Summary
The Night Agent Season 2 is really coming together in Episode 7, a dense chapter with a lot of explanations, as well as some key turning points in virtually every subplot.
There’s quite a bit going on in Episode 7 of The Night Agent Season 2. “Tilt” is, I think, the densest chapter so far, the one most full of key developments and crucial turning points in virtually every ongoing subplot. There isn’t a great deal of action – barely any, actually – but that’s fine; this is where the chickens are starting to come home to roost, narratively speaking.
While there are still key details we don’t know, I reckon we have enough information now to piece together what’s going on and, more importantly, why it’s going on. We have a villain and a rough motive, and while some of that motive is still inference on our part, it’s more than we knew an episode or two ago. Let’s try and piece it all together.
Meet Cute
The obligatory flashback in “Tilt” takes place six years in the past and shows how Solomon met his employer. He simply saw him standing at the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck. They had a brief, seemingly innocuous conversation; Solomon told him how Celeste was hit by a drunk driver who was never caught, they exchange pleasantries, and Solomon leaves.
Later, though, Solomon finds a file stuck in his car windscreen containing the identity of the driver who hit his sister and a handwritten note offering him a job. It was the beginning of a beautiful working relationship.
Peter’s Inexperience Is Showing
In the present day, following Solomon’s capture in the previous episode, it’s Peter who floats the idea of Solomon and his boss being information brokers, which seems accurate. He also suggests that they might have someone inside the FBI who provided them with encryption keys for the comms. That would explain how they were compromised during the meeting, and how Peter and Alice were made in Bangkok. Not just a pretty face, this lad.
Not great at interrogation, though. Solomon is easily able to get under Peter’s skin by mentioning his father and implying that Catherine doesn’t value him. Peter shows his inexperience by giving away Night Action’s existence after threatening to hammer Celeste with fraud charges. Catherine wants him to leave the interrogation to agents trained in it and merely babysit Solomon. You can tell this isn’t going to stick, but it keeps Peter sidelined for a lot of the episode.
Compound Interest
Solomon tells Catherine that if she’s interested in Foxglove, she should look into cyanogen. And it just so happens that Tomas, Markus, and the crew have just stolen some, which clues her into what they’re doing – making one of the Foxglove compounds.
Rose suggests looking up one of the PhD scientists who worked on the project. When she finds the nearest one, Dr. Wilfred Cole, she goes to pay him a visit. At this point, Rose is ready to return to California with a Secret Service detail, but she’s willing to do this last favor in the meantime. That never bodes well.
Rose finds Dr. Cole, who takes her to his home where he’s keeping some notes handwritten from memory about Foxglove. He was removed from the project before all the antidotes were created, and as far as he was concerned, it was shuttered. But then he saw a news report about Viktor Bala – Tomas’s father – having used a chemical weapon on his own people, and the people exhibiting eerily similar symptoms to some of the chemical agents theorized in Foxglove. So, either someone stole the compound and gave it to Viktor, or the U.S. government gave it to him in exchange for something.
Viktor claimed at the time that he had been given the compound by American sources but wasn’t believed. From this, I think we can safely theorize that Viktor is trying to prove a point to the world that the U.S. was working on these chemical weapons, and potentially provided one to him, by using one on U.S. soil.
Amanda Warren as Catherine in episode 207 of The Night Agent. Cr. Christopher Saunders/Netflix © 2024
When A Plan Comes Together
Catherine calls Rose to tell her that another chemical compound has been stolen – Oxamyl. The only chemical agent Foxglove were developing with both oxamyl and cyanogen was called K.X., a fifth-generation blistering agent ten times as potent as lewisite. And, as luck would have it, that’s one they couldn’t develop an antidote for.
Dr. Cole reckons they’ll target hydrazine-BH next, which is patented by Trantow Pharmaceuticals but manufactured by a company called Manodeo, who have two sites, one in Long Island and another in Philly. Catherine heads to one and Mosley to the other, leaving Peter to babysit Solomon, but the chemicals have already been stolen by the time Catherine gets there, suggesting multiple teams.
There’s something obvious that nobody has quite realized, though, and it takes Solomon to point it out to Peter. The chemical compounds aren’t enough to create the weapon – they need someone to build it. And that someone turns out to be Dr. Cole. Rose is still there when Markus and Tomas break in, taking Cole’s entire family hostage. Rose pretends to be the professor’s postdoc fellow to convince the others that they’ll need her help to build the weapon. Peter is powerless to intervene but hears the screams down the phone.
Predictably, by the end of The Night Agent Season 2, Episode 7, Peter has freed Solomon to go after Rose.
Noor Misses Her Meeting
Things are going especially badly for Noor in “Tilt”. Javad continues being a bit romantically pushy with her, so she snaps at him, which piques his suspicions. When she goes to meet Peter and Rose in the basement, she confronts them about what happened to Farhad, but after they tell her the truth, she wants to speak to her mother. When Peter calls Sami it goes straight to voicemail, which isn’t exactly convincing.
Since she won’t leave with Peter and can’t safely return to the mission, Noor is supposed to just kill time until she can get to the prearranged meeting with Sami and her mother. But Javad is waiting outside the basement and photographs her leaving, along with Rose and Peter. When he confronts her, he has all the evidence he needs, and her hasty cover story doesn’t sway him. Javad’s mask slips and he becomes extremely threatening, calling Noor all kinds of names and threatening to send her back to Iran.
In an effort to save herself – and presumably her mother, whom Javad has told her is safely in the care of the Iranians – Noor offers to deliver Peter to Javad. She doesn’t make the meeting with Sami, who gets a call from Catherine at the end of the episode telling him that Peter has absconded with Solomon.
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