‘The Terminal List’ Episode 4 Recap: “Detachment”

Here’s a quick sitrep on where Reece’s war in the streets stands at the outset of The Terminal List Episode 4. The US Navy has effectively cut him loose. The tumor in his brain is becoming more volatile – we’re talking sudden, skull-splitting migraines, disorienting waking dreams, and now, tremors in his hands. He’s living off the grid, and is wanted by the FBI for questioning in four murders, two of which he actually committed. And while Reece has learned that his wife and daughter’s deaths were part of a big money corporate mystery, his strongest leads – Project RD-4895, Capstone Industries big baller Steve Horn – are still just Post-It notes on Buranek’s ever-growing wall of research. He hasn’t fully processed that Lauren and Lucy died in the service of a corporation’s bottom line, and he hasn’t exclusively set his sights on Horn, who he now calls the head of the snake. Because for Reece, there’s a closer, more tangible win. “Answers or blood?” Ben Richards asked him after Saul’s methadone fade-out. And that’s where we join him as this ep begins, as Reece gently places the fore-end of his handmade sniper rifle on the rocks above a quiet highway in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He adjusts for windage, sights on the speeding Porsche Cayenne as it rounds the bend, and puts one round through the driver’s side windshield. Marcus Boykin was the ostentatious oil lawyer tasked with hiring the sicarios who executed Lauren and Lucy. Now, he’s another casualty in Reece’s personal war.

If you’re a wanted man living off the grid, it helps to have friends with skills, and Reece has a few. Waiting to pick him up in Wyoming is former US Army pilot Liz Riley (Tyner Rushing), who ferries him in her private plane to a secluded airstrip in northern Mexico, where Marco Del Toro (Marco Rodriguez) is waiting for them. The affluent Mexican businessman knew Reece’s father, and adored Lauren and Lucy; Reece calls him “tío.” The group repairs to his vast villa and ranch property, where the reception from Marco’s wife Paola (Patricia De Leon) is more icy. She would prefer that Reece’s revenge tour didn’t travel through her home. With the information downloaded from Boykin’s phone, Marco’s security team has traced the sicarios to a nearby group run by El Navajas (Albert Valladares). And he understands his friend’s need for retribution. What he doesn’t understand is why all of this violence has befallen him, only to leave Reece standing. Is it some kind of biblical endurance test? Reece grunts. “They never broke Job.”

As Buranek has been working the RD-4895 angle, she’s discovered Capstone’s sizable investment in Mike Tedesco and Nubellum, which developed it as a nootropic for application across every branch of the military. Secretary of Defense Hartley’s proposed budget cuts would decimate that contract, as well the $70 billion acquisition of Nubellum that Steve Horn has been pushing, which is why Horn himself shows up at the Pentagon to lean on Fontana, the Hartley aide who’s been feeding him intel. 

It should be noted how terrific Jai Courtney is here as Horn, the ruthless VC raider who never met a Windsor knot he couldn’t make wider and who drops military history quotables as a means of sounding threatening. It really just makes him sound pedantic, but Horn is too rich and powerful for anyone to actually call him out on it. Here’s hoping Terminal List doesn’t kill off Courtney’s character too soon, like it did with Sean Gunn’s Saul Agnon. Why hire an actor as irascible and memorable as Gunn for what amounted to a one-episode blip?

Joined by Ben at the ranch in Mexico, Reece is huddling with Marco and his security team when a migraine strikes, his vision blurs, the tremors intensify, and he suddenly keels over. It’s a shock to his friends, who he hadn’t told about the tumor. But it doesn’t shake his resolve. In lieu of a biopsy, Reece procures a cocktail of drugs to suppress the worsening symptoms. And he dismisses any notion of not actively participating in the operation against Navajas. If Paola had been killed, would Marco outsource an attack on the perpetrator? “I have nothing,” he tells the group. Nothing left to lose.” At this point, vengeance is the only thing keeping Reece upright. And this won’t be a targeted killing from a sniper position in overwatch. Reece will assault Navajas head-on. “I want him to know who’s come for him.” And during the ensuing raid on the sicario compound, after dropping a series of lesser targets with Ben on his six, he finally closes in on Navajas. This is not a job for an assault rifle, or even a pistol. After immobilizing his prey, Reece draws his Winkler/Sayoc tomahawk – it’s the very elegant, very deadly hand axe featured prominently in the opening credits of Terminal List – and handily disembowels the man who shot his family to death.

If there’s any satisfaction to the tracking and killing of Navajas beyond the finality of crossing another name off of his mortal list, Reece doesn’t display it. (Chris Pratt is somehow playing this character with even less emotion for each revenge killing that piles up, so it’s tough to tell if Reece feels anything at all.) Instead, he heads to the airstrip with Liz, where Marco and Ben see him off. Next stop is San Francisco, for a visit with the “head of the snake,” Steve Horn. Reece’s war is scoring wins in blood. But what he doesn’t yet know is how close the FBI is getting to his front lines. In California, Special Agent Tony Layun (J.D. Pardo) has connected Buranek to Reece, and located the journalist as she was laying low in her family’s beach house. She doesn’t immediately cop to being his ally, and their insulated communication system has kept his whereabouts secret by design. But there’s a convergence on the horizon, and Layun is staking out Buranek, moving when she moves. Reece knows all about headaches. But this FBI Special Agent feels like a headache of a different kind.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges