Summary
The Agency continues to enjoy fine form in Episode 8, with the chickens coming home to roost dramatically speaking.
The turnaround that The Agency has made in the last few episodes is pretty remarkable given how bad it was when it started. You could feel it coming in the previous episode when Martian’s lies caught up with him, but Episode 8 is where the chickens really come home to roost, narratively speaking, and you can feel the tension mounting as a result.
Don’t get me wrong, some aspects still don’t work. The subplots with Coyote and Danny still feel a little detached from the core drama involving Martian and Sami, but I’m starting to trust that the show knows what it’s doing with all this. I hope so, anyway.
Either way, things pick up where they left off, with Sami shocked to learn that Paul Lewis isn’t who she thought. But as if that wasn’t shocking enough, the choice she’s being presented with is even more troublesome. Sami has 24 hours to not only come to terms with this revelation but also to decide if she’ll turn on her country and begin working as a CIA asset.
She doesn’t seem keen, which kind of flies in the face of Martian’s confident assurances that she’d play ball. Perhaps he doesn’t know his paramour as well as he has convinced himself he does. Geopolitically speaking, it leaves the U.S. in the lurch. The Chinese are driving the Sudanese negotiations, and even Richardson, the British intelligence agent, more or less bows out, leaving Bosko and the CIA to figure out what is rapidly becoming a very complicated situation.
Despite Sami saying nothing of Martian’s pitch to Osman at first, she later confesses that Paul Lewis works for the CIA. Osman immediately takes the information to Dalaga and Guo, and the latter goes to… Richardson. The slippery Brit has been playing both sides against the middle and gives Guo a flash drive with evidence exposing two Russian operatives working in the U.S. Department of Energy.
With everything he needs for leverage, Guo meets with the Americans and tells them unequivocally that Martian’s clumsy recruitment efforts have endangered the peace process, and thus the negotiations will relocate and proceed without Sami or U.S. involvement. The CIA doesn’t have a leg to stand on. They’ve been outplayed.
After the meeting, Martian approaches Guo to figure out who orchestrated all this, since it wasn’t Beijing, but the conversation devolves into a fight that Martian wins. I’m not sure what the intergovernmental consequences of choking a Chinese agent unconscious are, but I don’t imagine they’re very good for the choker.
Elsewhere in The Agency Episode 8, Blair leans on Volchok’s secretary, Sylviya, threatening to out her as a spy if she doesn’t supply an object of Volchok’s that he uses frequently enough that it’d be worthwhile making a double of. She chooses his boots, which the CIA replicate, but she’s later caught switching them, leading to her being sentenced to execution. It was inevitable, really. Dr. Blake’s earlier question of how this new asset was to be protected being answered, essentially, by Blair saying that she was less important than peace, sealed Sylviya’s fate. She was a tool, nothing more. And not even an especially useful one.
This kind of callous pragmatism is what Naomi is trying to instill in Danny, who is faced with a new problem – trying to convince Rose, who has been selected for the Tehran program, to withdraw from it. But this isn’t as simple as threatening her like Edward did with Jerome in the previous episode. But after Danny’s initial attempt – taking her and plying her with drugs and alcohol – yields a potential angle, the solution seems even more sinister – posing as representatives of a U.K. euthanasia organization to convince Rose’s dying mother that they can help her go to Switzerland to legally end her own life.
There’s no wonder Danny isn’t comfortable with this – nobody should be. But, as Naomi reiterates, it’s part of the job. As is becoming increasingly clear, tremendous sacrifices must be made in the name of global peace, and The Agency Episode 8 ends with both Danny and Sami, who is pitched again by Martian, unsure of whether or not they can make them.
