Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Terminal List’ On Prime Video, Where Chris Pratt Is A Navy SEAL Commander Who Fights His Own Memory To Investigate A Conspiracy

Chris Pratt has spent the better part of the last eight years leaving the doughy comic nice guy persona of Parks and Rec‘s Andy Dwight behind and becoming a jacked, square-jawed but jovial action star. Still, it’s a bit of a surprise that his return to series TV is as a dead-serious SEAL commander who has a patchy memory and revenge on his mind.

THE TERMINAL LIST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we see surf wash over a beach, we hear Lt. Commander James Reece (Chris Pratt) say in voice over: “In the book of Judges, Gideon asks God how to choose his men for battle.”

The Gist: We see Reese at a military funeral, slamming a Navy emblem angrily into a casket. Two weeks earlier, at Incirlik Air Base, Reece and his Navy SEAL team are given orders to flush out and kill a notorious arms dealer “Chemical Kahani.” The team reaches the Mediterranean shoreline of Syria and enters the labyrinthine crypt leading to where Kahani is hiding out. In the process, they find a trip wire connected to explosives. But once they get around that, they get ambushed, with multiple SEALs and support soldiers getting hit. Then, in a panic, one SEAL, Donny Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger) sets off the trip wire while running.

At least that’s the official word. As he recovers at Incirlik, Reese has to not only deal with invasive dreams about the incident but the fact that 12 of his men died in the operation. When he’s told by investigators that Mitchell set off the trip wire, Reese swears that’s not how it went. He’s also approached by a reporter, Kate Buranek (Constance Wu), who pushes him to leak some info on the botched operation. He tells her that neither him or “Boozer” Vickers (Jared Shaw), who is sitting next to him and is the only other team member to live through the operation, won’t talk.

He comes home to California, and as he’s catching up with his wife Lauren (Riley Keough) and daughter Lucy (Arlo Mertz), and realizes that he has holes in his memory. Then, after he’s called to Boozer’s apartment, where apparently shot himself in the head with his team pistol, Reece is told that Boozer wasn’t in Incirlik when Reece thought he was. He has his best friend and former SEAL Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch) start to look into the ambush, because he truly thinks that their unit was a victim of advanced deep fake technology. He’s so convinced, he reaches out to Buranek to figure out whether Boozer was with him or not.

His suspicions are somewhat affirmed when he’s attacked by masked assassins while he’s in an MRI tube. But then the situation gets worse from there.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Terminal List, based on the book by Jack Carr, seems to have elements of Jack Ryan, Homeland and SEAL Team rolled into one testosterone-laden series.

Our Take: To say that the first episode of The Terminal List is pretty grim would be an understatement. Antoine Fuqua, who directed the first episode (Pratt and creator David DiGilio are also EPs), isn’t exactly known for uplifting fare. But what confuses us about the first episode is that we’re not sure if the series is trying to be a prestige take on the usual uber-masculine military intelligence thriller genre or a standard-grade conspiracy thriller stretched out to eight very dark episodes.

We’re not sure it can be both. When we see Reece going through his memories of the operation, and where they conflict with what his superiors and NCIS investigators are telling him, it’s an intriguing start to the story. As he discovers he has gaps in his memory, how will Reece try to resolve what he knows about his platoon with what really happened?

But then the story devolves in the back half of the first episode, with Reece speculating to Ben about how Boozer couldn’t possibly have killed himself with the team 9mm, because he hated using it instead of his much bigger .45, then the improbable MRI attack that seemingly comes out of nowhere. By the time we get to the end of the episode, it feels more like a full-on conspiracy show and less of an examination of someone who questions his loyalty to a military that’s not telling him the truth, despite the gaps in his memory and obvious PTSD.

It doesn’t help that we have both Pratt and Wu out of their elements here. Sure, Pratt hasn’t been in a pure comedy since his Parks and Rec days, but most of his action roles have not been nearly as grim as what we see here. In a lot of scenes, Pratt looks more surprised than intense, though he seems to pull off other dramatic scenes with ease. Wu is supposed to be a hard-nosed, activist reporter, but whenever she’s on screen we just want to see her in more comedies like Just Off The Boat or Crazy Rich Asians.

As usual in military-focused dramas like these, the dialogue is weighed down by unexplained military jargon and lots of yelling and grunting. The fog of war is an excuse to make the extended ambush scene that starts the episode a confusing jumble of action, and since we have very little connection to the members of Reece’s team, we have no real idea which bearded guy has been shot and which ran towards the trip wire.

Given the truly dark nature of how this first episode ends, we’re not really sure how the show will plow forward, except for Reece and Buranek peeling the layers back of this conspiracy. The fact that we were bored just writing that sentence makes us think we’re one-and-done here.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The final scene is a big spoiler; a we said, it’s pretty damn dark, even by thriller series standards.

Sleeper Star: Jeanne Tripplehorn plays defense secretary Lorraine Hartley, and we know that she’s not there to just make the same speech at a dozen different SEAL funerals. She obviously has something to do with this.

Most Pilot-y Line: After Reece points a gun at Buranek’s head — she was tailing him after one of the funerals — he has her come into the house. When Lauren asks if Buranek wants tea, the reporter cracks, “You’ve got something stronger?” Even the usually funny Constance Wu can’t make that lame line come to life.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The personality of The Terminal List can best be described as “grim,” as are the performances of Pratt and the rest of the cast. Life right now is pretty grim as it is; we don’t need this much monotonous darkness in our entertainment, too.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.