Summary
The first thing you notice about The Terminal List: Dark Wolf in Episode 1 is that it’s VERY serious, perhaps to its detriment.
Blimey, this is a bit serious, isn’t it? The Terminal List: Dark Wolf lays its cards out on the table pretty early in Episode 1, and those cards read, roughly, “The American armed forces should be treated with paramount reverence and respect.” And it’s a fair position. But the entirety of “Inherent Resolve” feels like that, dripping with reverence for the military in general and the special forces in particular, being very careful to highlight correct operational procedure and include scenes of the rank and file having a really swell relationship with the locals. Again, it’s a fair position, but as a premiere, it doesn’t exactly come rocketing out of the gates.
This is set in 2015, by the way. As you probably know, Dark Wolf is a prequel series designed to explore how Taylor Kitsch’s Ben Edwards ended up in the position we met him in during The Terminal List. So, while Chris Pratt’s James Reece is in it and plays an important role here, he’s a supporting character. This is very much Ben’s show. And Ben’s entire backstory seems to hinge on his role in Operation Inherent Resolve, a U.S. mission to train up the local ISF (Iraqi Security Forces) in Mosul, Iraq, to help them wrest control of the country back from ISIS.
You can tell it’s all going to go wrong immediately. The opening is a funeral montage set to morbid narration, and the first thing we see when we cut to seven years earlier is a tense hostage exchange that goes badly wrong. It’s all dodgy from the jump. The terrorist big dog is Hamid Al-Jabouri, who everyone hates but seems conspicuously elusive, and you can pretty much tell where that’s going to go given the obvious tensions between the Navy SEALs and the CIA pencil-pushers lurking around. We’ll return to this dynamic shortly.
But it’s important to understand that not a lot happens in Episode 1 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. It includes a couple of elongated in-country operational sequences that are played for maximum authenticity and detail, and they’re strung together by unavoidably clichéd scenes of military banter. Occasionally, everyone stops to have very serious conversations about brotherhood and sacrifice. Fans of the military action genre will feel right at home because everything about the premiere is comfortingly familiar. The devil, so to speak, is in the details, and how those details are executed.
There’s a personal touch. Edwards and the SEALs are on surprisingly cosy terms with the ISF, but Edwards is friendly with one guy in particular, Daran Amiri, who has recently lost one of his legs but has re-enlisted anyway to protect his family. The second this guy hobbled on-screen, I just knew things were going to go badly for him. He’s the equivalent of the older cop who takes on one last case before retirement. Edwards is even really friendly with his kids. It’s a recipe for disaster.
What I found quite compelling was the specific shape that disaster takes. In the absence of Al-Jabouri, a new Big Bad named Massoud Danawi begins causing mischief, and Daran is targeted as a vessel of that mischief. But I’m obviously underselling it with the term “mischief”, since what happens is a bomb is hidden in Daran’s prosthetic leg, and he’s forced to martyr himself for a cause he doesn’t believe in to take out a bunch of the U.S. forces against his will.
This, apparently, is straight out of Al-Jabouri’s playbook. He forces people to take their own lives by threatening their families. But Al-Jabouri isn’t supposed to be operating in-country anymore, which clues Edwards into the fact that the CIA higher-ups haven’t been honest with him. And that can only mean one thing — Al-Jabouri is a CIA asset, being protected by the U.S. in exchange for drip-feeding them actionable intelligence. An ordinary local family man and several U.S. soldiers paid the price for that arrangement. And Edwards isn’t happy about it.
You can see how this kind of thing might drive a man to distraction. Reece joins Edwards on a mission to “burn” Al-Jabouri by snatching him, at which point the CIA will ensure he goes free again, tipping ISIS off to the fact he’s an informant. That’s the idea, anyway. But Edwards is so appalled by Al-Jabouri’s smugness that he executes him, which is probably going to be difficult to explain to the CIA, despite Reece and the other present operative, Hastings, agreeing to fit the whole scene up as self-defense. This, one assumes, is the beginning of a rapid, off-the-books downward spiral for Edwards, taking him all the way to the first season of the main show. But Dark Wolf clearly isn’t in any hurry to get there.
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