Summary
The Night Agent Season 2 works on the same basis as its predecessor as a no-frills, blisteringly efficient action-thriller, but it also expands its plot and character dynamics in meaningful ways to justify another go-around.
It isn’t as easy as it looks to make something generic, especially on a streaming platform. A lot of hacks take shelter in genre, believing that they only need to do the bare minimum to meet an audience’s low expectations. That’s probably why the first season of The Night Agent was undermarketed, underestimated, and overlooked. It seemed to be exactly what it was – an old-fashioned spy thriller with no real ambitions of being anything else. Then people watched it and couldn’t stop. The secret wasn’t anything special. It just set out to be a really, really good version of precisely what people hoped it would be.
The Night Agent Season 2 works on the same basis. It was inevitable it’d return after the mammoth success of the first season, but the worry was that it would change, try to become cool or arty, or change the formula. On the other hand, nobody wanted the exact same thing again, totally unchanged. The sophomore season slump is a real phenomenon, and early in Season 2, it does look like The Night Agent is suffering from it. But it’s smarter than that.
For the uninitiated, here’s a brief primer: Night Action is a fictional – we think! – agency devoted to rooting out corruption in the upper echelons of the American intelligence apparatus. When Night Agents find themselves in trouble, they dial a phone that is picked up in the basement of the White House. In the first season, Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso – The Hive, Hillbilly Elegy) answered that phone and found himself in the midst of a plot by members of the sitting administration to assassinate a pesky foreign leader and seize the White House by disguising an assassination as a domestic terror attack.
Peter is back in Season 2 as a fully-fledged Night Agent, albeit with some understandable trust issues. So, when a mission in Bangkok goes bad and his new partner is killed, Peter immediately suspects Night Action itself is compromised and goes AWOL, hiding from his new boss, Catherine (Amanda Warren – Safety), and working the angles independently. What information did a CIA agent sell to a shadowy intelligence broker, and how is it connected to a European warmonger languishing in prison at The Hague and an ostensibly diplomatic Iranian mission to the United Nations?
Once Peter is reunited with his Season 1 tech expert beau, Rose (Luciane Buchanan), who now has plot-convenient access to the world’s most powerful surveillance software – don’t ask – it does seem like we’re at risk of doing the first season over again. But within a couple of episodes, it becomes clear that The Night Agent Season 2 has wider ambitions.
Luciane Buchanan as Rose Larkin in episode 203 of The Night Agent. Cr. Christopher Saunders/Netflix © 2024
The introduction of multiple international angles – the European country is tactically unnamed, but Iran gets a real licking for its widely publicized paranoia, totalitarianism, and state-sanctioned misogyny – gives this sophomore outing a bigger scope without sacrificing its tense small-scale drama. Everything remains human-sized but with a more terrifying geopolitical backdrop. Big stretches of the season are devoted to a new POV character, Noor (Arienne Mandi), an unassuming aide in the UN ambassador’s Manhattan residence who has decided to sell her boss’s secrets to the CIA in exchange for asylum for her and her family.
None of this is original, but as with the first season, it’s remarkable how well The Night Agent delivers it. There are twists and turns aplenty and various hair-raising set pieces, including but not limited to an undercover mission in the Iranian ambassador’s mansion, breaking into a highly secure government building, a last-minute, expertly tense extraction from Iran, and multiple down-to-the-wire chases, fights, shootouts, and races against the clock. It’s masterful stuff.
But there’s a really strong character core here that shouldn’t go unmentioned. Peter is an interesting leading man; he’s not sexy or cool, but desperate and earnest, and a key thematic throughline is his wavering mental health after being thrust into the field so soon after his traumatic experiences in the first season. This makes his relationship with Rose intriguing, too; this isn’t the debonair agent getting the girl, but two people out of their depth trauma bonding like their lives depend on it (which they do.) The introduction of Noor and her well-intentioned mission to free herself and her family from an oppressive regime only introduces more moral complexity, especially in how her story intermingles with Peter’s and the wider plot.
The Night Agent Season 2 is, ultimately, an extremely distinguished vintage of a comfortingly familiar experience. It does what it says on the tin extremely well and entirely without pretension or fluff. It’s fat-free filmmaking of a kind rarely seen anymore, devoted exclusively to keeping you gripped for the entire runtime, and making you care about what’s going on behind your own back. When it all comes together, you’ll realize just how niftily written and orchestrated it all was. And in many ways, that’s the best you can hope for from any show.
