‘The Terminal List’ Episode 1 Recap: “The Engram”

The Terminal List debuted July 1 on Prime Video, at the start of a long Independence Day weekend, just in time to catch the eye of any dads looking to stream some content during the downtime between lawn mowing and grabbing more ice for the cooler. And it’s dads, specifically, because this is a show designed, built, and marketed from the corner of the airport bookstore with all of the bold type and darkly-toned cover art. Chris Pratt stars as Lieutenant Commander James Reece, a stoic Navy SEAL platoon leader who follows a path of vengeance when the deadly ambush of his team during an operation gone south uncovers a vast conspiracy that gets pretty much everyone else close to him killed. Terminal List is based on the novel by ex-Navy SEAL Jack Carr — who. along with Chris Pratt, serves as an exec producer here — and while the series did big debut numbers for Prime Video, it also had its share of critical detractors, a group Carr dismissed as triggered snowflakes during a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. So, is this List a revenge fantasy for the Punisher skull sticker demographic? Airport thriller comfort food for dads? Or a perfectly decent vehicle for one of the Hollywood Chrises with sufficient dabs of suspense and action? Let’s get downrange.

“The Engram,” Episode 1 of The Terminal List — directed by Antoine Fuqua, who has proven time and time again that he really knows how to shoot an action sequence — begins over a field of the fallen. “In the Book of Judges,” James Reece (Pratt) intones, “Gideon asks God how to choose his men for battle.” And as the camera finds its way across the gravestones to the SEAL commander standing at attention, he continues his steely narration. “The Lord told Gideon to take his men down to the river and have them drink. The men who flopped on their bellies and drank like dogs were no good to him. But Gideon watched as some men knelt and drank with their eyes watching the horizon, spears in hand.” The tip of the spear figures heavily here, as do the trappings of death and sacrifice. Reece, who worked his way up through the teams, all the way from enlisted sniper to troop commander, was always proud to still be working six-month deployments with Alpha Platoon even at 40. But then an operation went very wrong. And now, Reece has to consider where the spear is pointed.

Flashback to two weeks before. At Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, Reece and his platoon, a group that includes Special Warfare Operator First Class Ernest “Boozer” Vickers (Jared Shaw) and Special Warfare Operator Second Class Donald “Donny” Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger, Chris Pratt’s real-life brother-in-law), are preparing their assault of an enemy compound in Syria. “Alright boys, we’re gonna enter via indig fishing trawler, 800 meters off the coast. We’ll be swimming east to our target. We got a high tide 0232. It’s gonna be a dark one…” Reece and the platoon are full of confidence. They trust their intel. But this thing is wrong from the jump. Creeping through wet and murky tunnels, they discover tripwires rigged to Semtex and heavily armed loyalists lying in wait. KIAs and chaos, guns blasting and comms failing. And when it’s all over, Reece and Boozer are the only members of Alpha left standing.

In a tense after-action interview with NCIS, Reece is told that his target was never at the compound, and that it was Donny who freaked out under fire and hit the tripwire. And even though he remembers it differently – Donny wouldn’t have lost his cool –  they have audio of Alpha’s panicked comms. Later, at the air base bar, Reece meets journalist Katie Buranek (Constance Wu), who’s reporting on the military’s over-reliance on special operations forces. He also raises a glass to the lost brothers of Alpha with Boozer by his side. But is he? 

Enter Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch). Behind the shapeless drug rug and grandiose back tattoo of a clipper ship is Reece’s best buddy from the teams, who’s now a CIA spook living in Coronado, California. Back stateside after an overnight C-130 flight, Reece tells him about the NCIS interview. “Who has the capability to alter our signals? Alter voices. Deepfake.” And while he’s home, his head isn’t, and his wife Lauren (Riley Keough) notices. Distance, inattention, haze. Reece only offers vague encouragement to their adorable daughter Lucy (Arlo Mertz) before getting even more conflicting news. Boozer, according to JAG Captain Howard (Matthew Rauch) and NCIS Agent Holder (Warren Kole), shot himself the night before, right here in Coronado. Reece’s mind spins the tape back and forth. His memories of the op, of Donny, of Boozer: what’s real anymore?

At NAB Coronado, Reece gets an earful from Admiral Puller (Nick Chinlund), who calls into question his age and mental acuity and seems ready to pin the op gone bad entirely on him. Increasingly unsure himself, Reece confides further in Ben. There’s no way Boozer would’ve shot himself with a team-issued Sig Sauer pistol. No way, because Boozer swore by his trusty M1911. “We would always debate the virtues of nine millimeter versus .45.” At Boozer’s funeral, Secretary of Defense Hartley (Jeanne Tripplehorn) presents herself as an ally to Reece, and says he’ll get the Navy Cross. OK, but the whole team is still dead, his headaches persist, and he feels like he’s being mentally gaslit by the entire Navy establishment. 

After spending its first hour under a shroud of death, bashing holes in James Reece’s battle-scarred memory banks, and watching the military hang him out to dry, The Terminal List saves its most unspeakably awful tragedy for last. Attacked with his own gun by two masked assailants during an MRI scan, Reece races home to discover Lauren and Lucy lying dead in his kitchen. After all of the back and forth about engrams and the nature of factual memory, you really want this to be an event fabricated in his cortex. (You would expect it, especially considering the casting of the talented Riley Keough as Lauren.) But instead, these deaths are a catalyst of the worst kind. In the grim world The Terminal List has created, Reece requires righteous justification for his vengeance. And beyond Alpha Team being ambushed, beyond whatever sinister forces are at work pulling the strings, killing off his family before we ever really knew them becomes its most horribly real trigger. And so the list will be written.    

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges