TL;DR: Episode 5 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf delivers the show’s most explosive and emotionally raw hour yet, with betrayals, brutal fights, and a shocking death that sets the stage for a blood-soaked second half.

There’s a moment in Episode 5 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf—somewhere between Taylor Kitsch dragging his bleeding body through a tunnel and Rona-Lee Shimon trying to justify why shooting a supposed ally in the back is totally fine, actually—where I realized this spinoff has gone full ‘90s techno-thriller paperback mode. You know the type: you pick it up in an airport Hudson News, the cover has a silhouette of a soldier with night vision goggles, and by page 47 you’ve already gotten a double-cross, a chase across Europe, and a paragraph describing how to stitch a bullet wound with fishing line.

That’s not a complaint. If anything, Episode 5, titled “E & E” (Escape and Evasion, for those who didn’t have a Tom Clancy phase in high school), is the most Terminal List this spinoff has ever felt. James Reece may be MIA—Chris Pratt is off-screen cashing that executive producer check—but Ben Edwards is proving he can carry the franchise’s grim-faced paranoia all on his own. And, more importantly, the showrunners finally let the conspiracy web stretch wider, darker, and bloodier.

So let’s dig into it: the betrayals, the torture, the brutal death that changes everything, and why this episode felt like a turning point for Dark Wolf.

Picking Up the Pieces (and the Bullets)

We open exactly where last week ended, which means Ben Edwards is still bleeding, limping, and somehow refusing to die despite taking a round from Mossad agent Eliza Perash. It’s a scene straight out of The Bourne Supremacy’s European back-alley chase playbook: gunshots echoing through tunnels, sirens wailing, everyone sprinting like cardio is their only personality trait.

Meanwhile, Raife Hastings (Tom Hopper) has taken the courier hostage in Austria. And by hostage, I mean he’s doing his best Jack Bauer impression—pulling bullets out of the guy just so he can shove more pain into him later. It’s nasty, it’s ugly, and it’s probably the most human Raife has ever looked on this show. Torture isn’t new territory for spy dramas, but Dark Wolf treats it with a strange intimacy; Raife isn’t just interrogating, he’s bargaining with himself. Every scream from the courier is another reminder that maybe, just maybe, this mission isn’t as black-and-white as he thought.

But while Raife is busy breaking his own soul, Ben is chasing Eliza across Germany. It’s like the writers asked, “What if we paired two traumatized operatives who absolutely don’t trust each other and then locked them in a hotel with a hit squad?” The result is pure chaos: close-quarters firefights, Ben refusing to hand her a gun (which, fair), Eliza proving she can hold her own anyway, and the two of them walking away with more questions than answers.

And here’s where the show does something clever: instead of painting Eliza as the cartoonish traitor, they lean into moral ambiguity. She swears loyalty—not to Ben, not to Jed Haverford, not even to Mossad—but to her daughter. Which is, ironically, the most honest declaration anyone’s made on this show. For Ben, who’s built his life around brotherhood and duty, that’s a punch in the gut.

The Shepherd Looms

Ah, “The Shepherd.” You can’t have a conspiracy thriller without a shadowy figure with a Biblical codename, and Episode 5 finally dangles that carrot in front of us. According to Eliza, her whole mission has been about finding out who this guy is, and why Haverford—played with maximum gravitas by Robert Wisdom—has been protecting him for two decades.

This is where the story widens in a way that Dark Wolf desperately needed. Up until now, we’ve been in a loop of missions gone wrong, teams ambushed, agents mistrusting each other. Fun, sure, but shallow. Dropping The Shepherd into the mix reframes the season: maybe these characters aren’t just pawns in a random counterterror op gone sideways. Maybe there’s a bigger puppeteer pulling strings.

And let’s be real: if you’ve read enough airport thrillers, you know The Shepherd is going to end up being someone personal. Mentor, father figure, former ally—hell, maybe even Haverford himself. The point isn’t who he is yet; it’s that for the first time, Ben Edwards looks like a man who wants to know why instead of just “who to shoot next.”

Raife’s Breaking Point

Let’s swing back to Austria, because Raife’s subplot deserves more attention than the show gives it. While Ben is bonding (sort of) with Eliza, Raife is busy torturing a man who—plot twist—isn’t even with the Khalid Network. He’s actually German intelligence. Oops.

This moment lands harder than expected. Raife isn’t just guilty; he’s shattered. He spent hours brutalizing an ally, and when the guy finally admits the truth, it’s too late. The man dies in his arms, not with hatred, but with a kind of sad resignation. And Raife, who’s been painted as the smirking muscle until now, finally feels like a human being drowning under the weight of his own mistakes.

In another show, this might be the setup for redemption. In Dark Wolf, it feels more like foreshadowing doom.

Tal, Klaus, and the Brutality of Spy Work

While the boys are busy shooting and bleeding, Tal (Shiraz Tzarfati) gets her own subplot—and it’s a nasty one. She breaks into Klaus’s apartment (played by an almost unrecognizable Ethan Suplee) to hack files. What should have been a routine espionage B-plot turns into a full-on horror sequence.

Klaus isn’t just suspicious; he’s monstrous. The beating he delivers to Tal is shot like a home invasion thriller, suffocating and ugly. Watching her barely scrape by—setting his face on fire just to survive—reminds us that this world doesn’t care about competence. You can be the smartest operative in the room, but if the wrong brute catches you, you’re toast.

This subplot doesn’t connect directly to Ben or Raife yet, but it reinforces the show’s thesis: in The Terminal List, trust no one, expect nothing, and survival is a coin flip.

The Death That Changes Everything

And then there’s the ending. The explosion. The loss that pushes Ben over the edge.

Ben and Eliza, trapped in Zurich traffic, become sitting ducks. A motorcyclist drops a bomb on their car, and in seconds, the world goes orange and deafening. Ben scrambles out alive, but Eliza isn’t so lucky. She dies there, burned and broken, her last act being the unintentional confirmation that yes, she was probably telling the truth.

It’s a cruel twist, but one that makes sense narratively. Eliza wasn’t built for the long haul—she was built to complicate Ben’s morality, make him question loyalty, and then be ripped away so he’d have nothing left to cling to but vengeance. When Ben takes her bracelet and walks away with the bearings, it’s not just symbolic. It’s a declaration: the man we’ve been watching stumble through alliances is gone. What’s left is warpath-Ben, the kind of operative who doesn’t care about right or wrong anymore, only payback.

Final Thoughts

Episode 5 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is the strongest of the season so far. It’s messy, brutal, and unrelenting, but it’s also the first time the show feels like it knows exactly what story it wants to tell. By leaning into betrayal, moral ambiguity, and the cost of violence, it finally gives Taylor Kitsch the playground he deserves as Ben Edwards.

If you thought last episode was explosive, Episode 5 doesn’t just up the ante—it detonates the whole table. With Eliza’s death pushing Ben into darker territory and Raife drowning in guilt, Dark Wolf is proving it’s not just a spinoff—it’s the next great paranoid action thriller.