Summary
The Recruit Season 2 gets off to a pacey, action-packed start in Episode 1, sending Owen on a new mission to South Korea.
The Recruit Season 2 picks up minutes after the first season finale, which is perhaps just as well since the Noah Centineo-led thriller hasn’t lost a single step. Episode 1, “Y.N.A.H.Y.A.L.”, rockets along at a lightning clip, tying up some leftover loose threads and sending Owen out on a new mission with potentially higher stakes – all while leaving some wildcards very much in play.
Whatever you liked about the first season – the comedy, the espionage, Centineo’s charisma, you name it – is very much present in this premiere, which also benefits from slicker action and a more expensive-looking production. The success of the first season has evidently been put to good use.
But, as with Season 1, there’s a lot at play here, so let’s do our best to round things up as coherently as possible.
Tying Up Loose Ends
We begin in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, which you’ll recall is where we left Owen in the first season, a captive of Nichka, the mob enforcer daughter of Max Meladze. Max is dead, and Owen looks likely to join her, with Nichka having already dug him a grave and Dawn’s team, who’re tracking him via the watch Max gave him, planning to make sure he ends up in it.
The only thing that saves Owen – aside from tussling with Nichka – is the fact that Season 1’s operation went so badly wrong that the only way Dawn can redeem herself reputationally is by bringing Owen home alive. They agree to mutually assured destruction; she lets him live and gets some plaudits, he doesn’t reveal what he knows about her extracurricular activities. Both have the potential to ruin the other, so it’s a deal.
Not that Dawn gets any plaudits. Alton West is fuming during the debrief and tasks Lester with turning Nichka into an asset to replace her mother’s connections to Russian intelligence. Violet (albeit reluctantly) agrees to be attached to his hip on behalf of Nyland’s office to make sure the job gets done. Owen and Dawn try to strategize a believable cover story in the bathroom – which is overheard by Nichka through the vent, which she then crawls through to tell Owen that she has some kompromat and should be looked after – and Hannah tells Owen she’s moving out (but not that her mother forced her to do so in Season 1, letting him believe it’s his own fault.)
Owen Gets More Graymail
In a brief interlude before we cut to a week later, a Korean man and woman on Russia’s Sakhalin Island are ambushed on the road by men in balaclavas. The man, Duri, is shot dead, and the woman, who claims to be working for a South Korean NGO, is forcibly taken away.
We can assume that this will become important later, as while Owen is consigned to his bare office to safely do nothing at all while the Agency determines whether what happened in the Czech Republic was his fault, he receives some mail addressed to the former occupant of his office, Bill Bemus. It’s from Korea and contains a note and a digraph referencing a country that is apparently fictional. Researching RQSWALLOW results in a complete office-wide security shutdown.
Nyland tells Owen that the digraph refers to a Korean operation so secret that it was hidden behind a fake country. Owen reiterates that the letter is graymail – which, by the way, is the threatened revelation of state secrets in order to manipulate legal proceedings – and that the number written on it is a longitude-latitude position for the Paradox Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, which just so happens to be where Agency personnel stay while they’re in-country.
Owen convinces Nyland to let him find the graymailer, on the grounds that he’s already radioactive so will make a convenient fall guy if it all goes wrong, and that he knows Korea, with his dad having been stationed there for two years before his death.
Nyland eventually agrees, but on one condition – Janus is going with him. Since the clandestine op was a joint endeavor between the CIA and the NIS (South Korea’s National Intelligence Service), the sender could be a spook from either nation. Fun!
(L to R) Shin Do-hyun as Yoo Jin Lee, Noah Centineo as Owen Hendricks in Episode 201 of The Recruit. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
The Korea Connection
Upon arriving in Korea, Owen and Janus are immediately detained by Grace Cho of the NIS. Their official cover story is that they’re investigating a HR incident, which isn’t exactly believable, and the Koreans know it; while he’s waiting outside the office, Owen is subtly interrogated by Jang Kyun, an agent who identifies himself as an office clerk just so Owen can show off his powers of deduction and experience with Korean food and customs.
You can tell this is going to be an important throughline. Owen speaks Korean and understands the country. He also has an associate there, Yoo Jin, his former BFF – and, incidentally, his first kiss; I think I see a romance coming along – who helped him process his grief in the aftermath of his father’s death. But South Korea is an important ally for the U.S., since they help to keep North Korea and China in check, so Owen has to be on his best behaviour. Ten minutes after checking in at the Paradox Hotel, he’s chasing down the sender of a note he finds in his room while Janus drinks wine and listens to classical music in the bath.
The note takes Owen to a nightclub, eventually, but he makes two stops on the way – one to Jang Kyun, who has been tailing him at Cho’s request since they arrived (he delivers him bibimbap and kimchi), and one to Yoo Jin, whom he thanks for being there after his father died. At the club, Owen’s supposed to stay low-key while he tries to make contact with whoever sent the note, but it takes him mere minutes to get into a very high-profile fight that Jang Kyun has to bail him out of.
You can see already here that Owen is becoming an action hero in real-time after a season spent bumbling into one crisis after another, but he still pales in comparison to Jang Kyun, who is the furthest thing imaginable from a clerk. Together, they rush outside and get back to Jang Kyun’s car, where he quickly gasses Owen unconscious as he figures out that he’s the graymailer.
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