‘The Night Agent’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap – On the Job Therapy (And A Big Twist)

There have been some turns already in The Night Agent Season 3, but the biggest one yet is to be found in Episode 5, “The Isolation Play”. On balance, I actually think this is the best hour yet, and not just because of the last-minute reveal that Isabel may have been working with the Broker all along. Peter gets some on-the-job therapy here that is extremely beneficial for his character, having finally met someone in Adam who can tell him the things he has been needing to hear for three seasons (like the very obvious fact that he should take a vacation).

Here we also see Chelsea’s subplot intersect quite naturally with Peter’s main arc, and I think all this has been handled fairly well. This season seems to be resisting the obvious impulse to make President Hagan flagrantly corrupt and is instead taking a more compelling angle with his wife that affects Chelsea on a more personal level. It’s still a little predictable, granted, but it’s better than the alternative.

Peter Is Making Friends

“The Isolation Play” begins with an eight-months-earlier flashback showing how Hagan recruited Adam, an old Army buddy who went on to carry out black bag operations for the CIA, as a Night Agent. Establishing this relationship helps to give Hagan some credibility, since it was suspicious that he sent Adam to keep an eye on Peter, and it also ends up making Peter’s arc in this episode more compelling because we have a sense of Adam’s background and know the advice he’s sharing is genuine.

After the ending of the previous episode, Peter is recuperating in Adam’s quiet rural home. But Adam has some harsh lessons for him, particularly about how his going rogue is contrary to how these kinds of operations work. His mistrust of the president put him and Isabel in danger, and Adam had to bail him out. It’s compelling advice in large part because it’s correct.

Adam is also useful in other ways. He has discovered that every shell company that paid into the crypto wallet was incorporated by the same woman, who was paid to look the other way by an Atlantic City casino called Seaside Palace. The guy in charge of that place is David Hutson, the co-founder of Heroes in Healing, the nonprofit from the SARs who’re also Senator Lansing’s biggest campaign contributor. It’s all coming together.

Ocean’s Two

In a solid set-piece, Peter and Adam infiltrate the casino and discover that the horse racing track is both where the money is and where Hutson himself is chilling. Peter plans to remotely clone his phone, while Adam sneaks into his office and clones his computer.

It isn’t that easy, though, obviously, and it all comes together really nicely. Adam ends up stuck in Hutson’s office while he has a dalliance with a woman who isn’t his wife, so Peter makes a Hail Mary play by tipping the wife off with a photo (since he has hacked into Hutson’s phone). It’s smart and pretty funny, since Adam is amusing in a way that Peter isn’t.

Peter and Adam are able to just about get away with cloned versions of both devices, though they have to fight their way out by the end. The evidence is good — it reveals that Hutson is an alias, exposes past ties to Zapata and the LFS, and implicates all of the shell companies in Flight Pima 12. This results in Hutson being arrested, but it doesn’t, sadly, implicate the Broker.

Chelsea’s Getting Suspicious

Thanks to Theo’s press conference, Chelsea is approached in the street by Brian’s frantic brother, who isn’t buying the official line that Brian attacked the First Lady. Chelsea’s not thrilled by the encounter, but he only raises her suspicions even more. She pushes to be involved in the investigation and discovers that Brian received an unusual deposit in his bank account shortly before the attack.

She also shares some of her misgivings with Theo, who, for the record, I don’t trust at all. During a dinner that night with the Hagans, Theo lets slip that Chelsea is working the investigation — she frames it as helping her to provide better protection — and Jenny visibly bristles at the idea. Jenny also seems keen to keep Monroe on as a donor, though less so once Hagan reveals that he may be financing the LFS. At this point, Hagan seems legitimately clueless, and it’s his wife who seems to be pulling the strings.

Chelsea reaches out to Peter with her theories, telling him that the payment Brian received came from Corepoint Dynamics, a company that Issabel was investigating that was mentioned in the SARs due to a dodgy wire transfer, but wasn’t connected to the crypto wallet. It was FinCEN’s job to investigate, and someone — presumably Jay’s boss — was clearly paid off to make sure that investigation went nowhere. Isabel claims to have a contact who can help but who won’t go public, but she’s really suspicious about it, so Peter follows her. She goes right to the Broker himself, which is a pretty big development. Have they been in cahoots the entire time?

And Another Thing…

A couple more details from The Night Agent Season 3, Episode 5 that I couldn’t fit into the recap proper:

• Despite Monroe’s earlier claims, Jay is still alive. And what’s more is that he seems to have been put to work sniffing out more connections between the shell companies and the crypto wallet. More money is going into the account, which means that the LFS is gearing up for another attack. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the Broker is trying to stop the attacks, not the other way around.
• “The Father” finds Isabel’s dropped phone in the forest and clones it. He also patches himself up in the hotel bathroom while using Vernon’s stolen PS5 as a distraction, but his kid is very much onto him at this point.

RELATED:

• The Night Agent Season 3 Episode 6 Recap