Summary
The Terminal List: Dark Wolf doesn’t get any more urgent in Episode 2, but it does shift gears into more interesting off-the-books territory.
Maybe it’s just me, but The Terminal List: Dark Wolf has real pacing issues. Episode 2 runs for an hour and only really includes three major scenes, with the connective tissue dragged out to a worrying extent, presumably just to pad the runtime. When the show lets loose, it’s pretty good; it effectively builds tension and creates compelling drama, and there’s a really good example of this later that we’ll get to. But everything else is tortuously verbose and sluggish, and such a big deal is made out of certain things that it runs the risk of coming across a bit ridiculous.
A good example of this is Ben Edwards’ exit from the Navy SEALs. Now, we knew this was probable after the cliffhanger ending of the first episode, and also to facilitate his transition into the character we met in The Terminal List, but there’s a ridiculous amount of pomp and circumstance involved in the whole thing. Essentially, the brass and the CIA know that he assassinated Al-Jabouri, a protected intelligence asset, but since Edwards, Reece, and Hastings all have their stories straight, they can’t prove it. This allows Edwards to swerve a prison sentence, but he’s also discharged, and to appease the higher-ups, an officer has to go with him. Hastings volunteers, convincing Reece to stay behind and star in the main show (in so many words).
This takes ages, and the performative sincerity is grating. We get it — there’s a ton of appropriate respect and reverence for soldiers and special forces personnel here, but there’s no need to lay it on quite this thick at the expense of dramatic pacing. Though having said this, it isn’t like things pick up right away once Edwards and Hastings are cut loose. Instead, they spend ages in a hotel bar just mulling things over until they’re propositioned by Jed Haverford, another CIA agent who wants them to carry out an off-the-books assassination of, you guessed it, Massoud Danawi, the man who supplied the bomb that killed Daran.
I’ll grant you that it doesn’t make a great deal of sense for Edwards to take this mission, given what he already knows about how the CIA operates, but it’s to make a point that he’s solely fixated on revenge rather than principles. Hastings is more reluctant but ultimately comes around, so the two are shipped off to a joint CIA/Mossad safe house to plan the hit, which is to take place in a nightclub.
This is where The Terminal List: Dark Wolf Episode 2 gets a lot better. Like the operational scenes in the premiere, tension is effectively built and maintained, and the action, when it arrives, is clinical and well-orchestrated. I’m not sure if the events in the club, set to a pulsing techno backbeat, are necessarily enjoyable enough to justify how much time we had to spend waiting for them, but this stuff is way better than the build-up.
It also contains by far the standout scene of the episode. When Edwards and Hastings try to poison Danawi using an Israeli agent named Eliza posing as a server, Danawi gets suspicious and forces her to drink the beverage to prove it’s all above board. She does, and then has to no-sell the effects while she almost dies of poisoning until Edwards is able to get to her and brew up an antidote. It’s a really effective scene because I, for one, wasn’t expecting Eliza to just chin the drink, and it highlights how far these deep-cover agents are willing to go to see a mission out. In moments like this, Dark Wolf is really good. But we have to spend so long waiting for them, and endure so much pearl-clutching dialogue in the meantime, that it’s difficult to get lost in the action.
Once again, things end on a bit of a cliffhanger, with Hastings — I think; it’s a little unclear — pistol-whipping Danawi to death. Freed from the trappings of Iraq and above-board military action, there’s definitely a silkier quality beginning to emerge here, but the leaden script continues to hold things back.
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