Summary
The Agency really picks up in Episode 4, delivering some proper international espionage business without languishing too long in the characters’ uninteresting personal lives.
I’ve been thinking about The Agency a lot, partly to try and figure out why I think it’s so dull, and what’s meaningfully different about Episode 4, “Quarterback Blitz”, that made me like it a little bit more. My best working theory is that it’s almost like a traditional story turned inside-out. It’s better when it focuses less on the characters and their tedious interpersonal dynamics and more on the wider-ranging geopolitical issues that the CIA has to navigate.
When you filter this through the lens of the show’s underlying thesis, which is that all deep-cover agents are maniacs by design, The Agency comes together better than it has thus far, especially in that really torpid third episode. It feels like there are macro real-world stakes informing the micro-interactions. All of the players and pieces are coming together with a shared purpose. Everything’s better for it, even if it’s still a little languid in spots.
Sami’s Value
It even has an intriguing flash-forward (I think!), opening with Martian being uncharacteristically chatty with an unseen interlocutor, his face all marked up with bruises, implying that at some point in his near future, he’s going to be captured and smacked around. Good news, dramatically speaking.
This exchange also provides a bit more clarity about Sami, as Martian explains her top-secret role in meetings between Sudanese and Chinese officials. Sudan is a goldmine – literally and figuratively – geopolitically speaking because it has oil, a port on the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal, and actual gold. Sami’s expertise in the region (remember her talking about not needing to be lectured by Europeans on her specialist subject) means she’s ideally positioned to broker peace in the long-running Sudanese civil war. But it’s all a big secret.
It’s through Sami we get a new villain in the form of Osman, a Sudanese Mukhabarat intelligence agent who is flagrantly threatening and has been keeping a close eye on Sami and everyone she has been meeting with – including Martian. This leads to an unintentionally funny sequence where Martian, who is trying to make amends with Poppy, teaches her how to shake a CIA tail. He doesn’t realize that he’s actually being followed by Osman.
The Belarus Problem
This is the least of Martian’s concerns, though. With Charlie having been saved last week, the focus of the CIA turns to Belarus, who’re trying to locate Coyote. This is proper international espionage business. Henry and Martian trying to sniff out who the hidden KGB agent is and which of the dignitaries they need to work with is good stuff and makes them seem much more capable than previous episodes have.
It all comes together really neatly when later Henry reveals that the whole chain of events was kick-started by a congresswoman making disparaging remarks about Belarussian political affiliation as a favor to Langley. Credit where it’s due – this kind of stuff is very difficult to pull off from a writing perspective, and The Agency nails it.
Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright in The Agency | Image via Showtime
Danny’s Mission
She hasn’t been seen much since the premiere, but it’s worth remembering that Danny is the new agent whom Martian was briefly training up ahead of her first field assignment. She’s now the responsibility of Martian’s former handler, Naomi, and her mission is to infiltrate the Institute of Geophysics as a student with the ultimate intention of being solely selected to go to Tehran on an exchange program.
Danny’s problem is that her CV is completely made up, so when she’s offered the opportunity to comprehensively explain some technology that she really has no idea about, she has to accept. This leads to a panicked research session where she tries to memorize 25 pages of information about the tech in one day before being taken to the black-tie event by the head of the exchange program, Reza.
Luckily – although that’s probably not the right word – Danny is spared this indignity because Reza is a creep. In the car on the way there, he puts the moves on her, and when she rejects him he chucks her out and doesn’t let her do the speech. Obviously, he thinks he’s punishing her, but she’s probably quietly relieved. However, it does make her mission of getting to Tehran – which was already near-impossible for a woman – a lot more complicated.
Martian’s Mistake
The Agency Episode 4 features more engaging scenes with Martian and Dr. Blake, in which he continues to lie through his teeth – both about when he last had sex and with whom, and how he got the scar on his hand – but also be oddly honest about certain things, such as his earnest love for Sami and how the CIA trained him to deal with emotional situations, like having to leave her behind, which most ordinary people couldn’t.
He’s also lying about this, as we know, since he hasn’t completely left Sami behind – and that is going to become a big problem for him very soon.
The problem takes the shape of Osman, but it’s really Martian’s own doing. Having given the man the slip earlier, Osman has realized that he isn’t a teacher. This puts Sami on the ropes, since Osman confronts her, chokes her, and threatens her into giving up Martian’s name. Since she thinks it’s Paul Lewis, that’s the one she gives.
But, as we know and as Henry was worried about, this is a defunct CIA identity. Osman digging into it is going to scare up all kinds of trouble, and based on the flashforward, Martian may end up wearing that trouble on his face sooner rather than later.
