable operative working in the murky moral grey areas of clandestine operations. It’s a great hook for drama, as it’s Ben’s core desire to remain loyal to his fellow soldiers and do what he believes is right that lead inexorably to his descent into the moral quagmire of the modern geopolitical maze.
Joining Kitsch from the cast of the original show is Chris Pratt, as James Reece. Once more Pratt drops the likeable doofus everyman schtick of Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World. Instead, Pratt returns to the hard-as-nails, military mindset of characters like the Navy SEAL he portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s tense tale of the events leading up to Osama Bin Laden’s final hours.
Together, Pratt and Kitsch continue to offer compelling portrayals of would-be heroes fighting in the dense fog of modern warfare. Dark Wolf loses none of the rounded character psychology, compelling storytelling, narrative twists and enthralling action of the original series.
Whilst the show might be criticized as following a familiar thriller narrative, the show’s true thrills remain not in what happens, but in how it happens, and in its depiction of the real human cost of violence and the toll it takes. Ultimately, it’s the dramatic chops of Dark Wolf that impress most, with the show putting its core cast through the emotional wringer, in an intense tale of a world in which violence is common currency.
For viewers of The Terminal List the biggest questions are around what got Ben kicked out of the Navy SEALs in the first place? No spoilers, but that’s the central focus of Dark Wolf, as it reveals the incidents that lead inexorably to Ben’s warm ideals of brotherhood and loyalty clashing with the cold, harsh steel of America’s military machine.
We finally get to see what happens when Ben’s platoon is ambushed whilst on a clandestine mission, but what or who caused the resulting tragedy is the big question hanging over the show. With the mission messed up beyond all recognition (or, to use the military acronym, “FUBAR”), Ben’s status as a Navy SEAL is compromised. Don’t worry though: Ben isn’t in the wasteland long before the US intelligence services realise his value seeing in him, as Ben’s CIA recruiter tells him, a soldier “willing to do what it takes to make an actual difference”.
Shot with the immediacy and edge of the original series, this is quality action drama, with stylistic shades of the realistic action of the Paul Greengrass-directed Jason Bourne movies, and the thrilling intensity of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. Like those movies, the series shares not just great camerawork and editing, but a sense of realism that plunges viewers into the confusion and paranoia induced by a world in which nothing is ever what it seems and nobody is certain of anything except the knowledge that their opponents are heavily armed.
Ben’s new position as a clandestine paramilitary operator places him in new places with new people, including Raife Hastings (played by the imposing Tom Hopper) who, like Ben, is fighting demons of his own. As Raife tells Ben: “My father used to tell me that some men will go to war to fight the enemy, but others will seek war to fight themselves.” It’s a recurring theme in the show, as we follow characters at war with themselves, traumatized by their actions, and the violence they have both experienced and inflicted. How do warriors tell wrong from right, or good from bad, in a world in which truth and morality are in constant flux?
Reflecting this shift in focus, the battlegrounds the protagonists fight in are no longer the war-ravaged desert streets of Middle Eastern cities, towns and villages, but amidst the commuters and nightclubbers, shopping malls and homes of wealthy cities unblemished by the ferocity and bloodshed of faraway wars. This gives the drama new scope, as Ben and his fellow operatives hunt their prey through the streets and back alleys of familiar cityscapes, amidst the chaos of shoppers, workers, and commuters going about their regular days, unaware of the danger in their midst. These scenes lend the show a gritty tension, leveraging our recognition of ordinary life, and adding dangers unseen by all but the highly-trained hunters and their lethal prey.
With the lead actors supported by a solid cast of character actors, including Luke Hemsworth and Robert Wisdom, the focus is firmly on making the drama as realistic, morally complex, and tense as possible. At times claustrophobic in its intensity, always gripping, and never shying away from violence or its consequences, Dark Wolf is an espionage thriller that strives for grounded authenticity in tracing Ben’s winding path from Navy SEAL to CIA operative.
Fans of the grim, violent, and unrelentingly tough worlds of dramas such as Reacher and Jack Ryan, and of course The Terminal List, will dig Dark Wolf. Gritty, dark, tense and twisting, this action-fuelled prequel retains the realism of the original series, delivering an insightful, in-depth character study of a former soldier thrust into a shadowy world of spies, subterfuge and sinister villains whose hidden agendas crash against old school values of comradeship, loyalty, and trust. Dark Wolf offers drama with a bitter bite of realism and a high dose of adrenaline-fueled action, intense storytelling, paranoia, chills and relatable characters whose moral codes are tested to the max under extreme circumstance.
