The Terminal List Season 2 Review: Chris Pratt's Action Thriller Is Back With a Vengeance

After four long years, Chris Pratt's action thriller series The Terminal List has finally returned for its second season on Prime Video. While it remains to be seen what that long gap between seasons means for viewer retention, the show actually seems to have benefited from a creative standpoint. The long lead time means Season 2 gets to be bigger and more ambitious, with an expanded cast, a globetrotting production, and a lot of action. It's still a meat-and-potatoes Dad Show that never met a tough guy cliche it didn't put in a BJJ choke, but that's not necessarily a big knock on a show like this, which is more about the potency of its tension and momentum than the quality of its writing. When an episode ends, it's impossible to not want to immediately start the next one. 

The Terminal List Season 2 picks up a few months after the end of Season 1, which found former Navy SEAL commander James Reece (Pratt) hunting down the people responsible for killing his platoon and his wife and daughter, the last of whom was his best friend Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch), a CIA operative who was involved in setting up the ambush that killed Reece's men. After killing Edwards and taking his boat, the wanted fugitive sets off toward Mozambique, where he plans to take refuge at the Hastings family's game reserve (his teammate Raife Hastings [Tom Hopper] is in America — more on him in a bit). 

Reece's story gets off to a slow, character-building start, with the first episode at sea and the second episode in Africa as he grapples with his feelings of grief and guilt. His part in the larger conspiracy plot doesn't get going until the CIA asks for his help finding another wanted man in Episode 3, and even then, he doesn't dovetail with Hastings and journalist Katie Buranek (Constance Wu) — who are investigating why weapons sold by Hastings' company keep ending up in the hands of terrorists — until pretty late in the season. Reece's narrative isolation makes the story feel disjointed, with the main character sidelined from the main plot for a quarter of the season. Fortunately, the supporting cast steps up and keeps the show moving. 

7.2

The Terminal List

at Prime Video

Like

• Adrenalized action
• Good work from the supporting cast

Dislike

• Disjointed plotting
• Too connected to spin-off Dark Wolf

While Season 1 was all Reece, Season 2 is more of an ensemble piece, with Hopper's stoic warrior and Wu's fiery truth-teller getting arcs of their own. Hastings is an important character in author Jack Carr's novel series who first appeared on screen in the Kitsch-led prequel spin-off The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, while Buranek returns from Season 1 with an even more important role to play this time. They make for a good team with a fun height disparity. 

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Pratt spends most of the season glowering and looking haunted, so a lot of the personality is provided by the supporting cast. Gabriel Luna is lovable as philosophical family man sniper Freddy Strain; Luke Hemsworth is despicable as debauched CIA operative Jules Landry; Dar Salim is soulful as Mo Farooq, an Iraqi soldier who previously worked with the SEALs but now seems to have switched sides; and Olga Kurylenko is passionately patriotic as Yana Tomenko, the right hand to Vasili Andrenov (Costa Ronin), a Ukrainian businessman who's trying to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. 

The Russia-Ukraine War provides a timely backdrop for the story. True Believer, Carr's novel on which the season is based, was published before the start of the war, and updating the story to include it gives the show the opportunity to consider America's present role in global order-keeping. The Terminal List is less cynical than Taylor Sheridan's somewhat similar Lioness, though both shows are skeptical of the CIA's trustworthiness. The Terminal List, however, is first and foremost concerned with honoring the operators who serve as the sheepdogs keeping the wolves away. If the show has an explicit political message, it's that servicepeople need to be respected, even if — or even because — they're willing to do anything to protect American people and ideals. "We fight evil," Strand tells Reece when Reece is struggling with the idea that he might not be a protector at all, just a killer. "Sometimes we go to the dark to do it." The Terminal List ultimately comes down on the side of the ends mostly justifying the means, and that soldiers are not responsible for the sins of their bosses, but there are consequences to becoming a human weapon, and the pull of the dark side is strong when your job is violence. 

One way the show respects the troops is through technical authenticity. Carr is a SEAL veteran, and the show has former SEALs among its writing, directing, and advisory staff. Two Season 2 episodes are co-directed by Ray Mendoza, who worked as a technical advisor on Season 1 before co-directing Warfare, the Iraq War film based on his own experiences as a SEAL. The Terminal List isn't as realistic as Warfare, but a lot of attention is paid to the weapons and tactics Reece and his teammates use. The action is consistently adrenalized and hard hitting. There are often short bursts of multiple action sequences per episode rather than a single setpiece, which keeps the show kinetic. The types of action sequences are diverse — there's a Heat -influenced urban shootout, a sniper battle, and a helicopter assault — and all are carefully detailed. The battles take place all over the world as the show jumps from Africa to the Middle East to Washington, D.C., to Ukraine. 

The dialogue is punchy and grim, full of macho aphorisms like "I've separated a lot of fathers from their sons." The conspiracy plot can be hard to follow, with a lot of mumbled exposition about Al-Qaeda, Russians, Ukrainians, the CIA, good guys who seem bad, bad guys who seem good, and Reece's family history, but the larger emotional story of Reece trying to figure out who he is after he's lost everything balances it out. The details are complicated, but the broad strokes are simple. 

The events of Dark Wolf play heavily into Season 2, to the point where Dark Wolf is basically Season 2 and this is really Season 3. It's generally not a good idea to make spin-offs required viewing to understand the main story, as Pratt should have learned from how trying to keep up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe turned into homework. But there are worse ideas than a Terminal List Cinematic Universe, where you never know when Raife Hastings might show up and double-tap somebody — especially if it means there aren't several years between seasons.

Premieres: Wednesday, Oct. 21 on Prime Video
Who's in it: Chris Pratt, Constance Wu, Tom Hopper, Gabriel Luna, Luke Hemsworth, Dar Salim, Olga Kurylenko
Who's behind it: David DiGilio (creator)
For fans of: Dad Shows
Episodes watched: 8 of 8