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Rats In A Maze wastes little time on preamble and instead drops the viewer straight into the humid tension of Athens, where Oliver Grey, the compromised CIA figure, speaks in careful tones to a shadowy presence known only as the Colonel. The instructions are clear enough. Grey must prove his remaining value through one last exchange involving Jules Landry. The meeting that follows is full of mutual distrust. Landry appears already wise to the trap, producing a bag that contains the severed fingers of the men Grey had dispatched to shadow him. The gesture is crude yet effective, a blunt declaration that Landry is no easy mark and that the game has grown uglier than either man anticipated.
What follows are scenes of calculated violence and psychological pressure that defines the episode. Landry, flush with cash and a false sense of security, drifts into a nightclub, drugs a woman and heads back to a room that proves far from private. James Reece is waiting. The ensuing struggle is pure physical theatre, a brutal hand to hand clash that strips away any lingering notions of distance or professionalism. Reece does not simply subdue Landry. He claims him, extracting the man from the scene and delivering him to a black site in Kurdistan where the real work begins.
The interrogation that occupies the bulk of the episode is among the most sustained and uncomfortable scene the series has offered. Reece and Mo Farooq work the captive with a methodical cruelty that draws on shared history and hard won knowledge of breaking points. Extreme heat gives way to cold. Food and water are withheld. A recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots, something that has been used this way in the real world, loops through the speakers, its relentless rhythm designed to erode whatever resistance remains. Landry’s drug dependency is exploited. Traumatic memories are prodded. The process is neither glamorous nor quick. It is ugly, protracted and entirely in keeping with the moral terrain the show has staked out for itself. Luke Hemsworth commits fully to Landry’s gradual collapse, charting the journey from swaggering defiance to something closer to animal desperation.
The information that eventually spills is worth the ordeal. Landry admits that a package containing travel documents for two snipers, Tariq Nizar and a Chechen known as Tasho, was provided through al Nawaz. The pair are bound for Odesa in Ukraine, a city about to host high stakes international peace efforts. The revelation lands with the weight of genuine strategic threat. Odesa is no longer a distant backdrop, it’s the place where the season’s various threads are clearly converging. Landry further discloses that Grey answers to a Russian ultranationalist tied to the Black Hundreds, an organisation intent on restoring Russian influence and undermining American power. The man at the centre of that web is known only as the Colonel. Landry has never met him face to face, yet the connection is firm enough to send a clear warning forward.
Mo takes the final stage of the interrogation upon himself, subjecting Landry to one last ordeal involving piano wire, a method that Landry had boasted about in the previous episode, before extracting the last scraps of usable intelligence. The personal nature of the exchange is unmistakable. These men share history, and the betrayal cuts deeper than operational failure. Once the answers stop coming, Mo ends the matter in a manner that is both decisive and horrifying, leaving little room for sentiment. The subsequent call to Reece carries the episode’s sharpest note of dread. The Colonel is planning something devastating. America sits in his sights, and James Reece himself occupies a strangely central place in the design. The warning hangs in the air, unanswered and heavy with implication.
While the interrogation dominates the episode, the other storylines are not ignored. Raife Hastings, still on the hunt following the earlier discoveries, follows the Project Kestrel lead that Katie Buranek had uncovered.. His path takes him overseas and toward a reunion with Tal from The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Ground Branch begins to stir in the hunt for the CIA mole, yet Reece remains several steps ahead, operating with the autonomy that has always defined him. The fabricated intelligence placing Grey abroad is exposed for the distraction it was, further illustrating how thoroughly the opposition has manipulated events.
Ben Wheatley’s presence behind the camera on Rats In A Maze brings a distinct and uncompromising vision that elevates the episode’s most harrowing sequences. The British filmmaker has long specialised in stories that refuse to soften their edges. Across works such as Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England and Free Fire he has built a reputation for confronting violence and psychological fracture without apology or decorative flourish. His approach favours a probing, documentary like gaze that lingers where other directors might cut away. That same quality is fully in evidence here.
In the interrogation scenes at the Kurdistan black site Wheatley allows the camera to remain steady and unblinking as Reece and Mo apply successive layers of pressure. Extreme shifts in temperature, the relentless loop of Kipling’s Boots, the calculated exploitation of Landry’s dependencies and the final ordeal with piano wire are presented with a clinical clarity that makes the cruelty feel all the more real. There is no stylised slow motion or heightened musical cue to distance the viewer. Instead the sound design and framing keep the audience locked inside the room, forced to register every laboured breath and every diminishing resistance. This is the same unflinching method that made the climactic rituals of Kill List so difficult to shake, or the prolonged warehouse chaos of Free Fire so exhausting and immersive.
Dar Salim brings a quiet, contained fury to Mo that makes the character’s final actions feel inevitable rather than excessive. The history between Mo and Landry adds layers that pure exposition could never supply. Tom Hopper’s Raife continues to evolve into a figure of steely competence whose personal stakes are never far from the surface. Jeremy Bobb’s Grey is a study in calculated self preservation, a man who understands the walls are closing yet still believes he can negotiate one more exit.
Every piece of information extracted from Landry carries a price, both in the moment of its extraction and in the larger strategic picture it illuminates. The two snipers en route to Odesa transform the peace talks from background detail into active danger. The Black Hundreds cease to be abstract ideology and become an operational force with reach and intent. Grey’s continued freedom becomes more than an administrative failure. It becomes an open wound. By the time Mo’s warning reaches Reece, everything has changed. The rats are trapped in the maze, and the ways out are getting fewer.
Rats In A Maze works because it understands that story of this kind is not solely a matter of gunfire and pursuit. It is also a matter of revelation, of the slow and costly peeling back of layers until the true shape of the opposition is visible. The episode peels back the layers with unflinching clarity. It advances the plot without sacrificing character, deepens the conspiracy without resorting to cheap twists, and leaves you with a sharpened sense of urgency heading into the final stretch of the season. The path to Odesa is now open. The Colonel’s design is no longer entirely in shadow. And James Reece, once again, finds himself standing at the centre of a storm that has been gathering far longer than anyone initially understood.
Where to watch The Terminal List – Season 2, Episode 6: Rats In A Maze (2026):