In The Terminal List: Dark Wolf episode 4, Vahid and Cyrus had a bit of a disagreement over whether or not they should help the Iranian minister, Yousef, with making nuclear weapons. Since Cyrus was okay with working for Yousef, he told him to stay in Geneva and continue his work. Meanwhile, Vahid was asked to leave for Tehran as soon as his job was done. Now, for the completion of Cyrus’ project, he needed to get his hands on the bearings that Molnar had shipped from Budapest. Haverford’s inside man, known only as the Shepherd, had tipped him off to this shipment. So, Haverford prepared to intercept the shipment, steal the authentic bearings, and switch them with fake bearings so that when they’d be used by Iranian nuclear scientists, their project would fail. In the meantime, Haverford went after Molnar to put an end to him. Overall, things were going fine until Haverford’s crew found themselves being shot at by unknown assailants. Edwards and Perash broke away from the rest of the group so as to safeguard the authentic bearings. That’s when Perash betrayed Edwards by incapacitating him and stealing the bearings. The fifth episode is largely focused on Edwards, Perash, Hastings, and Varon and doesn’t give us any updates on Farooq and Landry. So, let’s talk about it.
Spoiler Alert
Hastings Kills A Friendly
Hastings is seen heading to a safe house in Austria with one of the unknown assailants that he had incapacitated during the shootout, with the intention of torturing him and getting some information out of him. But before doing so, Hastings patches the guy up and then wakes him up using smelling salts. Once the guy understands that he has nowhere to go and that his life is in his captor’s hands, Hastings cuts open one of his wounds and advises him to start talking unless he wants to bleed out and die. Hastings keeps increasing the pain index of his torture methods, and his captor keeps refusing to answer any of his questions. It’s only after Hastings brings lye into the equation that the assailant blurts out that he works for German intelligence. While the officer loses consciousness, the color drains from Hastings’ face too, as he comes to the realization that he has been torturing a “friendly” all this while.
Hastings tries to learn if the BND knew that a Mossad-CIA coalition task force was going to hit the Khalid Network convoy, if the BND was tasked with taking down the Khalid Network, or if they were just flying blind and shooting at anyone that was shooting at them. The German intelligence officer can’t give any concrete answers because, well, he is dead. The realization that he has invited a world of terror hits Hastings like a freight train. I suppose once the spiral caused by his horrific actions dies down, he’ll start wondering if he and his crew have been betrayed by Haverford. He had a hunch that Haverford was keeping a lot of things from the crew. He tried to inform Edwards about it, but he told Hastings to ignore what his gut was saying and just be done with the mission. Now he’s going to start to feel that he should have trusted himself more than everyone else and probably go rogue. He hasn’t been contacted by anyone from his team. He has no way of contacting the only person he trusts, which is Edwards. So, I guess it’s safe to assume that he is going to assign himself the task of hunting down Haverford and getting some answers out of him. How productive will that be? We’ll see in the next few episodes.
Edwards Confronts Perash
Edwards gets information from Haverford that Perash is in Zurich. He is ordered to retrieve the bearings. So, that’s what he sets out to do. As soon as Perash enters her room in a hotel, Edwards ambushes her and, at gunpoint, takes the bearings off her hands. And then he asks her who she is working for and why she betrayed him. Perash says that the Mossad ordered her to get the bearings. Hence, she was just doing the assignment that she was given by her bosses, who outrank Haverford, at least in her eyes. She says that she has nothing to do with the unknown assailants that ambushed them when they intercepted the shipment. She thinks that something is off about Haverford or the Shepherd, but she can’t prove any of that yet. She needs to get the case to Berlin before her location is outed. She deactivates the tracker in the briefcase with the bearings in it. I couldn’t determine whether the tracker was placed by the Khalid Network so that the briefcase could be tracked or if it was placed there by Perash herself so that Mossad could keep an eye on her movements.
If it was a Mossad tracker, it makes sense, and her deactivating it means that she is protecting Edwards until he is sure that Perash isn’t a backstabber. If it was a Khalid Network tracker, then why didn’t Perash deactivate it before making her way from somewhere around Budapest all the way to Zurich? I don’t know, and Edwards doesn’t get the chance to find out either, because some more unknown assailants barge into Perash’s hotel room and start shooting at them. This leads to a pretty lengthy and competently constructed action sequence that ends with Edwards and Perash killing everyone that was after them. They exit the hotel, discard the guns, throw away the tracking device, and Edwards keeps the briefcase with the bearings in it on his person. Edwards wants to part ways with Perash, but she says that her mission was always to look into Haverford’s connection with the Shepherd. Either Haverford and the Shepherd are working together, or it’s possible that Haverford is being used by the Shepherd for their own agenda. She claims that both of them have been betrayed and they need to stick together to get to the bottom of this mess. Edwards accepts Perash’s proposition, and they head to an abandoned movie theater to take a breather before thinking about the next step of their mission.
Is The Shepherd Dead?
Once they are all patched up and partially recuperated, the first thing that Edwards does is check the authenticity of the bearings that he has been protecting so far, and he notices that they are different from the ones that Molnar was selling. You see, the original plan was that Haverford’s crew would hit the convoy and take the authentic bearings off the proverbial table. Someone from the team would then present themselves as the new seller of the bearings, which’d be inauthentic, thereby botching Tehran’s plans of making a nuclear weapon. The only way to tell the difference between the original and the inauthentic bearings was that the former were almost transparent while the latter were hazy. With Molnar dead, there was no way for someone to point that out. Now, when Edwards observes the bearings, he sees that he has the inauthentic ones in his possession, i.e., the hazy ones.
This means that someone switched the original briefcase with the counterfeit one before the Khalid Network convoy entered the tunnel or when the shootout began. The question is why and how? The Shepherd, Haverford’s crew, and Mordechai are all those who knew about this switcheroo. While we don’t know about the rest, we do see Varon going after the Shepherd in Munich after learning about this location by hacking into the texting app that the Shepherd used to communicate with Haverford. Does she find anything productive there? Well, she does download a bunch of data from the Shepherd. But then the Shepherd finds her snooping around his house and tries to kill her. Varon, in retaliation, kills the Shepherd and then walks out of the apartment with the stolen data. By the way, do I think that that’s the real Shepherd or some guy who is a front for the Shepherd? I feel it’s the latter because, after giving the Shepherd so much build-up, killing him off like that would be a tad too anticlimactic. More on that later.
Perash Is Dead
At the end of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf episode 5, the former announces that they should head to Stein am Rhein by road, because it’s been marked as the rally point for Haverford’s crew. Perash asks if Haverford has instructed him to do anything else, and Edwards says that he has been asked to sever all ties with Mossad. Yet, Edwards has chosen to trust Perash because of her “we are fighting the same war” speech. While driving to the rendezvous spot, though, the car that Perash and Edwards are in is attacked by a couple of assailants with a bomb. Perash perishes, while Edwards kills the assailants and then flees the scene with Perash’s bracelet and the briefcase full of fake bearings to hopefully get to the rally point without facing any more obstacles. Yes, Perash is dead for sure (yay), but there’s no way of saying who orchestrated this attack. Earlier, Perash and Edwards were speculating that it might be ISIS or the Iranians. But it might’ve been Haverford as well. He probably told Edwards to stay away from Perash because he had sent people to kill her for betraying him.
Since Edwards was with Perash, the assailants must’ve assumed that he had switched sides and tried to kill him too. If that’s the case, what is Haverford’s true allegiance? If the show is as cliche as I think it is, I think it’s simply going to show that Haverford was “turned to the dark side” by this Shepherd, and enlightened to the horrors inflicted upon the world by Israel and the USA. Hence, Haverford has decided to betray his own country as well as its greatest ally by working with Iran, or whatever shadow group that the government is using to make nuclear weapons. And this whole ordeal will conclude on a bitter but nationalistic note where Edwards will kill Haverford for acting against the best interests of the nation that has given him “everything.” That’s all speculative, though. I guess we’ll have some answers once Edwards reaches Stein. What are your thoughts on episode 5? Let me know in the comments section below.
