When an episode is called “E & E,” you brace for escape-and-evasion.
Turns out, it’s also Edwards and Eliza, circling each other like two wolves trying to figure out if the other is prey or pack.
And then, just when I thought I had a handle on who was betraying whom, the show reminded me that in this world, everyone’s both.
Edwards & Eliza: Enemies, Lovers, or Just Collateral?
Let’s start with the obvious — Ben Edwards is alive. He’s bloody and shaken, but alive — because Eliza aimed for his plates.
She wasn’t trying to kill him; she was trying to take him out of play. And that choice makes everything between them murkier. His face is bloody, he’s dizzy, and he’s still ready to put her through a wall the second he spots her again.
The fight in Zurich felt like déjà vu: grenades, masked gunmen, corridors you can barely see because Prime Video slaps watermarks across the screen.
Eliza admitted she was on a separate but complementary mission. Yes, she’s taking her orders from Mossad because her true mission is Haverford.
Mossad doesn’t trust his decades-long Shepherd relationship, and she and Tal were sent to figure out whether he’s using that asset for his own ends.
Do I believe her? I don’t know. Edwards doesn’t either.
He makes her walk in front, empties her pockets, raids the concession stand for snacks while she tries to stitch him up, and still can’t quite decide if she’s telling the truth or setting him up for another shot in the back.
But it makes sense that assets would need to be flushed every so often. Why would anyone take the risk of an outsider becoming too inside the operation?
And then there’s that quiet moment in the abandoned theater where she admits she’d shoot him again if the mission demanded it, but also that in another life they might have been something else.
It’s classic spy-show banter, but with Kitsch and Moran, it lands somewhere heavier: two people who know they’ll never be known, except in these fleeting in-between moments.
And then the Fiat explodes before they even exit the city. With Simple Man on the radio, a motorcycle dropping a bomb, and Edwards screaming “out out out,” suddenly, Eliza is dead.
Or is she? Because TV has trained me not to trust death by explosion, especially when the bracelet conveniently lands in Ben’s hand like a symbol for the next phase of his grief.
Haverford knows where Edwards was heading, but Ben didn’t spill the beans about Eliza. And Eliza got a text just seconds before the cyclists planted the bag. Was she warned? We may never know.
Hastings: The Line You Can’t Walk Back
Over in Austria, Hastings plays his own horror movie. He chains one of the guys he captured during the failed op, slices him open, strings him up, and pours lye into his wounds.
It’s sick, graphic, and he justifies it as necessary — until the guy gasps out the truth: he’s CIA.
He’s not Halid or some anonymous terrorist. He’s the friggin’ CIA.
That’s the nightmare of this whole show. Hastings wanted answers, and all he got was a friendly corpse.
His screams of “fuck, hold on” as he tries to revive the man are almost worse than the torture itself, because you see it hit him all at once: there’s no undoing what he’s done.
And how does Hastings live with that? He already had one foot out of this world, and now he’s deeper than Edwards in the mud. But it sure adds fuel to the fire we know burns inside Edwards.
We didn’t meet Hastings in The Terminal List. Will he make it out of Dark Wolf alive? Could the next Terminal List prequel or Dark List sequel be his?
I wouldn’t mind more of the Tom Hopper character. He’s plucking my heartstrings as much as Taylor Kitch did during The Terminal List.
Tal: The Firestarter
If Eliza is (or was) the enigma, Tal is the blunt instrument. Her Munich sequence was a fight scene worth the whole hour.
She breaks into Shepherd’s side of the portal, tapes up the camera, and when the giant man returns, she goes toe-to-toe. Tea kettles, eye gouges, fire starters to the face — this is brutal, hand-to-hand combat, and she survives because she’s faster and has more to lose than he does.
But what does she actually gain? She’s got the laptop, sure, but Shepherd is still a question mark. And the more this show leans into “Haverford might be dirty,” the less I know what Tal’s role is meant to be.
She’s another Mossad agent on her own, complementary mission. We know that much. I guess that’s a start.
The Big Picture
By the end of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf Season 1 Episode 5, Edwards is alone again, bleeding in the street with bearings in his bag and Eliza’s bracelet in his fist.
Hastings is broken, guilty, and carrying a secret no one can ever know. Tal is alive, but whether she actually has the upper hand is a coin toss.
And for now, Haverford is probably still smirking from the shadows, which is likely exactly where he wants to be.
So here we are, five episodes in, and I still don’t know who’s lying. Which, of course, is the point.
Now What?
- If nothing else, Edwards felt for and akin to Eliza. He’s going to demand answers in due time. I can’t help but wonder how it all plays into his own future betrayal. Was there more to his story than we already know?
- How do you come back from torturing and killing a CIA asset, even if you didn’t know? Does Hastings spiral, or does he double down?
- Is Tal the only one we can actually trust, or is she setting up her own endgame?
- And is Haverford a master manipulator, loyal American, or a man running his own shadow war? Honestly, I found him questionable in his first scene in The Terminal List: Dark Wolf premiere. He’s living in the gray areas.
- “Does it get any better than this?” The poor bastard finds his jam on the radio and within seconds, it all falls to shit. Isn’t that always the way?
It’s tiring trying to decide who’s the monster and who’s the mission. Maybe that’s exactly what Dark Wolf wants.
It’s definitely what I want. There’s nothing better than swimming through murky storylines trying to find a suitable direction, questioning everyone, falling for some, and being surprised by others.
But what about you?
This episode didn’t offer as much by way of explanation, but it did posit a lot of new questions. Where do your loyalties currently lie?
Drop me a comment down below!
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