As Gabriel Luna sprawls behind a custom sniper rifle on a balcony overlooking a port city, he pulls out a leather-bound notebook and opens it to a simple range card with half-circles across the top.
Two miles away, a team of two snipers hidden amid the city clutter sits behind their own hyper-customized rifles, sighting in on a podium just below Luna. The American president will soon appear to give a speech, and it will be Luna’s job to protect him.
But unlike Luna, the two assassins have sophisticated targeting computers mounted on their guns, receiving precise information — 8-digit coordinates, wind and humidity — from a spotter hiding in the president’s crowd.
Without a word of dialogue, the stakes and contrasts of a climactic sniper battle in the second season of Amazon’s “The Terminal List” are set: The bad guys will be shooting with every advantage of technology, while Luna, playing a CIA officer and former Navy SEAL, will face them with just a pencil, an Army Form 5517-R “standard range card,” and his own instincts and skills.
The sniper shootout comes in the penultimate episode of the action-heavy military drama’s latest season, which debuts today on Amazon Prime. It follows Luna and series’ star Chris Pratt as they unwind an international terrorism plot. The sniper shootout comes as the two defend the American president during a U.S.-Russia peace summit in Ukraine in an episode dubbed “Every Bullet Has Its Destiny” — words embossed into the leather of Luna’s range notebook.
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The sniper duel, like the rest of the series’ shootouts, focused on true-to-life details thanks to the former Navy SEALs behind “The Terminal List.” Executive producer Jared Shaw, a SEAL from 2002 to 2013, met Pratt when the actor visited Shaw’s unit while prepping to play a SEAL in “Zero Dark Thirty.” Writer Kenny Sheard was a SEAL for 12 years, and the show is based on books by Jack Carr, an enlisted SEAL-turned-officer for 20 years.
Shaw spoke with Task & Purpose prior to the show’s release about how the SEALs developed the sniper battle.
“There is definitely a sniper element in the book,” said Shaw. “But as we got into the writers’ room, we had Kenny Sheard in there who’s a former SEAL sniper as well. And so as we sat down in the room and really started kind of fleshing it out, it took a little bit different direction than what it does in the book, and we’re able to start getting into kind of some of the finer points of sniper warfare.”
“The Terminal List” has been a hit for Amazon Prime as one of a recent genre of action-thriller shows, like “Reacher” and “Lioness,” that trade on putting hyper-realistic military hardware, tactics and skills on screen. Pratt and Luna get into gunfights in nearly every episode, from an early-season ambush in an African wildlife preserve between Pratt-led park rangers and elephant poachers, to a back alley gunfight in which Pratt, covered by Luna, frees a captured team member.
But the sniper battle in episode seven is the apex of the season’s shootouts.
Assigned to protect the president, Luna and Pratt discover the sniper’s secret stash of weapons, including CheyTech M200s, a real-world sniper rifle (“that’s a 2,000 meter gun,” Luna says), plus the range computers.
“Easy day,” Pratt says as they consider their opponent. “Show these wanna-be snipers there’s levels to this game.”
Yeah. There’s a lot of that kinda talk in the show.
But the commitment to accuracy is obvious, even for the disguised spotter, who sends back coordinates that — we checked — are along the shoreline in Odesa, Ukraine.
As the writers raise the tension and the snipers dial in their shots ever closer to each other, Shaw said, the show stays focused on the details.
“I’m not sure it’s been seen before, showing the vapor trails of the bullets at long distance, and seeing how that round is pushed by wind, humidity, and adjustments and corrections you have to make over those distances,” Shaw said. Outside the show, he said, he hears from special operations veterans who watch those details closely. “It’s just those little points of authenticity that long-distance shooters, snipers, operators will key in on and be like, ‘oh, okay, I see what you did there. You guys are trying to keep it real.’”
The post The Navy SEALs behind ‘The Terminal List’ break down the new season’s sniper battle appeared first on Task & Purpose.
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