‘The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’ Ending Explained – No Surprises To Be Found Here

There’s a popular argument against prequels that suggests our knowledge of what happens in the future kills any real suspense around what might have happened in the past. I generally disagree with this idea, but I have to confess I thought about it a little bit during the ending of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, which is, in large part, fulfilling the spin-off’s obligations as a prequel rather than as a standalone story. A lot of the big reveals and major payoffs came in the penultimate outing.  What’s left in Episode 7 is dotting the t’s and crossing the i’s in explaining how Ben Edwards ended up in the position we met him in during The Terminal List.

I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t that interesting. And it isn’t even very interestingly presented. Outside of an expansive early action set-piece, there’s little going on here that isn’t just rather on-the-nose dialogue and a lot of characters performatively calling each other “brother”, like they’re all cosplaying Hulk Hogan. It’s a finale reaching for significance and profundity that just ends up feeling a bit predictable and silly, capping off a season that had its ups and downs in a depressingly obligatory fashion.

Three Months Later

The action picks up three months after the events of the penultimate episode, with Haverford free and clear, Cyrus Rahimi on track to become Iran’s Foreign Minister, and Edwards’ whole team still disavowed and under investigation for arming Iran with nuclear weapons. We see Hastings being interviewed alongside a very smug Haverford, and the clear implication is that he’s going to get away with it.

But not if Edwards has anything to say about it. He’s still on the run, hiding out in Germany’s Black Forest, and crucially, he still has the bearings. This has kind of thrown a spanner into the works of Haverford’s plan, since it prevented Iran’s nuclear armament without, apparently, impacting Cyrus’s career. Cyrus is, in fact, sitting so pretty that he doesn’t want anything else to do with Haverford, and doesn’t seem especially worried about Edwards being on the run or the bearings being unaccounted for. Which will prove his undoing, as we’ll see.

“The Wolf You Feed” uses a letter that Edwards sends to Reece to do a lot of thematic heavy lifting, basically speaking his character arc aloud. He’s fed up with corrupt bureaucracy, war, red tape, and the rank and file paying the price: “We lose a rifle and get punished, they lose a war and get promoted”. As far as Edwards is concerned, it’s about time the brass was held accountable, which is exactly the plan he’s working on in the isolation of the forest.

Reece to the Rescue

The highlight of this finale occurs early on. It’s a protracted set-piece that finds Edwards defending his remote cabin against waves and waves of goons like something out of Rambo: Last Blood. This is fun, as all of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf‘s action has been, but it’s mostly an excuse to reintroduce Reece in person. As it turns out, his brief cameo in the letter-reading scene is just the tip of the iceberg. He’s here in person, looking a little weird clean-shaven.

This felt a bit fan-servicey to me. It’s all well and good having Reece in the earlier episodes when Edwards was still in the Teams, but having him turn up to save the day here feels a little forced. It’s explained a bit later as Mo having reached out to him, but the timing of it and everything doesn’t quite work, especially since Reece then once again disappears from the plot. It’s a Pratt ex machina.

But whatever. It gets Edwards out of a pickle and allows him to move on to the “revenge” portion of his plan, which is what we’re all here for anyway.

Revenge Is… Mundane

The ending of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is intended to provide a lot of payoff with Edwards taking revenge on Haverford and Cyrus, but… it doesn’t quite work out like that. With the climactic action already handled in the home defense scene, the finale takes another approach in the closing scenes. Edwards, Mo, Landry, and Tal all move on their separate targets, taking out Cyrus with a car bomb in the exact manner that Eliza was killed, and getting Edwards in front of Haverford, all with very little effort.

Finally, Haverford explains his motivation. Initially, I had assumed that it was as stated in the previous episode, which is to say using the nuclear armament to promote Cyrus to use him as a West-friendly puppet to decrease tensions in the Middle East. But it turns out he actually had a more Bond villain-esque scheme to trigger a full-scale nuclear war as revenge for America refusing to take any meaningful action against Iran, despite the nation’s many crimes against humanity. And his model for how international relations should be approached? Israel. I mean, yikes.

Uncharacteristically, Edwards doesn’t kill Haverford. Instead, he has him arrested and disgraced with evidence Tal acquired, thus exonerating himself and the rest of the team. That leaves Edwards adrift on a boat, with the whole world at his feet… and, of course, he decides to enlist with the CIA. The polygraph test he’s taking during the interview confirms he’s being truthful when he says he’s built for it, which is fair enough. But we all know how that works out for him in the long run.