Summary
The Night Agent Season 2 delivers more strong character work in Episode 6, and builds to another solid suspense sequence.
What makes a good agent? Given that’s the title of Episode 6 of The Night Agent Season 2, it’s a worthwhile question to ask, since it also forms the thematic basis of another hour that takes things pretty slowly and then explodes into action towards the end. The climactic suspense sequence isn’t quite as expertly handled as the one in the previous episode, but that isn’t as much of a criticism as it sounds.
If nothing else “A Good Agent” is doing solid character work, not just for Peter – on the contrary, Peter is starting to feel less developed than the people around him – but for Catherine, Noor, and Rose, in particular. All three are in the line of fire and are struggling to work out if the sacrifices are worth the end goal, especially since the end goal seems more elusive now than ever.
Catherine’s Connection to Peter Sutherland Snr Is Becoming Clearer
As is becoming commonplace in Season 2, Episode 6 of The Night Agent opens with a flashback, this one thirteen years prior. Catherine is in the field at this point, a Night Agent herself, working with a colleague named Noah to stake out a former SVR agent named Anton Sidorov. It was Noah, it turns out, who gave Catherine the rosary she was clutching during Sami’s extraction of Noor’s family in the previous episode.
The mission was a bust. Catherine and Noah went inside to install surveillance equipment, not realizing there was someone else, a hulking dude named Yuri, inside. Yuri was able to kill Noah and almost kill Catherine until she stabbed him in the eye with the rosary. Catherine’s debriefed by a young version of Jamie Hawkins from Season 1. He wants her to start a file on Yuri’s FBI contact – Peter Sutherland.
Noor’s Close to the Edge
In the present day, Peter Sutherland Jnr is still lying to Noor about her brother’s death. When she steps out for a moment to take a call from Haleh warning her that Javad wants to talk to her about the events at the party in Episode 4, Peter tells Catherine and Rose what really happened, and Rose is particularly disgusted at the deception. When Noor comes back in to tell them that she has to return to the mission to protect Haleh, she spots the discomfort on Rose’s face and asks to speak to her in private.
Rose tells Noor that Farhad suffered a broken arm during the escape but is otherwise okay, and in exchange for her “honesty”, Noor gives her the drive containing the photos and the password to unlock it. But Rose is really grappling with what she’s doing here.
When Noor returns to the mission, Javad questions her. He takes her phone for scans and puts it in her office safe, and also tells her about Abbas’s daughter, Shirin, who went to study abroad and fell in love with a Westerner, disgracing her father and setting his career back when she returned and started publishing inflammatory rhetoric about the regime. I suspect this is the woman we saw in Episode 4’s flashbacks, whose headscarf Javad discovered in Noor’s room.
Noor suspects she’s rumbled and plans to leave as soon as she gets the opportunity, but she’s waylaid by Javad once again, who comes to her room to take her to Abbas. But it’s nothing to do with her phone scans; Abbas tells her that the police reported the disturbance at her family’s home, and asks her to identify Farhad’s body, which is lying on a mortuary slab with a bullet hole in its chest.
The French Connection
The documents Rose photographed on Noor’s phone turn out to be from the French DGSE (Directorate-General for External Security, basically their equivalent of the CIA) listing Iranian dissidents living in Europe. In other words, they’re nothing to do with Foxglove, which makes Farhad’s fate and the manipulation of Noor even more regrettable. But they’re not as much of a dead end as it seems, since the fact they’re printed in colour means they’re traceable directly to the printer that produced them.
Catherine follows this lead, which takes her to Ms. Jacqueline Laurent, a French diplomat and DGSE double agent who has been selling state secrets to Solomon Vega for years. Catherine uses her to set up a meeting with him; she’ll be posing as a potential seller, while Peter stakes out the area and Rose, albeit reluctantly, monitors the other surveillance feeds.
Rose is having a crisis in The Night Agent Season 2, Episode 6. She’s deeply troubled by Peter’s willingness to do things she considers reprehensible for the good of the mission, and she tells her therapist that she’s worried Peter is going to drag her back into a dark place. Her therapist rightly points out that she barely knows Peter, and has bonded with him over intense trauma, which isn’t exactly a healthy foundation for a relationship.
Still, Catherine is able to coerce Rose into helping by talking to her about her aunt and uncle (Sidewinder and Gazelle, who were killed in the Season 1 premiere.) Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that Catherine is just indulging Rose’s fantasy of being part of the familial gang by tokenistically promoting her to the status of an agent – she even had the deputy director of the CIA give her clearance for Foxglove, which she knew she’d ask for.
(L to R) Navid Negahaban as Abbas, Keon Alexander as Javad in episode 206 of The Night Agent. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Solomon Vega Is Caught
Needless to say, Solomon and his employer aren’t stupid, so they recognise immediately that their DGSE contact wanting to introduce them to someone so soon after the break-in at Abbas’s residence doesn’t bode well. So, they set up the meeting as a sting to learn more about Peter and Night Action.
Catherine doesn’t suspect this until she’s already deep in the building, an empty apartment block clearly bought for the express purpose of meetings just like this. It’s Rose, monitoring from Peter’s apartment, who realizes that their communications have been compromised. In a nice inversion of the sequence in Episode 3 when Peter guided Rose away from Solomon, which was itself a callback to the first season premiere, Rose steers Peter away from his pursuers and into the building to rescue Catherine.
Together, Peter and Catherine are able to get the jump on Solomon, who had just killed Jacqueline and was getting ready to interrogate Catherine about Peter and Night Action. He’s laughingly accepting of his fate, which suggests to me that he doesn’t have much faith in their ability to hold him for long.
And Another Thing…
Here’s another note from The Night Agent Season 2, Episode 6 that didn’t slot into the main recap:
- Tomas does indeed meet with his father in the ICC (International Criminal Court) Detention Centre in the Hague, where he’s brutally eviscerated by his dad for being a soft touch. It’s made clear that the plan was never to expose anything but to make a stern point on American soil. Markus is acting under direct orders from Tomas’s father, who considers Tomas too weak to have done the job.
- Tomas takes this rather personally and later calls Markus telling him that he approves of the mission and will be directly involved henceforth. It looks like someone has serious daddy issues.
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