The Terminal List vs. The Terminal List: Dark Wolf — Same War Chest, Different Wars

Image: Prime Video

Prime Video’s The Terminal List (2022) is a bulldozer of a revenge thriller: blunt-force, head-down, and diesel-loud. Its prequel, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf (2025), trades that bulldozer for a scalpel, slicing into the origin story of Ben Edwards and asking how a good man learns to work in the shadows. Together, the two shows feel like opposing sides of the same coin—one minted in grief, the other in compromise.

The Terminal List follows Lt. Cmdr. James Reece (Chris Pratt) in the aftermath of a catastrophic ambush and an even greater personal tragedy. What unfolds is his grim march up a names-on-paper kill list, as he dismantles a conspiracy stretching from boardrooms to black sites. The story is powered by rage, paranoia, and military procedural know-how. It is linear, relentless, and utterly committed to its central conceit: a soldier who turns his grief into ammunition. If the show is sometimes heavy-handed, it makes up for it in its propulsive clarity.

By contrast, Dark Wolf winds the clock back about five years to follow Ben Edwards, played with layered intensity by Taylor Kitsch, from Navy SEAL to CIA asset. The prequel explores the moral sandbar where loyalty, duty, and self-preservation meet. It launches with a three-episode drop on August 27, 2025, before rolling out weekly through late September, and it is framed less as a body-count ledger than as a character study. Rather than asking who’s next, it asks why—why a man might choose betrayal, why loyalty bends under pressure, and why the cost of survival is often paid in integrity.

The tonal shift between the two shows is striking. The Terminal List is all steel and smoke: hard lighting, harsh justice, and a drumbeat score that propels Reece’s vendetta forward. Its appeal depends on whether you enjoy the lone-avenger-versus-the-machine template. Critics often dismissed it as conspiratorial and overwrought, but audiences embraced its blunt appeal wholeheartedly. The Rotten Tomatoes split—critics hovering around 40 percent and audiences at 94 percent—tells the story of a show that was built for viewers hungry for catharsis.

Dark Wolf, on the other hand, is cooler, knottier, and slower to burn. The firefights are still there—rifles massed, stacks breaching doors, the grime and mud of combat—but the emotional engine is internal, fuelled by Edwards’s compromises. Early buzz describes the “two wolves” tug-of-war inside him, and the premiere arcs across Iraq, bad orders, and the kinds of decisions that leave stains on the uniform. Unlike some prequels, it fills in the gaps without collapsing under the weight of its own lore.

Talyor Kitsch & Chris Pratt - Image: Prime Video

Characterization drives the divergence even further. James Reece is carved in the tradition of the modern American folk hero, somewhere between Jack Ryan and Jack Reacher, only meaner, sadder, and far less patient. The series immerses us in his trauma fog, which lends urgency but limits nuance.

To Reece, the world becomes a target-rich environment, and he becomes the hammer. Critics called it wish-fulfilment, and they weren’t wrong—but that tunnel vision is also the reason fans locked in so fiercely.

Ben Edwards, by contrast, has always been the franchise’s most intriguing question mark. Dark Wolf finally hands him the microphone. Kitsch leans into the contradictions that define him—teammate and traitor, idealist and operator—and the show surrounds him with veterans and advisors, ensuring the authenticity of brotherhood without tipping into recruiting-video territory. The result is a slower burn, less visceral but more human, offering a study of what happens when loyalty corrodes.

Both series invest heavily in authenticity, but they put it to different uses. In The Terminal List, tactical accuracy is ballast for a revenge plot that barrels forward with unstoppable momentum. Viewers come for the meticulous room-clearing sequences but stay for the release of righteous mayhem.

Dark Wolf employs the same authenticity to different effect, using the texture of missions, CIA tradecraft, and murky logistics to make each compromise feel earned. The small details—the hand signals, the posture, the tension in the air before a breach—are as telling as the gunfire, reminding us that these operators live in a space where doing the wrong thing for the right reason is a daily calculus.

The pacing mirrors this difference. The Terminal List is a battering ram, eight episodes long and relentlessly focused, every detour stripped away in favour of the next target. It either clicks immediately or feels like a grim loop; judging from audience response, for most it clicked.

Dark Wolf, on the other hand, takes on an episodic-serial rhythm. Each mission can stand on its own, but together they feed into a larger story about corruption and compromise. The weekly rollout is well-suited to this design, giving audiences time to sit with the moral hangover after the action dust settles.

The performances further set the two apart. Pratt wields Reece like a blunt instrument, a man vibrating with barely controlled rage, and he surprises with how much weight he gives to a role that could easily have become stock. Kitsch, however, is the franchise’s MVP in Dark Wolf. His restless eyes, the quiet guilt etched into his expressions, and his weathered, almost “Riggins-but-broken-in” presence give Edward’s a tragic depth. Joined by Tom Hopper and Luke Hemsworth, Kitsch anchors an ensemble that crackles with the easy camaraderie of men who have shared foxholes—and by all accounts, much of that chemistry was forged off-camera during training.

Talyor Kitsch - Image: Prime Video

Frederick E.O. Toye’s direction in The Terminal List bears the stamp of his television pedigree. Having honed his skills on series like Westworld and Person of Interest, Toye approaches Chris Pratt’s revenge saga with the discipline of a tactician. His episodes unfold with the precision of a military raid—every angle and camera movement feel rehearsed, economical, and designed to mirror the mindset of James Reece himself. Toye’s lens lingers on the small but telling details: the racking of a rifle, the flick of a gaze between teammates, the clinical sweep of a room. These moments give the show its ballast of authenticity, grounding an otherwise heightened revenge narrative in procedural realism. Visually, Toye opts for a bleached, unforgiving palette: the California daylight looks drained of warmth, corporate boardrooms seem sterile and hostile, and combat zones are rendered in flat, ashen tones. The result is an atmosphere of constant paranoia and pressure, where the environment itself seems complicit in Reece’s spiral. The pacing reflects Toye’s background in high-stakes genre television—episodes barrel forward with a kind of narrative inevitability, leaving little time for reflection. This makes the series compulsive to watch, but also gives it a relentless, almost suffocating momentum, much like its protagonist’s psyche.

Paul Cameron, by contrast, directs The Terminal List: Dark Wolf with the sensibility of a cinematographer who has spent his career painting in light and shadow. Known for his work on Collateral, Man on Fire, and other visually muscular films, Cameron reshapes the franchise into something moodier, more cinematic, and far more interested in the moral terrain than in the sheer body count. Where Toye charges through scenes like a freight train, Cameron lets them breathe. His use of silence and hesitation is just as important as his bursts of action, allowing Taylor Kitsch’s Ben Edwards to communicate entire paragraphs of inner conflict with nothing more than a half-smile or a restless glance. Visually, Dark Wolf is layered and lush. Cameron uses warm amber tones in scenes of camaraderie, underscoring the fragile humanity of brotherhood, while CIA interiors are steeped in cold blues that radiate sterility and duplicity. The Iraq deployments are filtered through a dust-stained lens that makes the desert feel both expansive and suffocating, a liminal space where compromises are made and the cost is written in sand. His camera often pulls back into wide sweeps or hovers in surveillance-like angles, emphasizing the constant presence of unseen forces manipulating events from above. The rhythm of his episodes is slower, more deliberate, giving the moral corrosion of Edwards' time to seep into the bones of the viewer.

The difference between the two directors can be boiled down to the dialect they use to tell their stories. Toye frames The Terminal List like a surgical strike—efficient, direct, and unflinching in its forward motion. Cameron, on the other hand, directs Dark Wolf like a classified dossier, filled with smudged ink, half-truths, and dangers lurking in the margins. Where Toye makes the viewer feel the muscle memory of vengeance, Cameron makes us feel the psychological weight of betrayal. Both approaches serve their respective stories perfectly, but in utterly different cinematic languages.

Choosing between the two shows depends entirely on what you’re looking for. If you crave catharsis, if you want adrenaline spiked with grief and don’t mind the blunt edge of a sledgehammer, then The Terminal List delivers exactly that. It is a straight shot of narrative vengeance, tidy in its propulsion and bitter in its aftertaste. If, however, you are drawn to shades of grey, to character meat and moral tension, Dark Wolf is the richer experience. It works cleanly as an origin story even if you haven’t seen the original, and it enhances The Terminal List if you circle back afterward, since Edwards’s choices hang heavier with foreknowledge. And if you enjoy appointment viewing, its weekly cadence through September 24 gives it the kind of water-cooler suspense the first series never really had.

Ultimately, the comparison is less about similarity than evolution. The Terminal List gave Prime Video a hit, a blunt-force entry into Jack Carr’s world that satisfied fans of the genre. But Dark Wolf elevates the franchise. It takes the same tactical authenticity, the same war chest of detail, and repurposes it into something more layered, more human, and more narratively ambitious.

Prime Video clearly intends this universe to grow. With Dark Wolf anchoring the franchise now and The Terminal List Season 2 waiting in the wings, the stage is set for deeper explorations of the murky zones between loyalty, betrayal, and survival. Where The Terminal List gave us closure, Dark Wolf gives us complication—and in doing so, it proves itself the better written and executed story, the one that secures this franchise’s future.

Catch The Terminal List and its prequel, Dark Wolf now streaming on Prime Video