Summary
The Recruit Season 2 continues to rocket along in Episode 4, which introduces a dangerous Yakuza element and reveals what Jae is up to.
I have no idea if Owen Hendricks is a good lawyer because in two seasons of The Recruit, he hasn’t practiced any law. I don’t even think he has slept for more than five minutes, but he’s so utterly indispensable to the CIA that it’s amazing how often they keep trying to kill and/or discredit him. In Episode 4 of Season 2, “A.T.N.W.H.Y.P.A.B.H.”, he proves his worth once again by almost singlehandedly freestyling a plan to free Nan Hee from Yakuza captivity. And it almost works.
But, in true The Recruit fashion, it doesn’t work. It’s the thought that counts, though, and Owen is just about the only employee within two governments who seems to have any original thoughts in his head. And Jae? I told you we couldn’t trust him.
Let’s break it all down.
Jang Kyun Drops Another Bombshell
After their falling out at the end of the previous episode, Owen races away from Jang and heads directly to his apartment. Now that Owen is technically rogue he needs to find Jang’s dead man’s switch ASAP so that he doesn’t have any leverage over the CIA, but Owen’s first idea is to look in his house, which is just about the last place a trained intelligence operative would hide something.
Jang also returns home in the middle of Owen’s search and the two get into a fistfight that eventually ends in a tired stalemate. After what we saw Jang Kyun do in the premiere, it’s a bit farfetched that Owen can even keep pace with him physically, but whatever. He’s the hero.
Either way, the dead man’s switch isn’t there. And Jang Kyun won’t be giving away where it is since it’s the only thing stopping the CIA from killing him, and he needs the CIA to help him rescue Nan Hee, whom he reveals is pregnant.
Homeward Bound
Since Lester was able to kill Lee, the local assassin that Dawn hired who failed to kill both him and Owen, Dawn is beginning to suspect that they’ve been compromised. She and Dodge decide to return to D.C., where Lester, Violet, and Owen are also heading.
Janus, meanwhile, remains in Korea to keep an eye on Jang Kyun, who returns to the NIS to try and trace recent crypto transactions. Cho is clearly onto him to some extent and demands he figures out what the CIA is up to in the next 24 hours or face banishment to the DMZ.
The return to D.C. is bad news on several fronts. Dodge and Dawn spot the others at the airport, while Nyland and Salazar are doing their best to keep everyone involved in the Season 1 scandal that the CEG is investigating away from the capital so that the CEG can’t do any investigating. Owen and Lester are walking into a counterespionage investigation, only barely ahead of an assassination attempt by their own countrymen. It’s a mess.
Messier still is Owen’s personal life. When he briefly checks into the apartment, he finds Jae having dinner with Terence and Hannah, and because Jae is deeply paranoid and jealous he makes a huge deal of being all over Hannah to try and mark his territory. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Owen is unbothered, but he doesn’t give Jae the reaction he’s looking for, and Hannah can’t disguise the fact she’s more interested in her ex than her current beau.
Jae, though, is more interested in Owen. When he gets a moment he sneaks a bunch of photographs of Owen’s belongings, travel documents, and even the old photo of him and Yoo Jin, all of which he attaches to a message to his “dad”.
The Rescue Mission Is On
Owen manages to convince Director West and Nyland that the CIA’s best course of action is to give Jang Kyun what he wants and help rescue his wife. Since they can’t do that officially, Owen suggests using Lester, whose transfer paperwork for Operations hasn’t been finalized yet, to lead the rescue effort, since he’s still technically a lawyer and his arrival in South Korea won’t violate any intelligence agreements.
Lester is furious about being volunteered for this since he thinks his promotion to Moscow Station Chief is at risk by simply being in Owen’s general vicinity, but he and Owen are forced to sneak out of the building anyway because the CEG agents are poking around. They pull Dawn instead, who they happen to run into in the elevator, but all she does is point them in the direction of Owen. She does intuit that neither Lester nor Owen has figured out she was behind their respective assassination attempts, though, so she and Dodge decide to follow them to Seoul using off-books identities to kill them before they can say anything.
(L to R) Brooke Smith as Marcy Potter, Devika Bhise as Juno Marsh in Episode 204 of The Recruit. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Oliver Twist
Owen uses Lord Oliver Bonner-Jones, his well-connected new English friend, to dig up some information on the Yamazaki clan who’re holding Nan Hee. She isn’t their usual kidnapping target, which piques Oliver’s interest, so he meets the others in Seoul where, entirely by chance, the Yamazaki lieutenant they need to speak to, Kenta Nakano, happens to be.
The plan isn’t exactly foolproof. Owen, Oliver, and Jang Kyun are to pretend to be representatives from an insurance firm associated with Nan Hee’s NGO, attempting to buy her freedom. Lester and Janus, meanwhile, can trace the proof-of-life call to find out where she’s being held. If Kenta plays ball and accepts the sizeable sum of stolen Agency money that they plan to pay him off with, cool. If not, they mount a rescue mission instead.
Since Owen goes to flirt with Yoo Jin while everyone is supposed to be resting in preparation for this mission, you can tell his head isn’t entirely in it. But it’s still Owen who manages to keep the whole ruse together. Jang Kyun is a real liability, demanding proof of life and refusing to indulge in the pleasantries, and when Kenta pulls up the live feed of Nan Hee, who is alive but looking a little worse for wear, Owen has to knock his beer all over the laptop to keep the two of them from revealing their connection.
But Kenta wants ten million dollars for Nan Hee’s release, which is five times what two government agencies managed to drum up on short notice, so buying Nan Hee back is a no-go. A rescue mission it’ll have to be. And to that end, Lester has some good and bad news. He managed to trace her location, but it’s in Russia’s lawless, heavily fortified port city, Vladivostok.
Jae Shows His True Colours
To cap off The Recruit Season 2, Episode 4, we find out who Jae’s “dad” is – Grace Cho of the NIS. Jae is just an idiot rich kid she caught dead to rights on drug offenses and is blackmailing into carrying out deniable international espionage. She needs him to find actionable intelligence on Owen or she’ll have him extradited on the drug charges or reported to the U.S. government for treason.
Desperate, Jae tips his hand and tries to copy Hannah’s hard drive, getting caught in the process. Hannah immediately realizes something is amiss and tries to run, but he grabs her and throws her head-first into a door, knocking her unconscious. Something tells me that if she survives this, she’s not going to be very happy with Owen.
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