Jack Carr freely acknowledges that the character of Ben Edwards was stronger in the TV series built around his debut novel The Terminal List than he was in Carr’s original work.
“The Ben Edwards character envisioned by the writers’ room working on season one of THE TERMINAL LIST was a much more nuanced character than I had created in the novel and once Taylor Kitsch brought him to life on screen, he elevated Ben Edwards beyond all expectations. Taylor’s powerful performance blew all of us away.”
The question of how Ben Edwards came to be who he was and do the tings he did in The Terminal List cried out for explication — and we’re getting it in a prequel series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf.
The official teaser for the series dropped Tuesday, July 1.
I am glad to see that Billy Bones Tom Hopper will be in on the caper as the Rhodesian-descended Raife Hastings.
Rona-Lee Shimon, of Fauda fame, is also part of the cast.
The title is derived from a Cherokee parable, paraphrase on Carr’s website thus:
We all have two wolves inside us, constantly fighting for control. The light wolf is fueled by love, peace, and compassion… and the dark wolf is fueled by fear, anger, envy, and greed. The wolf who ultimately wins the battle is the wolf you feed most.
The same parable inspired Cody Jinks:
I am perpetually fascinated by the war of the wolves, which plays out in the souls of Frontier Partisans across history. Fundamentally decent men were driven to commit dark deeds in the name of survival — and more often revenge. In his outstanding study of the Missouri Bushwhackers, Joseph Beilein lines out the self-described motivations of virtually every one of the Bushwhackers, and it always came down to revenge/justice. They saw themselves as defenders of their people, and avengers of wrongs done to them — and they plunged themselves into a bloody swirl of atrocity. Attempting to right a perceived wrong can lead right up to a line that, once crossed, is hard to find your way back to. Ben Edwards crossed a line. We don’t yet know where or how… but he never could quite make it back. That’s a damn tragedy — and it oughta make for some good storytelling.
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Taylor Kitsch played a former SEAL once before — in Savages, based on the Don Winslow novel. His name was Chon, but the cartel queen Elena (Salma Hayek) called him “Eat Shit Caviar” (for reasons). So Lady Marilyn and I always call him Eat Shit Caviar. Hard habit to break…
Matthew says
I think that the line is crossed when violence is less about self-defense and becomes about revenge. That is an easier thing to say than do in the heat of war or some other bad situation.
Hammer says
Looking forward to this. It’s all too rare that we see Hollywood invest in stories where the lead character is not an idealized comic-book hero, but a complicated person who made fateful choices that ultimately did not lead in a good direction.
I listened to an interview with Carr recently, where he talking about how it was liberating to create a new series that wasn’t based on pre-existing books that they needed to (more or less) adhere to, and that they could just start fresh and create a new backstory.