Taylor Kitsch wears a Casio G-Shock

On the set of The Terminal List, in 2022, Taylor Kitsch stands in a black cap and plate carrier, a suppressed rifle held upright against his chest. The letters tattooed across his fingers spell something the camera never stops to read. Behind him a crew member checks a phone and another waits in a mask, because this is a working film set and not the war it is dressing up as. Kitsch plays Ben Edwards, a former Navy SEAL and Reece's old classmate from BUD/S, now working for the CIA. On his left wrist, pressed against the rifle's foregrip, is a black Casio.

The watch is a G-Shock, and not just any G-Shock. It is the GA-2100, the model the internet started calling the CasiOak, because the case is a flat octagon with a thin bezel that looks, if you squint and you want it to, like the steel Audemars Piguet Royal Oak that costs roughly two hundred times as much. The Casio runs about a hundred dollars. You can lose one in a riverbed and buy another the same afternoon, and that is both the joke and the point. It is the watch you hand a character whose job is to be deniable, because nothing about it can be traced back to anyone.

You can tell it is the GA-2100 and not one of the other G-Shocks Edwards wears, because the case is that octagon and nothing else in the range has it. In the prequel, Dark Wolf, he also turns up in a rounder DW-6900 and in a Tudor Pelagos, the kind of expensive watch a deep cover identity is supposed to justify. In the original series, the watch on his wrist is the cheap one, a hundred-dollar Casio on a length of paracord, the watch a working operator actually buys for himself.