Summary
Peter is back and more frantic than ever. “Call Waiting” lays out the bones of a new conspiracy, tying it, naturally, to the shady outcome of the Season 2 finale.
Peter Sutherland is many things, but a good undercover agent isn’t one of them. He has been pretty frantic all throughout The Night Agent, but he’s practically fizzing in Season 3. Given the clandestine outcome of the second season, you can understand why. He has spent a year waiting to hear from the enigmatic Broker, the string-puller behind the election of a new President, and hasn’t heard a peep. In the meantime, he has been making himself important enough to Night Action – the shadowy off-books problem-solving agency operating out of the White House’s basement – to merit attention. Being a careerist is stressful enough when you’re, say, in finance. When you’re an international man of mystery it’s a nightmare. When Episode 1, “Call Waiting”, opens, Peter’s already fraying at the edges.
A flashback to young Peter with an unacceptable haircut overhearing his mother being given a terminal cancer diagnosis is his arc in a nutshell. She made him promise to always do the right thing, even when it’s hard, and in the years since he has lived up to that. And for him, the right thing has been really hard. And it’s only going to get harder.
A New Mission
After a brief stop in Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic, to facilitate the apprehension of a married couple selling schematics for nuclear submarines stolen from the Pentagon, Peter is job hunting. President Hagan – remember him? – is going heavy on the Night Actions, so Catherine is in Cairo setting up a new agent, and the entire agency is feeling the strain. I didn’t expect espionage logistics to be a recurring thread in this season, but it comes up again later as well.
Peter, who still hasn’t been in touch with Rose or heard from the Broker, is desperate for a new assignment to keep himself busy, so he’s given the task of tracking down Jay Batra. Jay, a junior analyst at a company called FinCen, has been accused of murdering his supervisor, Ben Wallace, and absconding with classified intelligence.
We also see, briefly, the downing of Flight Pima 12, over Venezuela, which is hit by a missile. This act is later blamed – by Hagan – on terrorist Raul Zapata and a group called the LFS. If you’re thinking this might be connected to Jay Batra, you’re correct.
Turkey Dinner
Peter tracks Jay to Turkey for some nice location shooting and a bit of flirting. Here, you really see what I mean about Peter being ill-suited to the undercover life. He’s so obvious! He’s somehow more conspicuous watching Jay put something in a train station locker than Jay is doing it. And he isn’t especially subtle himself.
Jay’s deposit is picked up by a pretty woman – new love interest alert? – whom Peter follows to her hotel for some light banter. Her name is Isabel. She’s a reporter for The Financial Register, which explain why she’s too busy to take Peter back to her room. He does nab the room number anyway by peeping at her bar receipt, and later breaks in. There’s a ticket stub hidden under her mattress. Does she turn up midway through the search, forcing Peter to hide in the darkness like a creep? Of course!
The ticket is for a football match where Jay is surreptitiously meeting with Isabel to hand over some documents. Peter lets him, then sits beside Jay to give him the lowdown on his current predicament. There are men after him, and they’re in the stadium. The only way Jay is going to get out of there is by trusting Peter, who’s willing to give him a chance to explain himself. Seems fair.
The Great Escape
There are a couple of chase sequences in The Night Agent Season 2, Episode 1, and the escape from the stadium is the first. When Isabel sees Peter leaving with Jay, she annoyingly intervenes, which almost gets Jay caught. Peter’s able to rescue him, though, and they both get away in a car with the help of a Molotov cocktail hastily assembled out of a medical kit.
Thanks to Night Action’s staff being stretched thin – I told you that would come up again – Peter can’t organise extraction until the morning. And because Jay does that stupid amateur-on-the-run thing and calls his cousin from the room phone, the goons find them immediately, leading to chase #2, this one on-foot through nice-looking local architecture.
You can tell Netflix has spent a fair amount of money on this show, especially during these bits, which are pleasantly practical-feeling.
So, What’s Going On Here?
In amongst all this, Jay provides some explanation about what’s really going on here. So, firstly, his company, FinCEN, received several suspicious activity reports (SARs) about large transactions from American companies to a shady crypto wallet. Wallace, oddly, told Jay to drop it, but then later turned up at his apartment asking him about the SARs and whether he had continued looking into them despite having been told not to. He pulled a gun, said he was sorry, that “they” made him do it, and then a struggle ensued. Wallace was killed, apparently accidentally, in that struggle.
Jay made off with the SARs list, and sent tips out to various journalists in the hopes that involving the press would protect him. Isabel was the only one who followed up. Now, since Jay was bending the truth about having only given Isabel copies, she’s solely in possession of documents that people are clearly willing to kill for. Peter can relate to Jay, since he was in a similar situation in Season 1, and promises he’ll do everything in his power to keep him safe and help him prove his innocence.
But Jay neglected another detail, which he finally shares when he and Peter are about to be extracted. He believes that crypto wallet belonged to Zapata and the LFS, which means that it’s highly likely that the U.S. funded the downing of Flight Pima 12. Yikes.
Right on time, Peter gets that long-awaited call from the Broker. He wants Jay.
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