Taylor Kitsch plays Ben Edwards in the prequel to The Terminal List, set five years before Reece's platoon walks into an ambush. Anyone who watched the first show knows where Ben ends up, so every scene of him and Reece as friends plays like a countdown clock.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Seen something in episode 4? Drop the frame The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
In the premiere, James Reece hands Ben Edwards a copy of Once an Eagle, and it's the third one he's given him. Ben still hasn't read it. Jack Carr calls it a book on leadership, and he used to hand it to SEAL leaders as they started out. Reece is trying to fix Ben's character with a 1968 paperback, and anyone who saw The Terminal List knows how that goes.
Stuck in Frankfurt with Raife, Ben pitches sightseeing options, and number three is the Struwwelpeter Museum, home of the creepiest kids' book ever written, in his words. Heinrich Hoffmann, a Frankfurt doctor, wrote it as a Christmas present for his three-year-old son in 1844. It's a set of cautionary tales, including a boy who never trims his fingernails. Ben calls it disgusting yet enthralling, which is also a fair review of Ben.
Eliza opens with Yeats. Ben counters with Wilfred Owen's Poems, which he calls his favorite book, as a send-off for her daughter Noa, who is about to start her army service. Asked if he actually reads poetry, Ben says he fits some in between surf sessions. Eliza reads the preface, the part about the pity of war. A SEAL whose favorite book is anti-war poetry, handing it to a kid about to put on a uniform, is either giving good advice or making a confession, and Ben isn't saying which.
Shopping for a send-off gift for Noa, who is about to start her service in the IDF, Eliza picks up Yeats at a book stall in Budapest and quotes "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." Ben makes the case for Wilfred Owen instead. Yeats wrote about the First World War as a civilian. Owen wrote about it from the trenches and died a week before the Armistice, which is a hard argument to beat.
At the sanctions talks, Cyrus tells the American side that the common bond between men is the exchange of goods, not the exchange of suffering. A US delegate asks if that's one of his philosophers or some famous Persian trader. Cyrus says it's Ayn Rand, and that he'd have thought she was required reading in the country that perfected capitalism. Atlas Shrugged runs over a thousand pages, which may be why the delegate skipped it.
