Summary
The Terminal List: Dark Wolf feels a bit more pacey and dynamic in Episode 4, which provides a stand-out action sequence and a couple of welcome swerves.
If The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is proving anything, it’s that joint CIA/Mossad black ops are a little bit tumultuous, which, to be fair, probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Episode 4, “The Sound of Guns”, throws in some welcome curveballs, immediately undermining the impression it gave in the previous episode that the Iranians were the bad guys and the Israelis were the good guys. I was perhaps a little eager in joking about that being geopolitically short-sighted. The Iranians still seem to be the bad guys, don’t get me wrong, but that would presuppose there were any good guys in this equation, and there don’t seem to be.
This idea that nobody can be trusted, even the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for, is very much in the margins of this episode, which is a bit zippier than the previous ones. Hastings, for instance, spends the entire runtime worrying that the whole thing’s extremely ill-advised and probably a front for some other kind of mission, and it turns out he’s correct, though perhaps not in the way he envisaged. Most of his suspicions are directed at Haverford, which is understandable. After a background check, he learns that Haverford founded the Iranian Operations Division and has dedicated his life to “keeping the tiger in the cage” ever since. Part of that involves running the longest-tenured asset inside Tehran, an undercover agent codenamed “The Shepherd”, from whom all of the actionable intelligence is coming.
Hastings doesn’t love the idea of single-source intel, but when he raises his concerns to Edwards, the latter quietly mocks him for it. After assassinating Ish’s killer in a train carriage full of civilians, Edwards has clearly gotten a taste for the freedom afforded by off-the-books operations. He tries to frame Hastings’ understandable concern as his longing for the red tape that choked their efforts in Mosul, but I get the sense he’s trying to justify his own bloodlust. Hastings counters that he’s the one who is going a bit off-piste, but nothing comes of it until it’s too late.
The Terminal List: Dark Wolf Episode 4 is structured around a heist, Ocean’s Eleven style. Molnar was working for a black market nuclear proliferation group with the idea of sneaking soon-to-be-prohibited technology into Iranian hands before pending agreements prevent that. A shipment of bearings is on its way to Geneva by road, to be received by Cyrus and Vahid Rahimi, neither of whom is on the same page about Iran’s future. Haverford sketches a plan to ambush the convoy delivering the bearings and replace them with some lower-quality fakes that will prevent the Iranian facility’s centrifuge from spinning fast enough. This divides the cast up a bit while they handle the prep work.
For Edwards and Eliza, this means staking out the ambush site, hacking into the local cameras and such, and pretending to be a couple when a bystander catches them. This whole thing is dripping with sexual chemistry, which only really validates Hastings’ claims that Edwards isn’t thinking straight because he’s got the hots for a foreign intelligence agent. It’s starting to feel more and more like Hastings is the intended audience POV character.
Speaking of which, he and Tal meet with a dude named Mordechai to pick up the fake bearings, which again heightens his suspicions, since how has all of this been arranged so quickly if the plan was only dreamed up moments before? “The Sound of Guns” tries to distract from these issues a bit by having Landry, aka the third Hemsworth brother whose name you can never remember, be an overt creep and try to force himself on Tal, which results in Eliza putting a knife to his throat. You’re supposed to be looking at Landry as a potential obstacle during the heist; before things get underway, Edwards even suggests that they remove him from the mission.
This is, of course, in service of the eventual twist. The initial stage of the ambush goes well, but their escape is thwarted by an RPG and a substantive reaction force that opens fire on them immediately, wounding Mo in the process. As with all the previous action sequences, this one is well-staged and features a lot of interesting camera movement and perspective usage. I had my eyes on Landry the whole time, so I was successfully duped, since I really should have been paying more attention to Eliza, who shoots Edwards in the back as soon as she gets the opportunity. It looks like the Israelis have been working their own angle this entire time. It’s a nice — if fairly expected — twist that should hopefully enliven the final few episodes.
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