Main cast: Chris Pratt (James Reece), Constance Wu (Katie Buranek), Taylor Kitsch (Ben Edwards), Riley Keough (Lauren Reece), Arlo Mertz (Lucy Reece), Nick Chinlund (Admiral Gerald Pillar), Matthew Rauch (JAG Captain Howard), LaMonica Garrett (Commander Bill Cox), Patrick Schwarzenegger (Donny Mitchell), Warren Kole (NCIS Agent Josh Holder), Jared Shaw (Ernest ‘Boozer’ Vickers), Laine Neil (Alyssa Holloway), and Jeanne Tripplehorn (Secretary Hartley)
Director: Antoine Fuqua
I’m always down for a brutal, no-nonsense action flick, and when Chris Pratt is starring as the vengeance-driven action hero, oh let me suppress a shiver of delight and make time for The Terminal List. I am not familiar with the source material, so I come into this one without any preconceived expectations whatsoever. I do hear from folks that have read Jack Carr’s book of the same name that the show is different enough that it may as well be a brand new thing of its own.
So, we start at the very beginning with The Engram. James Reece is the commander of a Navy SEAL special operations team sent to capture a chemical weapons terrorist named Kahani. The whole thing goes spectacularly and tragically awry, with only he and Ernest Vickers, known also as Boozer, being the only ones that come home alive.
Reece tells the investigating officer back in America that an SDF trooper panicked and set off a trip wire, thus causing the whole thing to go FUBAR. However, he is told that the person panicking was actually his own man, Donny. Wait, what is going on here? Is Reece’s memory faulty or, as he suspects, there is some kind of cover-up going on, and his men were set up to be the scapegoats?
Things escalate when Booker commits suicide, or so they say, and Reece finds the whole thing suspicious as hell. Well, he’s soon proven right when he’s attacked himself, and that’s just only the beginning.
It’s a bit too soon, naturally, to give a decisive opinion of the show, but I like what I see here. Mr Pratt is smoking hot with that beard, and he does a pretty good job here in a role that he doesn’t always play. He can certainly play the tortured man that sports a false cheery front well. The rest of the cast of characters are underdeveloped as of now or don’t live long enough to matter, so I’ll just have to wait and see whether there is anyone here worth remembering aside from Reece.
So, this is the start of an action thriller. A part of me wishes that they haven’t so fast revealed that Reece is right by the end of this episode, but who knows, maybe these folks have some surprises in store for me in later episodes. For now, I think I’ll stay around to see more of the show.
