“The Wolf You Feed” (Season Finale)

Here’s hoping there’s a Season 2 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, because even though we know how Ben Edwards dies, Taylor Kitsch has a lot more living to do with this character. The minute the Chief made the decision to forsake life in the teams for his own ideals, we were intrigued with his journey inward. And once he joined Jed Haverford’s black bag act in Germany, we liked how the work spoke to his code even as that operation exploded into devious double-crosses and way too many preventable deaths. Eliza Perash was certainly the most personal casualty. But Ben’s deeply felt experience with the Mossad agent helped him understand who he truly is. (“In this life, this is the only work we know.”) And by the time we rejoin him here in the Dark Wolf season finale, he’s again turning the tables on decision-makers like Haverford, who never saw him as anything more than a weapon for their own ends. Oh, you wanna make Ben Edwards the scapegoat for your crazytown nuclear plot with an outside actor in Iran? This wolf’s claws are even sharper now.

Edwards didn’t lay down after being labeled a traitor by Haverford. Months after the bearings sale/firefight at the airfield, he’s living in improvised conditions at a remote farmhouse in Germany, staying behind a wall of electronic encryption, and with Tal Varon on chat, coordinating a response to Haverford selling out the team. Once Ben pops up on the grid, Jed and his Iranian conspirator Cyrus will send people to kill him and retake the bearings. This is part of their play. While Tal works the dark magic of signals interception, Ben unleashes an array of homemade havoc on a team of arriving gunmen. Propane tank IEDs, antipersonnel mines built from bolts and screws, and a booby-trapped house that takes out half the bad guys while he escapes through hand-dug tunnels to his second and third firing positions. 

We liked the touch of him doing all this to drags on too many Marlboro Reds and a scratchy vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. While he has accepted his lot in life as a warrior – inside of all this he sends Amy, the most recent wife who left him, a one-line divorce email, “Sorry I never made it home” – there have always been two wolves inside of Ben, and the other one’s wearing a drug rug and crushing beers on a boat. Significantly outnumbered, he’s gotta distract these guys long enough for Tal to intercept the electronic goods on Haverford’s crimes against the US. He reaches his final spot, a sandbagged foxhole on a forested rise, and tosses grenades while he checks a nasty bullet wound in his side. 

They’re closing in. The Chief’s not going out this way, is he? Not if James Reece and a few guys from Alpha Team have anything to say about it. Mohammed Farooq alerted “Reecey” to Ben’s action, and the off-duty SEALs show up to help a brother out. It’s like a throwback to the Terminal List with Reece driving his Winkler Combat Axe into bad guy necks. 

The Dark Wolf finale then jumps between Germany, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, and CIA headquarters in Virginia as it ties up loose ends and reveals Jed’s treachery. First, Ben offers his tribute to Eliza’s legacy, delivering her wrist charm to her daughter in Israel along with the collected works of British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. Next, Mo offers a different kind of tribute to Eliza, a bomb on top of Cyrus Rahimi’s car. And finally, as Haverford plays golf and enjoys his retirement from the agency, he arrives at his horse farm to find a bearded visitor pointing his own gun at him.

“I was wondering when you’d show up.” Jed Haverford is the cagey spy guy to the end, and returns to his justification for all of this, America’s decades-long shadow war with Iran and his own personal investment, the 1983 bombing of Marine personnel in Beirut. Jed is so far down his own covert activity rabbit hole, he’s still advocating for arming a nuclear Iran even as Ben drops proof of his deceit on the table, government authorities roll up Haverford’s driveway to arrest him, and the bearings are making their way to Langley. 

Two months later, Ben Edwards is in the harbor at Norfolk, tending to the boat reclamation project that forms the credits of Dark Wolf and later plays a major role in Terminal List, when Pablo Schreiber drops in for a visit. Schreiber is Dasher, another former team guy, who now works for CIA Ground Branch under Vic Rodriguez, a character name straight out of the Jack Carr books these shows are based on. (Carr wrote the Dark Wolf finale with series co-creator David DiGilio.) “I wanna bring you in,” Dash says. “Guys like us aren’t meant to walk the earth. We’re here to burn it down, make room for something better.” And while one side of Ben would certainly be content popping bears and sailing the seas, he’s learned through all of this that his dominant side is the dark wolf. 

“In this life, this is the only work we know.” As its first season concludes, Ben Edwards is taking a polygraph at Langley as part of his application to Ground Branch. He’s reflecting on his journey from Iraq and the SEALs to Europe and Jed’s black bag team. And he knows there is only one answer to why he’s in this interview. “Because I belong here.” We’ll have to see if there is another Dark Wolf season on the horizon, or yet another spinoff from the Carr novels. But in the meantime, we feel like we got to know Ben Edwards as much as he came to understand himself.

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.