‘The Terminal List’ Showrunner Confirms the Franchise’s Future on Prime Video and Potential Spin-Off Plans
Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for The Terminal List Season 2.
When you watch The Terminal List, you know you will be taking a journey with Navy SEAL Commander James Reece (Chris Pratt) as he takes on dangerous missions trying to protect the country that he loyally serves, you know that the action sequences will be intense and nail-biting, and you know that there will be a level of intensity to it all that can, at times, make you uncomfortable or make you want to look away. With 17 military veterans working across Season 2 – starting at the top with author Jack Carr and including executive producer Jared Shaw, and a variety of military advisers, writers and directors – firsthand experience is essential to capturing the nuances of this fan-favorite series that has reached more than 100 million viewers worldwide.
The second season of the hugely popular book series picks up four years since Season 1, and after the backstory laid out in the prequel series Dark Wolf, as Reece finds himself caught up in a global conspiracy spanning the Indian Ocean, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, before circling its way back to the U.S. and connecting directly to his own father, former Navy SEAL and CIA officer Thomas Reece. Themes of loyalty and betrayal run deep within family, former teammates, and allies, all while James Reece confronts his own mortality.
In this exclusive Collider Signature in-depth conversation, showrunner David DiGilio, who is working to establish a Jack Carr universe of prequels and spin-offs alongside the series that kicked it all off, digs into creating the world of James Reece in an authentic way and how there are still so many stories left to tell. During the interview, he discusses what most excited him about Season 2 of the Prime Video series, continuing to explore the character dynamics that have been building since Season 1, how they approached the handling of two very pivotal character moments in True Believer, the massive action sequences in the finale, and watching what this cast brings to their roles. DiGilio also teases his desire to tackle Savage Son for Season 3, whether there are plans for more seasons of Dark Wolf, which is set seven years before the events of the first season of The Terminal List, possible future spin-offs, and how far ahead he’s thinking about what comes next.
With Season 2 of the Terminal List, Showrunner David DiGilio Was Most Excited About Getting To Finally Do a Redemption Arc
“I was so excited to jump into that arc of finding a reason for Reece to live again.”
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COLLIDER: What were you most excited about getting to explore this season that you couldn’t do in the first season that you couldn’t do in Dark Wolf?
DAVID DiGILIO: I think the thing that most excited me about Season 2, which is based on the book True Believer by Jack Carr, is that we get to finally do a redemption arc. Season 1 of The Terminal List is this really dark, psychological revenge thriller. It’s a conspiracy thriller mixed with that, but it’s really breaking apart a guy and taking him to his darkest places. Obviously, Dark Wolf is also watching a guy descend into the more complex, dark sides of the black operations world. And so, here we have a guy who is trying to pull himself out. Thematically and character wise, I was so excited to jump into that arc of finding a reason for Reece to live again.
You took the guy’s family away from him in the first season, so he wasn’t going to get over that super fast.
DiGILIO: There’s only one way that that’s going to go. Jack had written this wonderful book, and there is a really interesting thematic aspect to that book and that season, that James Reece has to become the insurgent that he was fighting against in order to take down the conspiracy. That’s super cool, psychologically and philosophically. But this one, in the foreword to the book, he had a passage about the experience of military veterans coming home from war and how hard it is to readjust and reintegrate into life at that more civilian pace. The story of Book 2 and Season 2 is a metaphor for that incredibly difficult process. I had read this book back in 2019 or 2020, when we were first developing Season 1, so I knew what was coming. And there was a bonus in there too, which is that the first step towards finding a reason to live again is that he gets into the anti-poaching cause in Mozambique. That’s something that my father-in-law, who’s a military veteran, had also gotten into. I loved the way that the skill set and mindset from special operations applies to the anti-poaching effort. That was cool, as well.
What were the biggest challenges in pulling off Season 2? Was it a specific episode? Was it a sequence? Was it a location?
DiGILIO: I think the biggest challenge of Season 2 is that it’s maybe the most global, globetrotting book in Jack’s series. There are a lot of globe-trotting chapters in the Jack Carter universe. He loves James Bond, and he starts to turn James Reece into an American James Bond. This is the first step towards that. So, we had to go from a very contained Season 1, where we shot in and around Los Angeles for a primarily domestic storyline with a little bit of Mexico to this insane story that is bouncing from the Indian Ocean to Mozambique to Brussels to Odessa, Ukraine, Lebanon, and all of these different locations that we’re dealing with. That took moving our crew of 300 around the world. We shot in South Africa, we shot in Toronto, and we shot in Morocco. Definitely the biggest challenge was capturing the scope of the book.
We get to see a few familiar faces from Dark Wolf in Season 2 of The Terminal List. How did going back in time for Dark Wolf help you in defining Reece and Raife’s relationship in this season and what you wanted to show us with where the two of them are now?
DiGILIO: Huge hat tip to Chris Pratt. He saw what was coming for us in the True Believer adaptation. There’s a lot of backstory in the book that sets up Raife, and that sets up Mo Farooq and Jules Landry. Those are huge characters, but you can’t really do a lot of backstory work in TV. It’s a freight train that’s moving ahead, or a bullet train that’s moving ahead. So, we used Dark Wolf to set up these characters and their backstory, where they started in 2015. Then, when you find them today in our Season 2 storyline, you really understand how each of these characters is a warrior adrift.
Each one of them is dealing with a different set of challenges that has truly changed them. It’s absolutely wild that the fans of Dark Wolf will get that. You don’t have to have seen Dark Wolf, but the fans of Dark Wolf will get that and see the transformation, maybe not bigger than with Jules Landry, played by Luke Hemsworth. It’s so fun to have that evolution in these characters, and that’s the great gift of Jack Carr. He’s gifted us these awesome characters on the page, and then we get to set them up in these shows. The added bonus is that we get to create a few extra characters. We always work with Jack on building those characters, and we bring back a few of those original characters too.
What was it like to find that dynamic between Raife and Katie this season? What did you find most interesting about watching them together?
DiGILIO: One of the things we realized, as we got into the book, is that both of these iconic Jack Carr creation characters, Katie Buranek and Raife Hastings, are barely in Book 2. Fans had fallen in love with Katie from Season 1, and fallen in love with Raife Hastings from Dark Wolf, and we knew we had to allow a few breaks for Chris Pratt as James Reece. We almost killed Chris Pratt in Season 1. He was literally in every single scene. The best way to do that is to build a B storyline that offers up equally enjoyable, amazing actors and characters, so for us, it was an easy target. We wanted to build a new global conspiracy, and then we could take Raife and Katie and put them on the trail of that conspiracy.
It’s not all smooth sailing for them. They do clash some, as they’re working together.
DiGILIO: The first time we put them together in a scene, we instantly saw this combination of what we call Dark Raife because he is very much in a different place than Dark Wolf. In Dark Wolf, Raife is this incredibly upstanding, very centered Lieutenant who’s on a path to rising through the teams. He takes a hit for his friend. He’s suddenly out of the SEAL teams, and then he joins Ben on the path of the Dark Wolf conspiracy and operation, but he leaves after that. When he leaves Ben, he truly finally leaves the teams. He is searching for meaning. When we pick up with him, he is working in the world of white hat arms dealing. He’s basically trying to take his knowledge from the military and pair it with a friend, a businessman that he’s met, and use it to put weapons in the hands of our allies instead of our enemies. All to say, he’s living in the gray area at that point. You might think you’re in white hat arms dealing, but you’re still in arms dealing, and it’s a slippery slope for Raife. Katie has basically become a victim of truth. She’s told the truth about what happened with Reece and she’s become a pariah for him. She’s a victim of her own celebrity. She is always still chasing that truth, but she does need a new story. It’s Raife who walks into her life and gives her this new story.
This is not a show that has a lot of time for jokes, but the funniest moment in this whole season is when Tal shows up and calls Rafe “half-Viking, half-mental patient.” That actually made me laugh out loud. How did that moment come about?
DiGILIO: We tried to make Tom Hopper ugly. It’s utterly impossible. You can’t do it. He’s just too good-looking of a guy. But we shaved his head, we grew out his beard, and we were going for this Viking look. I can’t remember if that was a joke that Hennah [Sekander], the writer of the episode, had put on the page or if it was something that we came up with on the day, but it goes back to Dark Wolf. She loves giving Raife and these operators a lot of shit. They’re back together again and she notices the look, but it’s also what’s behind the look, and she just says it out loud. The other thing we get from having our special operator storytellers in the room is that they’re constantly giving each other shit. We have some former SEALs and former Army Rangers, so we get to have that wonderful rivalry within the services play out in front of us. It’s a funny, brutal brotherhood and sisterhood. It’s very much like family, and when you see somebody in your family for the first time in a long time, it takes no time to catch up.
There’s something really interesting about seeing Mo’s arc this season and Landry’s. They both have the same thing going on, where we don’t really know what side they’re on until we eventually learn what’s happening with both of those characters. What was it like to find that balance, letting the audience think that Mo flipped but then actually have him turn out to still be on Reece’s side, but then have Landry be on the opposite side of that?
DiGILIO: That’s something that we were gifted from the books, that storyline of Mo as friend having to appear to have switched sides. We called it the MoGuffin instead of McGuffin. Our MoGuffin was very strong because Dar [Salim] is so strong. He’s so convincing. He’s an actor with a lot of strength and a lot of empathy, and you can feel that he’s been scarred by something in his past, serving with the American forces and what’s happened in this country. You don’t want to believe it, but you believe it because of how good he is.
Landry is somebody who, in the books, really just sits in a very dark place from the beginning. We liked the idea of having an arc to that character, so Landy was the guy who showed hints of darkness when you met him in Dark Wolf, but he ultimately was there for that team. What was wild was that, by happenstance, and we didn’t mean to really force this, but Dar and Luke, and Mo and Landry, really formed a connection while they made Dark Wolf. The C storyline of this season is that arc between Mo and Landry, and it comes to a very shocking conclusion at the end of Episode 6. I wish everyone luck in getting through that episode.
‘The Terminal List’ Season 2’s Most Shocking Scene Is Also a Heartbreaking Moment That Comes From a Place of Character
“There is a lot of trust that’s been built up.”
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What sort of notes did you get from Amazon for Episode 6, especially for that scene between Mo and Landry?
DiGILIO: I really want to give a huge hat tip to Amazon and to our studio, MRC. I think this is something that happens when you’ve been working together for six, almost seven years now. There is a lot of trust that’s been built up. That scene is the most shocking scene in the book. Probably the number one comment online from the fans is, “Oh, they’ll never do the Mo and Landry scene.” The fact that we were able to means that we have a network and a studio who trusts the creators to make sure that, if we’re going to tackle something like that, we’re going to tackle it from a place of character, and from a place of consequence and meaning, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s shocking, but more than anything, it’s heartbreaking.
Were there conversations about how much blood you could have spurting out at that moment?
DiGILIO: Yeah. I think there was mild conversation. There were a lot more of those conversations in Season 1. With Saul Agnon in Episode 3 of Season 1, when Reece was interrogating him, there was a lot of conversation about how much throw up could we see in that scene. There was way less conversation here, other than just, “Look, we trust you guys to do this in a way that feels elevated and part of the universe.”
Did you always know how you wanted it to look and how graphic you wanted it to be? It feels like much more of an emotional play between those two men.
DiGILIO: That’s exactly right. With everything, we root it in the character and the emotion. The difference in that episode, brilliantly directed by a great director named Ben Wheatley, who’s a feature director that I’d worked with on a previous show and finally got him in here to work with us. The difference with those scenes was that, in the book, it’s really only Mo and Landry with Reece in a distant observer role. We knew that there was a lot of power to have Reece and Landry, these two very different types of warriors with different builds, come into huge conflict in combat and keep Mo on the outside. He is the simmering time bomb of that episode. And then, when you get to that final moment of payoff between those two actors, everything that we’ve built up and that’s been just underneath the surface, gets to come out between these two guys. I give a huge hat tip to Luke Hemsworth because I think Landry, in the wrong hands, would be an utterly despicable character. He brings a pathos and humanity to that, that that is why it’s so heartbreaking at the end.
There’s a calmness in Mo in that scene that you know it’s just not going to end well.
DiGILIO: Yeah. The hallmark of Dar’s acting style is just how steady he is. You can just feel this power underneath that. It’s discreet and powerful and you understand where it’s going, and out of that comes suspense. That’s probably one of the best things about that episode. It’s probably the most suspenseful episode we have this season. He’s incredibly subtle as an actor, but if you watch his eyes, there is always a little movement in the eyes. That is the level of focus that is so unique to Dar and so unique to Mo.
‘The Terminal List’ Season 2’s Most Crushing Scene Played Out the Way It Did Thanks to Former Navy SEAL Sniper Jared Shaw
“[James Reece] just has to sit with the loss and what it means.”
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Freddy Strain’s fate is so heartbreaking because he is this good guy who’s skilled at what he does and he has a family to go home to. How did you figure out the way you wanted that to play out, not giving us that reveal until Reece gets that reveal?
DiGILIO: That’s a huge hat tip to Jared Shaw, who’s the former Navy SEAL sniper that’s the executive producer and writer of that episode. The technical side of that storyline and the way it builds towards this sniper versus sniper battle really comes from Jared’s experience. Kenny Sheard, another Navy SEAL with sniper experience in our writers’ room, was great as we were breaking that episode. You can get into the craft and technique of a hero versus a villain, and you can hide the ball of the drama and the emotion by just being caught up in watching two people do something very well. On the other side of the gun is Nizar, another great character from the Jack Carr universe who continues, by the way, in future seasons. You end up pitting these two incredible snipers against each other and you get caught up in that battle, but what’s really happening is that you’re watching a guy who is willing to sacrifice everything go up against one of the most dangerous types of terrorists, which is somebody who is willing to suffer for the cause, who believes they are the best, and will do anything to make the shot. That is the battle that you’re watching, but who’s sitting beneath it all? James Reece. He could go either way with these two guys.
When he loses Freddy Strain, that’s one of the most crushing moments in the season because Freddy is the person who’s pulled Reece out of the darkness. Freddy is the one who’s actually given him more than a mission, but a friendship and someone who believes in him. And then, once again, that’s ripped away. It’s a heartbreaking moment, but we knew it was really important to just give it to Freddy and give it to Nizar. We really built up that sniper versus sniper battle. You don’t really see much of that in the book. We wanted to amplify it, and then we wanted Reece to come into it and just experience the loss and not have any more bullets or any way to get any vengeance in that moment. He just has to sit with the loss and what it means.
I thought it was really well handled, even with the moment when his wife calls and we’re reminded of what Freddy had to lose.
DiGILIO: I’m happy to hear that because that was a big debate for us, that call. We felt, in the end, that it was really important because Freddy represents the Light Wolf. Reece was paired with the Dark Wolf, Ben Edwards, in Season 1. In Season 2, he’s paired with the Light Wolf. That final moment is a reminder of that White Wolf that Reece was, at one point before all of this began. After this incredible loss, can he get back there? Can he choose to heal?
Your finale this season has an action sequence that lasts for a good chunk of it. The team is in a Black Hawk helicopter doing a shootout, then they’re on the ground doing a shootout, and then they’re back in the helicopter. What was all of that like to do?
DAVID DiGILIO: We love to push the boundaries. We had done it with the Dark Wolf finale, where we had that huge battle at the farmhouse. We were like, “How can we top that?” I think Max [Adams] and Jared [Shaw] brought up the vehicular interdiction, and the Black Hawk was just awesome.
When it came to doing all the action for the finale, what was the most challenging part of all that? Was it being up in the Black Hawk? Was it everything inside because you have so many people and moving parts? It was relentless with a lot happening.
DiGILIO: It’s really a great indication of what our team is capable of after three seasons together. We’ve made the equivalent of 12 action films in five years. The only way you can pull something like that off is by having a team that understands each other, that understands what it needs to be visually, and that understands the safety aspect of. The hardest part of that sequence was how much we were doing in such a short amount of time. We had two units, working side by side, for three days. Kate Dennis, the finale director, is an incredible Australian director who was overseeing the main unit. Max Adams, an executive producer and former Army Ranger was directing second unit. We had a gunfight happening on one side of the abandoned steel mill while Reece was taking down Andrenov in another part of the steel mill.
We finished that, and we still had an incredible aerial stunt left to get. We had probably about 20 to 30 minutes of light left to get that, and the toughest moment was making the call of whether or not it was safe to get that stunt. We got it, and it was because we have an amazing head of safety, Ryan Sirico, who is a military veteran. Kevin La Rosa, who was running our aerial unit, brought that Black Hawk up from Los Angeles. He’s worked with us on every season of the show and we trust him implicitly. They said would could do it, and we got it done. It was madness, but controlled madness.
‘The Terminal List’ Season 3 Will Tell the Story of Savage Son, the Third Book in the James Reece Series
“It’s an incredible, but also incredibly contained, story based on Jack’s interpretation of The Most Dangerous Game.”
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At the end of the finale, Reece is given some information about his father and about the connection with Oliver Grey. Obviously, this story is not complete. What is all of that going to mean for Reece?
DiGILIO: When you talk to Jack Carr fans, Book 3, or Savage Son, might be the most anticipated season from Jack Carr’s series. It’s an incredible, but also incredibly contained, story based on Jack’s interpretation of The Most Dangerous Game. It’s about this Russian crime family, in effect, bringing Raife and Reece to this private island to hunt them. That means that you have a lot of set up to do to understand the level of animosity between these two families. What’s nice in TV, because Jack’s out there laying these train tracks well ahead of us, is that we can see what’s coming. We know what’s coming. It’s very important for us, in very economic amounts of time and storytelling, to set these things up in prior seasons so that they pay off and you get that sense of being part of this evolving, continuing universe with these great characters.
Setting up Colonel Zarkov up like that was a big deal because he plays a very big role in Savage Son. Jeremy Bobb as Oliver Grey was a big piece of casting. We had actually almost cast him in Season 1. When we thought about Oliver Grey and what’s coming, he can play the more bumbling side of Grey, but also the menace. He can handle both of that really well. So, there’s a big story coming, knock on wood, with Season 3 and Savage Son. This is all setting up what you’ll see play out in that big event season. As big as these shows are, they just keep getting bigger. There’s so much contained but cool stuff that we’ll be tackling when we get into Savage Son. You don’t want to slow it down with a lot of backstory. You want people to understand the friction and the conflict between these characters. That makes the emotional payoff all that much better.
Where are you at in the writing process for Season 3? Have you already started?
DiGILIO: We’re always thinking. I don’t think I can say anything more about that. We’re still very much writing inside the Jack Carr universe. There’s great stuff that he has gifted us with all of these characters that we’re starting to explore, but we’re looking forward to that one.
Is there a push to have a faster turnaround to get these seasons out sooner, or do you not have that kind of pressure?
DiGILIO: I think there is a big push from the fan base, for sure, and we feel it as well. The trick is to remember that we’ve all been gifted with Chris Pratt, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, as our hero and our EP on these shows. Chris, as a major movie star, has enormous obligations on the movie front. He’s also an incredibly dedicated family man and is always sure to be there for his family, for his kids, and for his wife. But the answer is yes, we are going to turn it around faster. That’s a big goal.
Where are things at with another season of Dark Wolf? The last time we spoke, you said you saw at least a three-season arc for the story you were telling there.
DiGILIO: Dark Wolf came out and did some very good, very exciting numbers. I think the trick is that Jack has gifted us so many characters to explore that it becomes a little bit of a question of, when do we have the time? When do we have the resources to do it? We feel really good and it will be really interesting to watch the level of engagement with Season 2. We feel really good about a lot of these characters and exploring more of them in the future.
There Is a Lot of Room for the Jack Carr Universe To Continue To Grow With More Seasons and Future Spin-Offs
“It is a large world, and yes, we are considering other spin-offs, for sure.”
Are you considering other spin-offs because it does feel like a very large world?
DiGILIO: It is a large world, and yes, we are considering other spin-offs, for sure. What’s very cool about Jack is that he’s not just a student of today’s geopolitical situation. You obviously saw that with the Dark Wolf storyline with Israel and Iran. You see it with the Season 2 storyline and the Ukraine war. But he’s also a student of history. He’s written a great book about the Vietnam War, called Cry Havoc, which we’re really interested in exploring as well. He gives you not just great characters, but amazing situations and history to dive into.
And also, who doesn’t just want to create a really fun action sequence?
DiGILIO: Yes! Jack and I are children of the ’80s. The ’80s action films are a big influence on our careers. That’s something that the books and the shows share. There’s this understanding that great character-driven action is just super fun, and it really deserves to be fun. We put so much time into it. Max and I work so hard on the page, along with the writers. Then, Jared Shaw and the stunt team take that stuff and put it into the locations with the directors and really build it out. What’s really interesting is when Chris Pratt shows up on set and we show it to him. Then, he’s bringing a whole other level, and always from a character place, that we then incorporate into the action as well. As much as these are great books, great characters, and great drama conspiracies, they’re just super fun action shows as well.
Obviously, we’re going to see Reece again, especially now that he’s decided to go ahead with the surgery. It sounds like we’re also definitely going to see Raife again. Are we going to see Mo again too? How long is he going to be taking this vacation he says that he needs?
DiGILIO: We dream about a Mo spinoff. Dar is so talented. We love the way that Mo’s relationship has been built with characters like Tal, Raife, and Reece. There are so many people who have intrinsic trust in Mo Farooq. Whether he gets his own show or he appears in these other shows, he’s going to be back.
How far out are you thinking about and planning for this world? You talk about really laying the tracks of it all, but have you thought beyond Season 3? Are you thinking about what you could do in Season 4 and Season 5?
DiGILIO: I think two seasons ahead. Because Jack and I talk almost every day, we’re constantly watching, not just what’s happening in the world, but things that happen in other shows and movies, things from our past, and movies that we share, and we’re constantly pinging those ideas. Also, Jared Shaw and Max Adams are part of that thread as well. When it comes to the flagship, we’re one to two seasons ahead all the time. And then, we’re constantly building the concepts for the spin-offs and waiting for the right time to take those in to Amazon.
The Terminal List is available to stream on Prime Video.
The Terminal List
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