The Terminal List: Dark Wolf premiered on Wednesday, August 27 on Prime with the first three episodes. Subsequent episodes will arrive weekly until September 24, 2025.
A prequel series to 2022’s The Terminal List, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf shifts the spotlight to Taylor Kitsch’s Ben Edwards, exploring precisely how the former Navy SEAL fell out of the teams and into a career stacking bodies on behalf of the CIA. Dark Wolf’s deadly world of international espionage doesn’t necessarily pack a ton of surprises for anyone with even a moderate degree of spy fiction literacy, but succeeds in spite of its predicability thanks to some truly tier one shootouts, its strong supporting characters, and some banging music choices. Dark Wolf is a lean, fast-paced action drama that successfully broadens The Terminal List’s universe without being a simple retread of the initial Chris Pratt series.
There’s very little fat in Dark Wolf; at seven episodes (one less than the original series) the plot hustles along at a rapid clip. This makes Dark Wolf an easy watch, compelling and moreish, although the more compact schedule arguably does contribute to the overall lack of depth that’s been injected into Ben himself.
With Ben’s actions and fate at the ending of 2022’s The Terminal List etched in stone, Dark Wolf finds itself fighting an uphill battle from the outset. It is, after all, quite likely that returning viewers will already have a pretty concrete opinion on Ben. Dark Wolf does a serviceable job of helping us understand Ben, and it’s hard to imagine any viewer begrudging him for the actions that see him cut loose from the SEALs. Kitsch does great work with what he has in these moments, exploding with appropriate and credible intensity when required. However, what’s not quite as obvious is how much we’re intended to sympathise with Ben throughout.
That said, in the context of what we ultimately learn about Ben in The Terminal List, it’s possible that keeping him at arms length from the audience is by design. It definitely allows the supporting cast to carve deeper and more lasting impressions. Tom Hopper (Black Sails, The Umbrella Academy) is quite magnetic as Raife Hastings, a former SEAL of Southern African descent and longtime friend of Chris Pratt’s James Reece, who follows Ben into the shadowy world of CIA field operations. Hastings is a huge physical presence on screen, but he also gets to be the wiser of the pair. Dark Wolf doesn’t take the time to dig into Hastings’ history – the audience learns he was raised in Rhodesia and has a deep-seated distrust for the CIA – but it seems like the producers are deliberately keeping their powder dry for a follow-up series to The Terminal List (Hastings was introduced in True Believer, the sequel novel to Jack Carr’s The Terminal List). Luke Hemsworth (Westworld) is also effective as CIA operator Jules Landry, another character existing readers of the Reece books will already be familiar with. Dark Wolf’s Landry is interestingly layered, as a character who is capable and overtly courageous but is simultaneously an unlikeable pest, and Hemsworth appears to be having a ball in the role.
The strongest performance, however, comes from the outstanding Dar Salim (Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, The Gentlemen) as Iraqi Special Operations Forces officer Mohammed Farooq. Another firm friend of Reece, Hastings, and Ben, Farooq is largely a background player throughout Dark Wolf, but Salim brings him alive with every opportunity as a dangerous but dignified operator, whose own tragic history seems to have left him exhausted but heavily committed to his counter terrorism work.
As a prequel project, Dark Wolf does admittedly paint itself into somewhat of a corner with so many characters from The Terminal List follow-up novel making early debuts in this series. After all, the audience already knows that Ben will make it through proceedings, and readers of the novels will also know which of the rest of the ensemble are going to wind up safe, too. This does put a bit of a target on certain other characters in this case.
However, even though the story itself is all a little predictable, the action execution is extremely strong. The close quarters combat is impressively John Wick-adjacent in one particular building shootout featuring Ben and partner Eliza (Rona-Lee Shimon), and a tunnel ambush sequence styled as an ambitious oner is exciting and visceral. The massive final showdown lacks tension thanks to the guaranteed survival of its star, but its indulgence in some crowd-pleasing catharsis comes as well-timed and appreciated (as are the regular needle drops, including Metallica, Tool, AC/DC, and Jimi Hendrix). Dark Wolf isn’t exactly upbeat but it’s definitely lighter, and a noticeable change of pace from The Terminal List – which was absorbing and compelling, but certainly considerably more sad and grim throughout.
