Summary
The Night Agent Season 2 gets off to a solid start in Episode 1, even if it feels slightly less organic than the first season’s premiere.
Things have changed in The Night Agent Season 2, but they’re still fundamentally the same. That’s the implication of Episode 1, anyway. By the end of “Call Tracking”, Peter and Rose are once again on the run from unknown dangers, the White House is involved, and there’s a burgeoning conspiracy afoot involving CIA whistleblowers and God-knows-what else. It’s like the Netflix series has never been away.
I will confess to being slightly less invested out of the gate, though. Maybe it’s just me, but the panicky premiere of the first season felt a bit more organically topsy-turvy, whereas the Season 2 opener is bending over backward to get every returning character – mainly Peter, Rose, and President Michelle Travers, for now – back to where we left them. I can’t comment on where things might go, at least not yet, but there is the distinct feeling of a sophomore season slump floating around here.
But we’ll see.
Peter’s Bangkok Mission Is a Bust
Season 2 of The Night Agent begins in Episode 1 a few months after the first season finale, with Peter now working as a Night Agent on a mission in Bangkok to apprehend a CIA whistleblower named Warren Stocker. His codename is Copperhead, and he’s partnered up with Alice, aka Hummingbird, who’re both answerable to a woman named Catherine, codenamed Reindeer, who is basically just the new Diane Farr (no word on whether she’s corrupt yet, though.)
Surprising nobody, the Bangkok mission goes terribly. Peter and Alice are thwarted at every hurdle; they’re immediately made by the goons they’re following, and when they call the Night Action line for an extraction, they rush to the location only to discover that it has been compromised too. Alice is killed, and Peter barely escapes (an open wound in that dirty river? Not for me.)
The intel gets where it’s going, though. However, at this point, we have no idea what Warren is selling or who he’s selling it to.
One Month Later…
Rose isn’t faring much better than Peter in “Call Tracking”. She’s in therapy thanks to the various traumas she experienced in the first season and doesn’t seem to be getting any better, but she has managed to create a new start-up called AdVerse which creates very precise customer profiles for targeted advertising using publicly accessible personal data. I’ll be honest – I’m with the reluctant investor who doesn’t quite see what’s revolutionary about this company here; there are loads of companies that already do exactly this, and Rose’s claims that “AdVerse does it better” don’t really hold much water.
Far out early theory: Rose’s incredibly sketchy business partner is probably doing something a little shaky with the personal data. I’m getting the vibe.
Anyway, Rose is distracted by an international call from an unknown number, which turns out to be a guy looking for Peter, claiming he’s in danger. Rose hasn’t seen or spoken to Peter since he left to be a Night Agent at the end of Season 1, but she nonetheless reaches out to the direct line she has for President Travers and ends up meeting with Catherine, who reminds her that despite her efforts at Camp David, she isn’t actually entitled to any of the answers she wants. Peter has been AWOL for a month, and nobody knows where he is.
Not willing to take “no” for an answer, Rose overrides AdVerse’s source code to look for Peter and turns up an image from an urgent care in New York which features him in the background, looking a little worse for wear. After making up a story about her sick mother, she heads out there and is directed to a nearby crisis shelter, where an employee points her toward a local basketball court.
Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland in episode 201 of The Night Agent. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Peter Is Working Off the Books
There’s a reason Peter has been hanging around a basketball court. He’s one-to-one coaching a kid who turns out to be Warren Stocker’s estranged son, which is a little morally questionable, but needs must. After pumping him for information about how his father – who is played, by the way, by Teddy Sears from Brilliant Minds – secretly communicates with him via a messenger app behind his mother’s back, Peter steals the kid’s phone and uses it to set up a meeting with Warren.
He’s led clandestinely to a chicken shop, onto a bus, and then through various stops until he disembarks at a meeting spot (was Warren really going to have his young son take this complicated route?). Peter eventually catches up, chases Warren, fights him in an empty theater, and then chases him again, hamstrung by the fact that he needs him alive. Warren disappears down a maze of alleyways.
While he’s searching, Peter bumps into Rose, who has been tracking the kid’s phone. But their reunion is immediately interrupted by gunfire. These two only have one kind of date, don’t they?
And Another Thing…
Here are another couple of details from The Night Agent Season 2, Episode 1:
- President Travers completely trusts Peter and knows if he has gone off the books it’s for a reason. I like this since given how far he went to save her life in the first season, it’d be absurd if we had to redo the same arc here.
- Catherine is very sceptical of Peter’s mental state given how quickly he was thrust into Night Agent training and the field. At this point, though, it’s unclear whether she actually thinks this or whether she’s up to something.
- Catherine also seems to have some kind of personal connection to Alice, Peter’s murdered Night Action partner, and indeed a personal connection with Peter’s late father, who was confirmed to be corrupt in Season 1.
- Nobody in the government has any idea what information Warren sold or who he sold it to.
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