"The Terminal List," Season 1: review

James Reece (Chris Pratt) catches and gets ready to gut one of the people on his list

[WARNING: spoilers.]

All eight episodes of Season 1 of Amazon Prime Video's "The Terminal List" came out just this month (July 2022), and I have now binged the whole season. "The Terminal List" is based on a novel of the same name by Jack Carr, a former Navy SEAL sniper and platoon leader. The series stars Chris Pratt as Lieutenant Commander James Reece, leader of a platoon that is ambushed and mostly killed during an op gone wrong in Syria. The rest of the series plays out as something between a mystery and a revenge drama, with the wild-card factor being that Reece can't necessarily rely on his own memory of events.

I suppose it's not spoiling things to talk about what gets the plot rolling: in the first episode, it's not enough that Reece loses almost all of his platoon—not long after, his wife and young daughter are killed, too. While the series briefly toys with the ambiguity of whether Reece might have killed his own family, this issue is quickly resolved in the negative. Reece, it turns out, is not merely suffering from the trauma of the recent op: he's also got a rapidly developing brain tumor, which basically means the clock is ticking. The one soldier who survived the op along with Reece ends up dead of an apparent suicide, and it becomes obvious to Reece that something is very wrong, and that someone is trying to cover something up. With the help of war correspondent Katie Buranek (Constance Wu, looking a little too doe-eyed and innocent for her role) and his CIA buddy Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch, tough as usual), Reece goes in search of answers, making a list of names and crossing each name off as he gets answers and dispenses with the people who, it turns out, are all in on an intricate conspiracy.

We've walked this road a million times before, in movies and on TV. Viewers will recognize elements of "24" and "Rambo" and God-knows-how-many scenarios in which someone trained by the government gets betrayed and ends up turning against the government. As I thought about this template, it occurred to me that it actually shares DNA with older stories like Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the creation escapes the control of its creator. And all the familiar tropes are in place: the supporting characters who give exposition dumps about how noble the main character is, the soldiers who vouch that the main character is both a man of integrity and a stone-cold killer, the police who rattle off the main character's military awards to show us how badass he is, etc., etc. It's all there; very little of this plot is original. And if you're a leftie who sees patriotism and automatically thinks it's jingoism, then you're going to hate this series because it's got more than a few red-white-and-blue moments about the goodness of fellow soldiers, the nobility of the overall fight, and the need to exact justice.

While the series tries very hard to use Reece's deteriorating mind as a device to keep us from knowing what might be real and what might be delusion, it occasionally zooms back to something like a third-person-omniscient point of view that lets us know that Reece, despite his incapacity, is essentially on the right track. When it comes to the conspiracy, he's not seeing things. It might have added to the suspense if Reece had accidentally killed someone he'd thought was guilty, only to find out later that his target had been completely innocent. But while he isn't quite a Gary Stu (the male version of a Mary Sue, Gary Stus generally don't have brain tumors), he's close, and like his action-series cousin Jack Bauer, James Reece's intuition is never wrong.

The series also doesn't do a very good job of hiding who the final bad guy is. I knew, from Episode 1, who the ultimate baddie was going to be; the writing telegraphed it in a painfully obvious way, and while the notion of "subverting expectations" has taken a beating since at least "The Last Jedi," a little subversion, in this case, might've been nice. I found myself wishing and hoping that I would be wrong about the final bad guy, but the series went right where I thought it was going to go, following an old narrative template that basically says the guy you're looking for has been under your nose the whole time.

That said, the series is a hard hitter, balancing Reece's surreal and repeated hallucinations of a particular day in his life with tense action scenes that pit Reece against the FBI and fellow SEALs in both urban and mountain settings. Some of the action is downright bloody: when Reece finds the guy who killed his family (a Mexican sicario), he strings the guy up and pulls a gruesome Jack Bauer on the dude's abdomen. And in the tradition of all great heroic tales, Reece's adventures wear him down, forcing him to rely on his considerable wits, never accepting defeat even when resources are scarce. In these kinds of stories, characterization means going through the wringer. Author Stephen R. Donaldson said something similar about his own characters: what's the point in writing about people who don't go through hell to get what they want? Agree or disagree with this philosophy as you will.

The series also employed some head fakes that made me think So-and-so was going to be a real challenge or one of the top villains, but the plot proved to be twistier and more subtle than that (except for the aforementioned unsurprising reveal of the final baddie). Certain characters seem to go from good to bad to good again; Katie Buranek is one such person: she sometimes seems to want to help James, and at other times she seems to be undermining him. FBI Special Agent Tony Layun (JD Pardo) alternates between wanting to take Reece down and to help the man once he realizes the extent of the conspiracy that Reece is up against. Reece's friend Liz Riley (Tyner Rushing) is an exception, though: she's a true-blue companion, even though she has doubts about Reece's mental and physical state when she catches him staring off into space or trying to hide his increasingly trembling hands.

Another thing non-righties might hate about the series is the serious way it treats the topic of God. The series actually opens with a voiceover of Reece describing a moment in the book of Judges in which God tells Gideon how to select men for battle. Later in the story, as Reece is in Mexico and sitting with extended family at a sprawling, peaceful hacienda, his host Marco (Marco Rodríguez) muses that Reece's travails are like those of Job, who lost his family as part of a cruel test—a bet between God and Satan about whether Job would abandon his piety in the midst of ultimate strife. So God is something of a spectral background component in this story, which also deals with Old Testament notions like justice and revenge.

I do like that the series respects bereavement and keeps it a constant factor in Reece's thoughts. In an action-mystery-thriller like this, you expect things like betrayal, but few stories actually allow their protagonist to dwell on their bereavement. I suspect that some viewers might not like Reece's constant hallucination about his family, but when I try to put myself in Reece's position, as a man who just lost everything he loves most in the world, I can't see him simply letting his wife and daughter go, although there is a moment, in the final episode, where Reece seems to experience a symbolic letting-go.

The big question, though, is where the series can possibly go for Season 2. I've heard that a Season 2 is being planned, but by the end of Season 1, Reece still has a growing tumor, not to mention way fewer friends than he started with. He's still a hunted man by the end of the season, so there's no chance of him resuming his life as a SEAL. He's a rogue, now, and dying. While the term "glioblastoma" is mentioned in the show, Reece refuses to get a biopsy to confirm what kind of tumor he has (and to be clear, it was a government experiment that gave him the tumor, hence all the coverups and assassinations), so the cancer could move in any direction: it's more a "Hollywood tumor" than any sort of real cancer: for all I know, it could be gone by Season 3 if the show lasts that long. Walter White's lung cancer did a similarly magical thing in "Breaking Bad," disappearing for a while before reappearing.

Critics generally hate "The Terminal List," but that's obviously because they're wokies who despise any show that takes patriotism, brotherhood, and masculine nobility seriously. At Rotten Tomatoes, the current "enthusiasm gap" shows the critics' score at 40%, with an audience score of 95%. The critics are manifestly out of touch. I think the show is boilerplate but pretty entertaining. It's well acted, with Pratt—normally known for comedy—doing a very good job in a serious role, and with a lot of help from a solid supporting cast. It also benefits from a certain combat realism thanks to the military consultants who were brought in to keep the show real (and again, author Jack Carr is himself a former SEAL). The show does telegraph major plot points, but you don't watch a series like this because of where it will end: you watch because it's going to be a hell of a ride.