Episode 6 of The Terminal List Season 2, “Rats in a Maze,” picks up the pace. This isn’t necessarily the biggest shoot-out yet, but the action hardly ever stops as all the many subplots start converging.
Raife Hastings, following his explosive exit in Episode 5, has even more going on as his investigation leads him to Odessa, where he reconnects with Tal, another familiar face from The Terminal List: Dark Wolf.
Again, I appreciate the cast members from the prequel series getting involved in this story, and Dark Wolf is shaping up to be a crucial character to this version of the tale.
Ground Branch is getting involved in the hunt for the CIA mole, but Reece is already several steps ahead as he takes matters into his own hands in one of the season’s most physical moments: a hand-to-hand fight sequence that brings out the soldier in Chris Pratt.
It’s bloody, it’s glorious, and we needed to see it.
Reece has been handling guns a lot this season, so being able to switch it up and show off his skills in a fight is a welcome change. And the brutality of the fight is appropriate for a show that has already shown plenty of it, while again showing this is all a part of Reece’s process.
What comes next is an interrogation that gets even more intense, but I’m going to be intentionally vague about what happens. There are some things this series reveals, and some things it leaves for you to piece together, and I’m going to keep it light on the latter.
Reece and Freddy Strain are doing some particularly nasty things to the person they’re questioning to get the information out of them that they need. The Terminal List is willing to go there. It’s fucking brilliant, brutal and ups the tension.
There’s a moment near the end of this sequence that might be one of the most eye-wincing things the series has to offer. I felt like Season 1 had already established a pretty high standard for this kind of thing with what Reece did to the man responsible for killing his family, but “Rats in a Maze” finds another way to make you squirm.
You won’t look away, though, because it’s so good.
Interestingly, for a show that has so much going on in this episode, there isn’t really one big confrontation. Rather, Episode 6 is focused on getting everyone in place for a much bigger one in Odessa, which is hosting a Ukrainian-Russian peace conference, where Raife and his new team are headed.
Reece and Freddy are also on their way to Odessa, which means the tension is ramping up between the sides. But there’s another fun ingredient tossed into the mix: two very skilled enemy snipers who have already shown us just how good they are.
With what we know about Freddy and what we know about Reece, there may be a very good sniper showdown to come.
Not everything great about this episode is an action set piece, though, which is a good thing considering the amount of them there were. Raife shares a great moment with Tal, opening up about the guilt he feels for leaving the teams behind.
Raife has moved on, but he’s always wondered about what it would have been like had he stayed, had he made different choices. Would Reece’s family still be alive? Raife knows if he had stayed, he likely would have been running Alpha Team instead of Reece.
It’s a surprisingly emotional beat for Raife and adds another layer to the character, proving that despite everything he’s endured and the difficult things he’s done, he carries the weight of what happened to his friend.
Tom Hopper is fantastic in this episode.
Raife and Reece finally get to talk to each other via phone and, while we only get to witness a small sample of that conversation, I’m dying to see these two put together in the same fight. They’ve both been through so much and had so much happen to them independently that I’m eager to see how they react when put in the same situation.
“Rats in a Maze” continues to plant clues about Reece’s past, and this episode we get more about his mother and father.
It becomes increasingly apparent that what is going on reaches much further into his history than he could have anticipated. Someone knows an uncomfortable amount about Reece, his family and the things that matter to him. The thing working against him is bigger than what he originally thought, and it could be much more personal than he expected.
That’s the thing about Episode 6 of The Terminal List Season 2: it combines that brutal hand-to-hand action with some very discomforting moments, more development on Raife and enough new information for everyone to feel like they’re making progress.
By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t walking away.
I’m watching Episode 7 right now.
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