Yearning for Forgiveness
“The Terminal List” and the Thud of Revenge
My wife and I love to unwind after a long day with an episode of one of our favorite shows. Sometimes, nothing hits quite like “I...declare…BANKRUPTCY!” from Michael Scott of The Office. But sometimes we like to mix it up with something new. After perusing what free options were available to us (we’re cheapskates), we stumbled across a limited series on Amazon Prime, called “The Terminal List.”
(Spoilers ahead!)
Chris Pratt stars as James Reece, a Navy Seal who’s just returned home from what was supposed to be a smooth and covert operation in the Middle East. James’ team had received reliable intel which would be used to move in on Dr. Kehlani, a chemical weapons expert. Unfortunately, the intel was corrupt, and almost the entire team died in bloodshed and panicked gunfire. Once stateside, Reece mourns the death of his close friends as he tries to assimilate back into civilian life with his family.
Well, at least that was the plan. Since returning from combat, Reece has been accompanied by increasingly intense headaches. Mixed with PTSD and an unknown tumor growing in his head, he struggles to distinguish reality from his distraught and recent memories of combat. With family members and fellow military friends aware, Reece visits a nearby clinic late at night for an MRI in which he is attacked with his own gun from the locked safe at his home. Narrowly escaping, Reece rushes home to find both his wife and daughter dead.
Tragic. Gruesome. Devastating. It felt impossible to not put myself in James’ shoes, imagining what I would feel to come home to such a sight and the implications I’d face for the rest of my life. Determined, James Reece sets out for justice on behalf of his wife and daughter.
We kept watching, desperate to see how the rest of the episodes would unfold. Hinted at by the title, James Reece spends the rest of the series finding and killing every individual involved in the murder of his wife and daughter, crossing each name off the list one by one, until just one name remains: Ben Edwards, James’ best friend and accomplice throughout the entire show.
As we watched the remaining time of the last episode wind down, we bit our nails as James confronted Ben, on a boat, in the middle of nowhere:
James: It was you, Ben…you fed bad intel…I need to hear it from you.
Ben: The admiral swore you were already dead, that you had tumors.
James: So did you do it for us, or did you do it for twenty million dollars?
Ben: Maybe both, at first. I haven’t spent a f****** dime. But, you should know, I need you to know, that it’s set in f****** stone. Laura and Luce, I had nothing to do with it. When I found out, I wanted to set the f****** world on fire, brother. I was with you, every step, cleaning up…that’s the truth. That’s the truth.
James: I know.
Ben: I’m sorry.
James: I know, Ben.
Ben: Let’s finish the list.
James raises the gun towards Ben, and the scene ends with a distant view of the boat. A gunshot sounds. The final moments show James Reece on the boat’s deck, list in hand. Ben’s name has been crossed off the list.
And that’s how the show ended. I was furious! We had spent many nights investing in this show; the characters, the emotional trauma James went through, and the building of hope as we yearned for things to be made right. For justice to be done. For mercy to show up. For redemption to have its day. For joy to, somehow, win.
We might say: “Well, some justice was done, right? I mean, the people who were responsible for those heinous acts were defeated, right?” So then, why did this ending feel so unresolved?
Because the main character, the potential hero, the one who had the power to defeat evil, was, in fact, devoured by the same force he sought to destroy. For my Lord of the Rings fans, we were hoping for James Reece to be an Aragorn or a Frodo Baggins who risks his life to save others, when in fact, we got Gollum, a sad character overtaken by darkness and defeated by the evil he so wanted gone.
In the Terminal List, it was death for death, eye for an eye, and pure revenge led up to a final moment between two lifelong best friends who now meet on the plains of betrayal. After spending so many of our moments thinking “When will it be enough? When will he finally forgive,” we watched hopefully as James was given a final opportunity for grace. The chain of death and brokenness could finally be put to an end. Mercy could finally have its day. Hope could be born again. We wanted redemption. We wanted someone to root for. We wanted everlasting peace for all the characters involved. We wanted Jesus to show up.
But instead, we were given a mirror. A thud. James Reece is a troubling character to root for precisely because when we look at him, we’re looking directly at ourselves without Christ. Dead to sin and alone in darkness, desperately doing everything in our own power to save ourselves, redeem our lives, and to logic our way to justice by taking things into our own hands.
The good news of Christianity is that Jesus forgives us. But it’s the way he does it that’s so striking. In the midst of our attempts to be a redeemed James Reece and our ever-increasing tumor-like sickness of doing it our way, he did something we could never do.
He put himself on the list. He became Ben Edwards for our sake. He brings the ring to Mordor, but in a twist for the ages, he is thrown in on our behalf. He surgically removes our tumor to be placed within His body. In fact, through the ultimate repaying of evil with good (Rom 12:17), he made it so that forevermore, there is no longer a hit list, but rather a Book of Life (Rev 20:12), in which our names will never be crossed off. Because he died for us, we get the better ending we’ve always yearned for, but never found in ourselves.