The Terminal List Season 2 Ending Explained: Who Is the Colonel, and Is Reece Okay?

Spoiler warning: this covers all eight episodes of The Terminal List season 2, including the final scene.

The Terminal List season 2 ending answers who has been pulling the strings, and it is personal. The Odesa attack was a coup, the man behind it is a Russian known as the Colonel, and his real target was James Reece, as revenge for something Reece’s father did in Vietnam more than fifty years ago. Reece kills the Colonel’s nephew, earns his pardon and walks into an MRI that the show never shows us the result of. Here is how it all fits together, and why we think season 2 is better than the first.

The official season 2 trailer, from Prime Video’s YouTube channel.

Where season 2 picks up

All eight episodes arrived on Prime Video on October 21, adapting Jack Carr’s novel True Believer. After the revenge story of season 1, Reece (Chris Pratt) is a fugitive hiding at a wildlife reserve in Mozambique, still carrying the brain tumor. The CIA comes with an offer: a presidential pardon and surgery that could save his life, if he helps them find Mohammed “Mo” Farooq (Dar Salim), an old ally suspected of joining an Al-Qaeda network.

That pulls him back in with CIA officer Freddy Strain (Gabriel Luna), while journalist Katie Buranek (Constance Wu) and Reece’s friend Raife Hastings (Tom Hopper) follow a trail of American weapons meant for Ukraine that have ended up with terrorists. The trail leads to Kestrel, an old CIA programme someone has quietly brought back to arm the wrong people.

Was Mo a traitor?

No. Reece never believed it, and he was right. The real mole is Jules Landry (Luke Hemsworth), who had been twisting intelligence and feeding it to the terrorists. Reece catches him and gets the truth out of him the hard way.

The Odesa attack and Freddy’s death

Episode 7 is the turning point. At a peace summit in Odesa, Russia’s president is assassinated, and Freddy is killed trying to stop it. Reece notices that two snipers were firing, and works out that this was never a terrorist attack. It was a coup.

The Terminal List season 2 ending explained: who is the Colonel?

The man behind it is the Colonel, real name Ivan Zarkov, a Russian ultranationalist. In 1972, during a CIA operation in Vietnam, Reece’s father Thomas killed two Russian military advisers, and one of them was Ivan’s brother, Victor. Ivan spent decades planning his revenge. The coup was meant to put his nephew, the media oligarch Vasili Adrenov (Costa Ronin), in power, and to do it with Thomas Reece’s son watching.

Reece and Raife track Adrenov to an abandoned factory in Ukraine. Adrenov taunts Reece that the second sniper’s bullet was meant for him, not Freddy, and Reece buries a hatchet in him before escaping with Raife as Russian forces close in. It is a choice, not self-defence: Reece throws away the chance to take him alive.

What happened to Reece’s father?

Back at Langley, Reece learns the rest. Thomas Reece kept working for the CIA after Vietnam, until he was assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1997. His name is on the agency’s memorial wall, now beside Freddy’s.

The final scenes: the pardon, the watch and the MRI

In the Terminal List season 2 ending, Reece gets his pardon and his chance at surgery, but he will not let the case go. Katie, who survived her own scare earlier in the season, has finished a book about him and goes back to reporting, telling him to get treated.

Then the two threads that matter for a season 3. Oliver Grey (Jeremy Bobb), the CIA analyst who worked for the Colonel, is shown settled in St. Petersburg, and Reece spots him wearing his father’s watch, which means Grey knows exactly what happened to Thomas. The Colonel, Grey and the second sniper are all still out there.

The last thing we see is Reece going into the MRI before his surgery. The show never tells us the result. In the book the tumor is gone, but the series leaves the Terminal List season 2 ending open on purpose.

Will there be a Terminal List season 3?

Amazon has not announced one yet, despite how open the Terminal List season 2 ending leaves things. Showrunner David DiGilio has said the next book, Savage Son, is ready if it happens, and Chris Pratt has said he wants to keep going. With the Colonel and Grey still free, the story is clearly not finished.

Our take

We liked this season more than season 1, and it kept us hooked the whole way through. Season 1 was a straight revenge story. Season 2 turns it into a proper spy story, moving from Africa to the Middle East to Ukraine, and the pace never drops: there is no slow episode in the eight.

What makes it work is Reece and Freddy. Their friendship is the heart of the season, and that is why Freddy’s death in Odesa hits so hard.

Our favourite moment is Reece killing Adrenov in that factory. After everything the Colonel took from him, it is the most Reece thing he does all season, even if it was the wrong call.

And the MRI ending worries us. It feels like a real cliffhanger, not a formality, whatever happened in the book. For more Prime Video action in the same vein, see our Reacher season 5 guide.

Image credits: featured image is a still from the official season 2 trailer, (c) Amazon MGM Studios / Prime Video, cropped; trailer from Prime Video’s official YouTube channel. Used for editorial commentary. The Terminal List is a Prime Video series; all rights belong to Amazon MGM Studios.

Sources: Comic Basics, Yahoo Entertainment, TV Insider, The Cinemaholic, TV Insider (season 3), About Amazon.