A thrilling, pacy, well-acted drama: Amazon Prime’s The Terminal List reviewed

‘The Terminal List is… a dated and drably made eight-part military thriller that offers little intrigue or excitement,’ says the Guardian’s ‘east coast arts editor’ in a corrosive one-star review. Eh? Can we have been watching the same series? Let me give you an example of this ‘little intrigue or excitement’ and allow you to judge for yourself.

Navy Seal Lt Commander James Reece (Chris Pratt) is having an MRI scan to determine whether he has suffered brain damage during a disastrous combat mission in Syria in which almost his entire platoon was wiped out. All his colleagues, superiors and family think he’s going mad because his memories of the mission do not remotely accord with the official version of events. We, the viewer, are not quite sure: is this a Jacob’s Ladder-style hallucination drama in which none of the protagonist’s visions are to be trusted; or a thriller in which the hero is being ‘gaslit’ into disbelieving what he once knew to be true? Perhaps the scan will give us a clue.

It does! If you’ve ever had an MRI scan you know how claustrophobic they are. You can be trapped in that confined space for as long as an hour and the whole time your natural instinct is to scream and try to escape. Now imagine sliding out from that ordeal to find two masked men with guns trying to kill you because you know too much. Obviously in our cases they’d succeed, but Reece, being special forces, is made of stronger stuff. A nail-biting fight sequence ensues including – good hand-to-hand combat detail, this – Reece ripping off his hospital gown and curling it swiftly round his arm, the better to defend himself against the knife thrusts of one of his assailants.