One of the biggest changes for the third season of Netflix’s The Night Agent is that Luciane Buchanan’s character Rose Larkin isn’t a part of it. Both Buchanan and creator Shawn Ryan are on record saying it was only because the story that Ryan and his writers broke for Season 3 didn’t include Rose, and that she could come back in future seasons. Still, it’s a big loss for the show, and that loss is evident in the first episode of Season 3.
THE NIGHT AGENT SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO.” We see a kid playing with Legos. His mother gets a phone call that upsets her. She asks her son to “promise me you’ll always do the right thing, even if it’s hard.”
The Gist: The kid was a young Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso). a government Night Agent, and we see him on an operation that flushes out a couple who is selling information on navy submarines. He asks them why they’re selling this info after all the years of loyalty to the government. They tell him that the pressure and secrets “took a toll” on them, and they wanted some control back.
After a passenger jet with over 100 Americans on board is shot out of the sky by a missile, Peter is back in DC. He finds out from Deputy Director Aiden Mosely (Albert Jones) that the competing bidder for the submarine info wasn’t Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum), whom he only knows as “the broker”; he wants to keep going after the man who schemed to put President Hagan (Ward Horton) in office. Mosely warns him against burnout, but Peter wants another case.
He’s sent to Istanbul to find Jay Batra (Suraj Sharma), a junior analyst at FinCEN, the agency that investigates financial crimes. His boss was found shot dead in Batra’s apartment. He fled to Turkey with classified FinCEN documents.
In Istanbul, Peter tracks Jay to a train station, where he sees Jay put an envelope in a locker. Jay slips away, but Peter notices that two other thugs are looking for him. He goes back to the locker and sees a woman pick up the envelope. He follows her back to her hotel and flirts with her at the bar; he finds out she’s a financial reporter named Isabel De Leon (Genesis Rodriguez).
He breaks into her room after she gets into a cab and sees that the envelope has tickets to a soccer match, where Peter sees Jay hand Isabel his documents. When he sees that the thugs that are after Jay get closer, Peter gets him out of the stadium and to a safe house, but not after an extensive car/motorcycle chase through the narrow streets of Istanbul. That’s where Peter finds out that the documents are Suspicious Activity Reports, and later Jay tells Peter that the organization being looked into may have ties to the terrorist organization that shot down that plane.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Shawn Ryan, The Night Agent is along the lines of other espionage shows like The Recruit or Jack Ryan.
Our Take: One of the things that made The Night Agent more entertaining than the average lunkheaded espionage drama is the relationship between Peter and Rose, driven by fantastic chemistry between Basso and Buchanan. That is missing in Season 3, essentially replaced with Peter’s pursuit of “the broker,” and how things may or may not play out with Isabel as Peter eventually works with her to uncover the dark money conspiracy.
The case itself really doesn’t start off all that well, for a couple of reasons. One, given that FinCEN isn’t all that well-known of a government investigative agency, it took a few beats for us to understand what it did and what was at stake, as well as what was really in the SARs reports that Jay stole. Also, Jay seems not just overwhelmed but dangerously stupid, as well, as we see during his brief stay at the Istanbul safe house.
Most of the other elements of the show are there, especially Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren), Peter’s Secret Service handler who seems to now implicitly trust him. And the involvement of Monroe will give the story a “big bad” that both helps and hurts Peter’s efforts to expose the dark money conspiracy. But it also feels like the story is going to be more dependent on chases and other action scenes than past seasons, an indication that it’s just not that interesting of a mystery.
Performance Worth Watching: Gabriel Basso seems to work well within the limited range he’s asked to display as Peter, though he’s better when bouncing off someone like Rodriguez, who plays Isabel, or Sharma, who plays Jay.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Right as Peter and Jay are being extricated from Istanbul, Peter gets a call from “the broker”, saying that he has been looking for Jay.
Sleeper Star: Louis Herthum is effectively smarmy as “the broker,” Jacob Monroe.
Most Pilot-y Line: Why in the world would an analog landline be installed in a U.S. government safe house?
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Night Agent is still perfectly good “watch while doing laundry” TV, but it feels like the third season is even more lunkheaded than the first two, and the absence of Buchanan is huge.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
