Summary
“Dark Matters” reintroduces Chelsea Arrington, giving her an expanded role in the White House, while Peter teams up with Isabela to dig deeper into Mike’s death. It’s a functional chapter more than a barnstormer, but will no doubt be important.
“Dark Matters” is one of those functional early-season chapters that isn’t exactly thrilling but does a lot of necessary legwork to get the plot moving in the right direction. In the case of The Night Agent Season 3, that largely means reintroducing Chelsea Arrington, who was a major part of Season 1 but only showed up for a cameo in Season 2. Her position as part of President Hagan’s security detail gives her key positioning here in Episode 3, though, since Hagan was only elected thanks to Jacob Monroe, aka the Broker, which means he’s intimately tied, knowingly or otherwise, to the deaths of Mike and Catherine in the previous episode and the downing of Flight Pima 12 in the premiere.
This episode is also inevitably about teaming Peter up with Isabel, since both are smarting from their recent losses. The show will have to be careful here, since we can’t just have a redo of Peter’s relationship with Rose, given Luciane Buchanan’s absence. At least for now, though, it doesn’t feel like that’s the intention. There’s a different, testier vibe between these two, partly because Peter is more jaded and partly because Isabel is more hands-on. But we’ll keep an eye on it.
Peter Is Big Mad
As is becoming standard, this episode opens with a brief flashback. This one takes place six years ago, and finds Peter and his friend Cisco — RIP! — botching an FBI training exercise. It seems irrelevant, but it’s to reiterate a point. The idea of these training exercises is that they can be repeated again and again until they’re perfected, with all the failures being contained there so that agents don’t have to suffer losses in real life. But Peter keeps suffering losses, with Catherine being the latest. And he’s very unhappy about it.
This frustration is exacerbated by the fact that Peter now has no leads, and Aiden keeps trying to keep him quiet so he doesn’t earn the ire of President Hagan, who isn’t best pleased about a relatively innocuous investigation having resulted in the death of a senior intelligence agent. Peter reckons now’s the time to brief Hagan on the connection to the Broker, and thus the Broker’s connection to his own election. It’s clear that one of the key storylines here is going to be to what extent — if any — Hagan is corrupt. Peter certainly assumes he is, but he’s not in the best frame of mind.
A later conversation between Hagan and his wife, Jenny, about Jacob Monroe, doesn’t particularly illuminate the situation either. But truthfully, I’m a bit more inclined to mistrust the wife. More on that in a bit.
Welcome Back, Chelsea Arrington
At the White House, Peter briefly runs into Chelsea Arrington, who is now part of Hagan’s security detail and has been since his campaign. She’s also in a happy relationship with another White House staffer who proposes to her in what must surely be a pretty serious breach of protocol.
Chelsea seems particularly tight with Jenny Hagan, since they have a little code system where Chelsea will come and get her away from senators with bad breath at the mere jingle of an earring, but this loyalty gets her into trouble by the end of The Night Agent Season 2, Episode 3. Sensing something amiss, Chelsea responds to Jenny’s screams and sees her fleeing from a man who seems to be armed and seems to be attacking her. Chelsea acts quickly, shooting the assailant dead, but it transpires he was totally unarmed.
What’s going on here?
New Alliances
Isabel isn’t one to let sleeping dogs lie, so when the bartender at the place where Mike was killed mentions him having had a drink with a random dude moments before his untimely demise, she immediately wants to look at the CCTV footage. She even takes a photo — blurry and monochrome, granted — of the assailant, who we now know to be an oddly studious single dad who homeschools his son in hotel rooms.
But Isabel is in over her head. She realises this when she goes to meet with Vernon again and finds him dead on his kitchen floor, with the assassin still in the building. Luckily, Peter, who had tried to form a bit of a partnership with her earlier, arrives to save the day. Isabel agrees to work with him, but only if she’s allowed to publish the whole story upon its conclusion, a promise he can’t really make, but that she takes as a guarantee anyway.
Peter and Isabel quickly determine that Mike’s secret connection was Senator George Lansing, whom Peter will have to pull a few strings in order to approach. In the meantime, he may have someone else to work with, since at the end of “Dark Matters”, he’s blindsided by his new “partner”, who has been sent by Hagan personally.
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