‘The Terminal List’ Recap: ‘Reclamation’

Written by John Edward Betancourt

Caution: This article contains spoilers for the season finale of ‘The Terminal List’. To revisit the previous episode, click here.
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Often times, stories that revolve around revenge… slip into some pretty standard territory when the time comes for our hero to exact their vendetta upon their target. In that, action and violence rule the day as the hero rips the last vestiges of the villain’s forces to shreds as they push to finally face the person or persons that hurt them, and properly make them pay for inflicting such pain and well… that formula if you will, is the standard for one simple reason. For it is incredibly impactful and crowd-pleasing. Since it gives the audience what they want and wows those same viewers/readers every step of the way. But now and again, you run into an action story that looks to shake up how the revenge plot plays out, often times with fascinating results.

Since a re-jigging of the formula allows for fascinating elements to be explored and it just so happens that for its season finale, The Terminal List on Prime Video… did just that. For this is a story that should have ended with Lieutenant Commander James Reece blasting away at Secretary of Defense Lorraine Hartley. But instead ‘Reclamation’ took the final showdown between Reece and Hartley in a vastly different direction, one that allowed for the viewer to come to understand SECDEF’s line of thinking. A feat that this story accomplished by having Kelly join Hartley at her island getaway, where she could tell her side of the story and help everyone to understand that she wasn’t the villain, but a genuine hero here that made some tough and unfortunate calls.

For she really did believe that she was trying to do Reece and his men a favor by wiping away bad memories that haunted them for ages on end. When in fact, she was giving them a death sentence. Which motivated Kelly, to really find a way to point out to the Secretary of Defense that she was in the wrong and help her to understand the hell she unleashed upon the world, and through some clever writing… she was able to do just that, and really… this was quite the inventive sequence for certain. Since it added a level of humanity to a plot that could have leaned into something hollow, for it reminded us that sometimes the villain really does think they are the hero and are simply misguided over evil. But before Hartley really could ponder on her actions and atone for them, James Reece came calling.

Because he was indeed hell bent on finishing the mission, and his arrival more or less brought forth some more traditional elements. Since he and Ben unleashed hell with their weapons and laid waste to Hartley’s private detail before another pair of twists came into play. Such as the fact that Secretary Hartley, when faced with the horror of her actions… took her own life rather than let Reece have another dark end on his hands, ending the fight for a time and seemingly giving Reece the closure, he has been searching for. But sometime after the dust settled from this fight, and the accountability was coming into play… one last secret was revealed to James. In that, Ben was the other mystery benefactor of this drug trial, and fought alongside Reece to heal his conscience over his actions. Which meant… that James had one last person on his list, and followed his own edict to a tee, leaving him alone and at sea and facing a future unknown. Since we don’t know if he received treatment for his tumor.

But what matters more, is that in Reece’s mind, the work is now done, and it truly was quite the pyrrhic victory for him. Because Reece lost everything in his quest for revenge and that made for one bleak ending. One where only the hero found satisfaction in getting what he wanted and well… the show deserves a round of applause for giving us such a raw and visceral ending to this quest. Because normally there is some kind of catharsis for the audience, but having Hartley opt out for realizing she’s the villain and having Ben hide his lies… leaves one unfilled but that is of course, the point. For revenge offers us nothing in the end but scorched earth and emptiness, and that’s precisely what Reece found at the end of his quest to honor the wife and child that greed and misguided thinking, deprived him of.

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