TL;DR: Episode 6 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf pushes Ben and Raife to a breaking point while exposing Haverford’s duplicity. It’s tense, brutal, and messy—the perfect appetizer for the finale.

There’s a certain rhythm to espionage thrillers. You start with the whisper of conspiracy, the faint echo of betrayal in a dimly lit room, and then—inevitably—some poor bastard ends up with shrapnel lodged in his thigh, pulling it out with the grim determination of a man who has long since given up on the possibility of a pain-free existence. Episode 6 of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, titled “Pawns & Kings,” understands this rhythm almost too well. It’s the penultimate chapter of the season, which means we’re standing at the edge of the cliff, staring down into the finale’s abyss, waiting to see which of our characters will jump, and which will be shoved.

The episode opens not with fireworks but with something quieter and more haunting: Raife Hastings dragging the body of a courier into a church. The image of a bloodied corpse left in front of a backlit cross is blunt, but it tells us everything about Raife’s headspace. He’s wrestling with morality in a world that’s systematically stripped morality out of him. Later, we’ll watch him cradle the compass James Reece gave him, as if it’s a relic of a code he no longer recognizes. In a show drenched in shadows, Raife is the one character still searching for light—and he might be the only one honest enough to admit he can’t find it.

Meanwhile, Ben Edwards is busy embodying the other half of this equation: the man who can’t stop fighting, even when every signal says “enough.” After surviving the car bombing, he digs shrapnel out of his leg in a Swiss bathroom stall. The detail feels both grotesque and oddly mundane, like watching someone patch drywall in their kitchen. That’s the show’s trick: it drags the extraordinary down into the gutter of the ordinary, and somehow that makes it feel more dangerous.

The geopolitical theater unfolds in Geneva, where Iranian Prime Minister Saedi plays diplomat while secretly advancing his nuclear ambitions. These scenes are functional table-setting, the kind of necessary but uninspired beats that every spy thriller has to slog through. They work less as drama and more as pressure cookers for Ben’s team, because the real story here isn’t about international policy—it’s about whether these men can hold on to their souls while pretending to serve a cause.

When Ben reconnects with Mo and Landry, we get a fleeting sense of camaraderie, but it’s quickly shattered by Jed Haverford, the spymaster who seems to grow slipperier with each passing scene. His murder of Vahid Rahimi (“That’s for Eliza”) is played as vengeance, but it lands like a confession. If Raife is the conscience of the group, Haverford is its rot, smiling while he manipulates them into doing the Shepherd’s dirty work.

The emotional heart of the episode—its raw nerve—comes when Raife finally tells Ben he’s out. Their conversation is the kind of quiet, devastating break-up scene that spy thrillers rarely allow. Raife clings to a code, to the memory of a world where actions had meaning, while Ben shrugs it off as the fog of war. And in that fog, you realize, Ben has chosen to lose himself. “Reece was wrong about you,” Raife says, and it’s the cruelest truth Ben could hear. The fracture between them isn’t about strategy; it’s about identity. Who you are when you strip away the mission. Who you are when you stop pretending you’re fighting for someone else’s cause.

The rest of the episode is a taut dance of betrayals and revelations. Haverford, of course, isn’t just compromised—he isthe compromise. The Shepherd isn’t who we thought. The bearings exchange turns into a bloodbath. Ben, Mo, and Landry shoot up a plane full of Iranian soldiers, and for a second, it feels like the team has won something. But then the rug is yanked again: Haverford has burned them, framed them as traitors, and vanished into the wind like a true operator who knows how to survive by always being two steps dirtier than everyone else.

The final image of Raife watching through a sniper scope but refusing to join the fight is both tragic and liberating. He’s still tied to Ben, but no longer willing to follow him into the abyss. It’s a choice few characters in this world are ever brave enough to make.

What “Pawns & Kings” nails is the sense of momentum. Every scene pushes us toward the finale with the inevitability of a loaded gun. The problem is that sometimes the show leans too hard into the mechanics of plot, leaving the emotional arcs gasping for air. Still, the episode earns its place as the penultimate hour by laying bare the fractures between men who once called themselves brothers, and by reminding us that, in the end, the most dangerous battles are fought not on the field but inside the heart.

Verdict: 

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf Episode 6 is a muscular, relentless setup for the finale, balancing action with an emotional gut punch between Ben and Raife. It’s not perfect—the geopolitical subplot wobbles—but when it comes to moral stakes, this chapter hits hard. Betrayal is the currency, and everyone’s broke.