The Terminal List Season 2 Review

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE TERMINAL LIST SEASON 2 FOLLOW.

It’s been a long wait for The Terminal List Season 2, but Chris Pratt is back as James Reece and, in my opinion, it was definitely worth it.

Season 2 finds a very different Reece to the man we met at the end of Season 1. Having killed Ben Edwards, for 172 days our hero has been at sea. He’s lost weight, his tumour is taking its toll and Ben is still living rent-free in his head, with Taylor Kitsch returning as the ghost of the friend Reece was forced to kill.

I had seen The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, so I loved to see Kitsch return. Ben was always one of my favourite characters and to use him as part of Reece’s damaged state means he’s still present without spoiling Season 1.

Reece eventually reaches Mozambique and the Hastings family game reserve, where we meet Rich Hastings, played by Arnold Vosloo. At first Reece begins to find a new purpose by helping to train the team there to fight back against poachers and the Mozambique section features some of the most beautiful cinematography of the season.

There’s even a brilliant little moment where Reece comes face-to-face with a lion. They stare each other down before the lion eventually walks away. I took it almost as the king of the jungle recognising another.

And slowly, Reece comes back to life.

When the poachers put innocent lives at risk, we finally see the old James Reece return. Give this man a rifle and an axe and suddenly those 172 days at sea don’t seem to matter quite so much.

Season 2 really takes off from here.

One of the smartest moves was to release Dark Wolf before this because Season 2 almost feels like a continuation of both shows. Raife Hastings, Mo Farooq, Jules Landry and other characters cross over into Reece’s story, and suddenly the prequel feels essential rather than optional.

Tom Hopper’s Raife Hastings is an absolute standout.

Raife investigates how weapons connected to his business end up in enemy hands, eventually teaming with Katie Buranek as they uncover connections involving politicians, arms shipments and a conspiracy far bigger than either originally thought.

Hopper gets some fantastic action, but his best work could be his quieter moments. His conversation with Tal about Reece is particularly good. Raife admits that leaving the teams was his choice, but wonders if Reece’s family might have still been alive had he stayed. He could have been running Alpha Team. It could have been Raife in those tunnels instead of Reece.

Tom Hopper absolutely smashes this scene out of the park.

Honestly, I’d watch an entire Raife Hastings series.

The other standout addition is Gabriel Luna as Freddy Strain. Freddy initially helps bring Reece up to speed, including a great training sequence where Reece works through different weapons before eventually finding himself behind a sniper rifle.

Freddy becomes increasingly likeable throughout the season and his friendship with Reece feels completely natural.

Which makes Odessa fucking hurt.

The sniper battle in Episode 7 is one of the season’s best action pieces. Reece and Freddy are trying to secure the peace meeting while two enemy snipers are positioned miles away on a concealed cargo ship. After several episodes spent showing us exactly what Freddy can do behind a rifle, it feels like the pay-off we’ve been waiting for to see him go up against another elite marksman.

Then Freddy takes a round to the face.

He’s gone.

It’s brutal because there isn’t this enormous heroic goodbye. One second he’s doing what he does best and the next Reece has lost another brother.

Gabriel Luna made Freddy so likeable that his death genuinely hurts.

Before Odessa, however, the season delivers one of its nastiest twists with Jules Landry.

Luke Hemsworth spends much of the season playing Landry with this brilliant macho bravado. He’s arrogant, self-absorbed and often comes across as a complete dickhead, but eventually Reece discovers that Landry is actually the mole.

And Reece’s interrogation of him is fucking savage.

Reece and Freddy use heat, freezing temperatures, water and drugs as they repeatedly push Landry’s body to its limits, kill him and bring him back. It’s prolonged, horrible and perfectly in keeping with just how far James Reece will go when he needs information.

And somehow the series isn’t done with him yet.

Landry is eventually handed over to someone with a very personal reason for wanting revenge, leading to one of the most eye-watering moments of the entire series involving piano wire, a stool and Jules, Jewels.

I’ll leave that particular image there.

All of this ties into the wider conspiracy, which proves even more complicated than simply finding out who the corrupt CIA operative is. Vasili Adrenov’s involvement cuts deeper than initially suspected, while Mo Farooq’s true allegiance shifts our understanding of what he’s been up to throughout the season.

That’s something Season 2 does particularly well. Every time you think Reece has found the enemy, another part is revealed.

Katie Buranek once again gets herself right in the middle of things and pays the price when she’s injured. Her investigation alongside Raife becomes one of the key threads in uncovering how far it all reaches, and by the finale she’s back alongside Reece.

I really like their relationship. Katie makes it clear that she’s tired of sitting behind a desk and wants to be back in the field, and you get the feeling these two are going to continue needing each other.

Then there’s Reece himself.

His tumour has hung over him since the first season, and Season 2 finally forces him to make a decision about surgery. Reece eventually opts to have the operation, giving him something he hasn’t really had since we first met him:

A future.

But The Terminal List isn’t about to suddenly hand James Reece a quiet retirement.

By the finale, Reece is a free man again and back in the United States. The CIA even offers him a job, potentially heading up an entirely different chapter in the character’s life.

More importantly, the conspiracy he’s been chasing appears to stretch right back beyond the events of either Season.

The revelations surrounding Reece’s mother and father suggest that what we’re watching was already being put into motion before Reece ever joined the military. It isn’t simply another conspiracy that James Reece stumbled across.

It goes back generations.

That completely changes what the series can do.

The finale brings Reece, Raife and Mo together on a mission of vengeance that ends one part of the story without solving the larger mystery. It doesn’t have quite the same fuck yeah satisfaction of watching Reece finally get Steve Horn in Season 1, but it doesn’t need to.

Season 1 was about James Reece working his way down a list.

Season 2 reveals that the list barely scratched the surface.

Even outside the story, technical work remains outstanding. The weapon handling is fantastic, the close-quarters combat is brutal and the helicopter work in the finale looks unreal. Watching the helicopter fly ridiculously low across the landscape like a shark hunting its prey is one of those visuals that adds another level to the sequence.

Chris Pratt owns James Reece now. There’s no separating the two for me.

More importantly, Season 2 successfully expands the world around him. Dark Wolf matters. Raife Hastings matters. Freddy Strain matters. Mo Farooq matters. These aren’t just supporting characters being brought in to give Reece someone to talk to; their histories and choices actively shape where his story goes.

The opening couple of episodes deliberately take their time, but once Season 2 puts its foot down it doesn’t really let up. We get assassinations, tactical raids, hand-to-hand combat, sniper battles, betrayals, torture, revenge and a conspiracy that becomes considerably more personal than I expected.

And after waiting this long for another season, I burned through the final episodes simply because I didn’t want to stop.

The Terminal List Season 2 was absolutely worth the wait.