Summary
The Recruit Season 2 rearranges the same essential elements into a more adrenalized, frenetic form. It’ll please fans of the first season but is unlikely to sway any of its detractors.
Have you ever set off running too quickly and realized that you’re falling? The Recruit is like that. It lives in the space between realizing what’s happening and hitting the ground, a tangle of limbs carried by their own flailing momentum. This isn’t a criticism, either. The first season was a charmingly breathless espionage thriller burning Noah Centineo’s ample charisma for fuel. Season 2 is that again with fewer episodes and more action. It’s hard to complain.
Nothing about The Recruit is novel, even though it sounds it on paper. It’s about a CIA lawyer – yes, lawyer – whose hero complex lands him amid a backstabbing geopolitical conspiracy, but its most consistent running gag is that Owen Hendricks (Centineo) doesn’t do any legal work, ever. He often introduces himself as a lawyer and people don’t believe him. He works for the CIA. That’s all anyone needs to know.
Owen’s pathological need to convince people that he’s a good, smart legal professional makes every situation he finds himself in worse, which was true in the first season and is truer than ever here in Season 2, where Owen’s lingering radioactivity keeps him confined to a bare office and embroiled in a counterespionage investigation. Nobody wants to talk to him until it has been conclusively determined that the death of former Russian intelligence asset Max Meladze, whom Owen was sleeping with, wasn’t his fault.
Owen’s efforts to get back into the Agency’s good graces – and to keep himself from dying of boredom – land him in another conspiracy almost immediately. Some graymail – threats of leaked state secrets designed to manipulate legal proceedings – addressed to the former occupant of his office reveal the existence of a South Korean National Intelligence Service agent who is willing to clean out the CIA’s closet if they don’t rescue his kidnapped wife from Russian mercenaries. With his career already all but ruined, Owen makes a convenient fall guy, so is sent to Seoul to find out how bad the situation is. And, predictably, it’s worse than anyone thought.
Owen has a personal connection to South Korea – his late father was stationed there when he died. He speaks the language, likes the food, and has a potential love interest that he left behind. Not that he has much time for romance. Between trying to help the badass but inscrutable agent Jang Kyun (Teo Yoo) get his wife back, he’s also trying to stay one step ahead of the CIA’s internal investigation, manage a new asset in the form of Max’s daughter Nichka (Maddie Hasson), get on the same page as now-disgraced Operations agent Dawn Gilbane (Angel Parker), and perhaps even patch up his strained personal relationship with Hannah (Fivel Stewart).
Teo Yoo as Jang Kyun Kim in Episode 202 of The Recruit. Cr. Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix © 2024
The Recruit Season 2 only has six episodes as opposed to the first season’s eight, but the plot isn’t any less complex to account for that. The result is even more frenetic pacing as the story ping-pongs between POV characters and settings, which are much more diverse now given the first season’s success. Shifting a lot of the action to South Korea and casting a lot of capable Korean actors gives this sophomore outing a slightly different vibe and is inevitably good cross-promotion for a streaming platform peddling so many K-Dramas, but there are also jaunts to Mauritius, Qatar, Russia, and others, just for good measure.
But the show’s essential underpinnings are the same. Noah Centineo remains a brilliantly charismatic anchor, consistently seeming out of his depth but managing to get by, straddling the line between genius and idiot, damsel and action hero, at any given moment. The personal history he has bundled up in South Korea, and the lingering trauma from his experiences in the first season (which in-universe happened only a day or two before), give him more emotional contours to play, even if the script doesn’t afford him much space to really dig in.
This is partly a consequence of fewer episodes, partly a consequence of a more adrenalized approach to action. Owen didn’t get his hands dirty too much in the first season; he didn’t kill anyone until the very end, and even then, only by necessity. His body count mounts out of the gate in The Recruit Season 2. He can scarcely go an episode without someone trying to kill him, and Jang Kyun, who early on takes down a club full of goons without breaking a sweat, isn’t a good peacekeeping influence.
It’s sillier, but silliness suits The Recruit, which never strove for realism in the first place. And yet somehow Owen remains remarkably compelling, thanks in large part to Centineo’s frazzled performance and Alexi Hawley’s snappy script, which throws out comedy gems every few lines. Fans of the first season will find plenty to like here in Season 2, which offers more of the same at a faster pace. But anyone who was put off by the lack of originality and the unserious tone won’t be swayed. Take that as you will.
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