Summary
The Night Agent Season 3 delivers some important contextualising backstory in “Once Upon a Time…”, fleshing out the Broker as a character in unexpected ways.
The Night Agent Season 3 hasn’t been shy about using flashbacks. But Episode 7, fittingly titled “Once Upon a Time…”, takes the idea a bit further. Instead of just sticking one at the start, half of the runtime is devoted to scenes stretching as far back as February 1995, which are intended to add some important context to Jacob’s past and his relationship with Isabel. It’s a useful idea, since we’re now supposed to be considering Jacob differently, not necessarily as a good guy, but certainly a guy not quite as bad as we first suspected.
Instead of being solely set in the past, though, “Once Upon a Time…” also includes several present-day sequences picking up from where we left things after Peter and Isabel rescued Jay from Jacob’s estate. The dynamics are continuing to shift, so this stuff is important to get everyone into new positions, the most notable being that Peter is now a captive of the Father. The flashbacks and present-day scenes are all intermingled, but for ease, I’m not going to present them like that.
Past Is Prologue
Jacob was a legal consultant in 1995, when he travelled to Mexico City to work with Raul Zapata on his inherited soap and solvent company. At the time, Sofia De Leon, Isabel’s mother, was the head of operations. Both she and Jacob assumed that the business was legitimate, and Zapata was just negotiating an international expansion.
According to Costa, a deeply unpleasant CIA agent who accosted Jacob at his hotel, Zapata was dirty. And thanks to a laundry list of bribes that got him into the country and arranged all the deals, Jacob can be made to look dirty, too. If he doesn’t want to spend a few years in a Mexican prison, all he has to do is help to prove that Zapata’s up to no good.
This mission is complicated by Jacob falling head over heels in love with Sofia. As they get closer and closer, the CIA, who are unequivocally presented as the bad guys here, lean harder and harder on Jacob. By the time he confessed to being a double agent and enlisted her help to shut Zapata down, Sofia was already pregnant with Isabel. When he was caught snooping, he made a deal with Zapata to become a shareholder in his company and to obscure his illegal activities, which involved the transportation of pretty serious weapons, including missiles. The dream would have been to sell Zapata out and disappear into the sunset.
But no such luck. Out of nowhere, Zapata told Jacob that he had uncovered a mole in his operation — Sofia. Before Jacob knew it, Zapata had her snatched, and the CIA refused to help. He was on his own.
The Birth of the Broker
This experience obviously changed Jacob on a fundamental level. We don’t see the years between 1995 and 2011, when the next flashback is set, but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots. When Jacob presents himself to an aging Costa, now a grandmother, he’s much closer to the present-day Jacob we’re used to. He has a whole bunch of kompromat on Costa and is willing to expose it. He gives her a phone, much like he did to Peter, and tells her to answer when he calls.
Costa also explains that the CIA made a deal with Zapata. Part of it was selling out the mole in his organisation; they had to give up Jacob or Sofia, and since Jacob was considered an asset, they sold out the latter. Zapata kept Sofia alive and used her as a scapegoat for some of his crimes. She gave birth in prison and then died there.
It was around this time that Jacob tracked down and reached out to Isabel, attempting to buy his way into a relationship with her. But this isn’t as cynical with context as she made it sound to Peter. Everything we’re seeing of Jacob’s past suggests he’s a much better guy than we’ve been led to believe, which helps to inform his present-day status. Speaking of which…
An Unlikely Partnership
When The Night Agent Season 3, Episode 7 catches up with Jacob’s present circumstances, he’s reviewing the security footage from his estate and seeing that Isabel absconded with Peter. He’s initially not best pleased about this, but it turns out to be advantageous, since Jacob is promptly cornered by the Father and forced to reach out for help. Peter is the obvious choice. Jacob has locked himself in a safe room, but it’s only a matter of time until the Father gets inside and kills him.
Jacob proposes a deal. There’s a whole database of intelligence he has cultivated over the years, so heavily encrypted that it can only be deciphered with the help of a copy of Grimm’s Fairytales that he gave to Sofia many years prior. If Peter rescues him, he’ll share everything. Peter isn’t inclined to believe him, of course, but Jacob says that now that he has been exposed, his only concern is protecting Isabel.
So, Peter does indeed rescue Jacob from the Father and manages to get him safely to Adam. However, Peter himself is jumped by the Father and injected with a sedative. Adam isn’t fast enough to prevent him from being taken away, one assumes to a rather unsavoury fate. Now it’ll be up to Isabel, Adam, and Jacob to rescue him.
