Before we dive into Dark Wolf, a quick refresher on The Terminal List. Basically, every character that show introduced died, and most at the hands of Chris Pratt’s list-maker, one James Reece. When the decorated Navy SEAL lieutenant commander’s entire team was killed in ambush, Reece returned stateside, only to be targeted himself. Worse, they went after his family. And so he wrote a “people to kill” checklist on the back of his little daughter’s crayon drawing. It was a storyline as grim as the pallor that hung over Pratt’s performance. Which is why, even though he was a part of all this killing, we gravitated toward Taylor Kitsch and his Terminal character, Ben Edwards. Close with Reece since their training days, the Navy SEAL-turned-CIA spook lived on a boat and tempered his own veteran of bad shit brooding with a kind of hopeful countenance. Edwards was like a guy with an M4 in one hand and a burrito in the other, either one ready to use.

The Ben Edwards we first meet Dark Wolf is still inside The Terminal List, literally seated at the same SEALs funeral that began the original show. And in his voiceover, Edwards makes one thing clear. In the military, words like freedom, honor, and glory are definitely part of the experience. But ask any SEAL what they truly fight for, and the answer is always the same: their fellow operators. It’s a notion that Dark Wolf challenges almost immediately.

Flashback to seven years before. It’s 2015, and Chief Special Warfare Operator Ben Edwards and Lieutenant Raife Hastings (Tom Hopper) are in Mosul, training and collaborating with Iraqi Special Forces troops as a part of Operation Inherent Resolve. Edwards shares a bond with Daran (Fady Demian), the SEALs’ ISF interpreter; even knows his wife and two children. So it’s tough when a dicey hostage transfer operation goes wrong, a firefight explodes on a bridge, and not only does Daran lose a leg, but an ISIS shot caller by the name of Hamid Al-Jabouri (Joseph Makkar) gets away clean. 

When Reece joins Edwards and Hastings at their forward operating base, there is talk of their frustrations – “Ten years of bleeding on this soil and the only thing that grows is a new enemy” – but also their brotherhood, a connection forged in those same fires of combat. Reece brings Edwards a copy of Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle, and also references “our fathers’ wars,” two touches in Dark Wolf that feel very reminiscent of the Jack Carr-penned books this series and Terminal List are based on. Edwards, Reese, and Hastings are brothers in arms. But they all see themselves as part of a lineage born to fight. 

With Al-Jabouri in the wind and SEAL command targeting Massoud Danawi (Farshad Farahat), an arms dealer to ISIS, Edwards seizes an opportunity to hunt down both with the help of local intel provided by his friend, ISF officer Mohammad Farooq (Dar Salim). Problem is Danawi is way ahead of the SEALs. He forces Daran to carry a bomb into the US base, hidden in the translator’s new prosthetic leg. Daran does so out of fear for his family, but in the aftermath of the blast, Edwards discovers his friend’s wife dead and his two kids missing. A warning in Arabic, written in blood: “He who abandons the caliphate abandons God.” 

What are they really fighting for if they can’t protect their brothers, their allies? When Edwards pitches a mission into Mosul to strike at Danawi and Al-Jabouri, Commander Cox (Lamonica Garrett) shuts him down. And that’s when the Chief puts 1 and 7 together. SEAL command and Fuller (Chris Diamantopoulos), a CIA attaché, are running a protection racket. Hamid Al-Jabouri is untouchable. He’s an asset for the Agency. Hastings attempts to hold the Chief back, but Edwards loses it on Cox, Fuller, and Landry (Luke Hemsworth), a former team guy gone private. “Your asset killed our Iraqi partners, not to mention women and fucking children!” 

You know they were going in anyway, and with some heavy references to Zero Dark Thirty – Chris Pratt was on SEAL Team 6 in that one – the operators hit Mosul and infiltrate an ISIS-controlled secure compound in search of Al-Jabouri. The idea is to detain him as a high value target, but also expose him to his ISIS partners, who would then target him as a collaborator. But the hasty, unsanctioned mission goes south when Edwards finds Daran’s kidnapped children in the house. “I’m with the CIA you dog!” Al-Jabouri growls in English. But before any of his brothers in arms can stop him, Edwards puts his pistol under the man’s chin and fires. It’s an execution. But as the camera captures a curtain slowly falling across the corridor, and Edwards holds Daran’s daughter close, carrying her from the scene, he feels entirely justified.  

Try telling that to the brass. In the moment, while still on the X, Reese looked around and immediately built a conceivable cover. Al-Jabouri was going for a detonator, Chief Edwards had no choice. But it’s really messy. There were local witnesses. And Hastings cut the zip ties from the man’s wrists only after he was dead. It’s the kind of situation probably all of these soldiers were gonna run into eventually. An asymmetrical war, a set of competing motivations, and a choice to close ranks around a fellow operator, even in light of the consequences. But as The Terminal List: Dark Wolf looks to what’s next, it’s with a defiant Ben Edwards directly in his superiors’ sights.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.