Well, we’re halfway through the season. How are we feeling? I’m not sure this season is working quite as well as the first when it comes to plotting and action; those 10 episodes weren’t great TV, but the show felt like a well-oiled machine. Now, the slight decentering of the U.S. government and the introduction of several competing parties make it all feel a little less focused, a little less addictive.
That being said, I’m hopeful. The last episode was a definite step up, especially because the two main groups of characters (Peter/Rose/Catherine and Noor/Javad/Abbas) started sharing the same space, and “A Family Matter” continues that upward trajectory. If there’s something this season has that last season doesn’t, it’s a dash of real moral complexity; it’s hard to know exactly what we’re meant to think of Abbas and Javad without knowing the full scope of what they’re hiding, but they’re mostly likable despite the shadiness they’re involved in. And Noor is most interesting of all, an informant who will betray the CIA and Iran alike to protect her family.
Last season did make a decent effort to humanize the baddies, both the cartoony psychopathic assassin couple and the suits pulling their strings from the shadows. Outside of the mission and possibly Warren Stocker toward the end, season two hasn’t attempted the same. But this episode finally shows us Solomon in a different mode than usual, actually interacting with his sister (who does know about his work after all) and discussing the possibility of asking for a raise, as if popping around the globe to kill people from various intelligence agencies is just any job.
Solomon does bring up the subject while meeting with his boss later, though he hilariously undercuts his own efforts by talking himself down to a smaller raise. But later, the buyer — and we can just refer to him as Jacob now, since the episode descriptions do — brings up the subject himself, suggesting 15 percent and a “VP of acquisitions” title. It’s good motivation for Solomon, whose primary task now is “acquiring” Peter Sutherland. They’ve been working hard on IDing him, just like Peter has been working to ID Solomon and the buyer, but they can’t find any record of him working for any particular intelligence agency.
It’s a nice change of pace to see the search play out from Solomon and Jacob’s perspective: They’re looking into the mysterious phrase “Night Action,” just like Peter and Rose are looking into Foxglove. Still, most of this is setup for future meetings, and the episode’s real focus is elsewhere.
How should Night Action handle a wild-card asset like Noor? Catherine’s solution is simple: threaten to burn her at the mission by revealing to Abbas what she’s been up to lately. Peter is open to that tactic, worried about what could happen if those chemical weapons remain in the wrong hands for too long. But Rose is disturbed by the idea of risking harm to Noor or her family. So when Peter meets up with Sami Saidi — a former Delta Force operator sprung from jail by Catherine and turned into a Night Agent — he insists on Rose’s way of doing things. Sami must extract Noor’s family in the next 24 hours, and only then will Night Action get access to the intel from the ambassador’s briefcase.
There’s lots of stress in the lead-up to the extraction: It doesn’t require much intuition to tell that Peter is very anxious, and Sami offers his own bit of wisdom by suggesting he stop dwelling on his failure to save Alice and locate his “moral anchor.” Sami’s little sister is the person he thinks of when he’s in a tough moral quandary or too fixated on his mistakes. It’s obvious that Rose is Peter’s equivalent.
The drama is more intense at the mission, where Abbas and Javad are in a panic trying to figure out how and why Peter infiltrated the party. They figure he must’ve had the help of someone inside. During Javad’s interrogation of Haleh, she admits the phone from the surveillance footage belongs to Noor. But he’s not ready to face the full implications of her words, even if they lead him to poke around Noor’s residence. When Abbas calls for an update on the search for a rat, Javad doesn’t tell him what he has learned.
She’s gotten away with it for now, but there’s no getting around it: Noor is in deep shit. Unfortunately, the suspicion at the mission isn’t even the worst thing that happens to her in this episode.
She meets Peter, Rose, and Catherine at a Night Action station in New York, gathering around the solitary phone to wait for a call when the extraction is over. When Sami calls from the home of Noor’s mom and brother, though, the news isn’t good: Azita never told Farhad that they were leaving, and he’s refusing to go. He eventually budges when Peter explains over the phone that Noor is in trouble with her employer and needs help — she’s still insisting she’ll destroy the photos if Night Action doesn’t get her family out.
But the presence of Sami raises the suspicions of their neighbor Babak, who demands to know who the American really is. Even after Sami manages to get Azita and her son to the car, Farhad is claiming he won’t leave. When the police pull them over in the middle of the ten-mile drive to the airstrip, Sami puts his training to use and takes out both cops, stabbing one in the neck before grabbing his gun and shooting both. That’s when Farhad seizes the opportunity to not only escape but shoot one fallen cop’s gun at Sami. It misses, but the returned fire kills Farhad almost immediately. The scream Azita lets out is brutal.
This whole tragic final sequence plays out with a sense of sickening inevitability, like an ugly, violent domino effect. This rushed extraction was built to fail even if we didn’t know exactly how it would fall apart. It’s hard to know whom to blame, exactly: Peter and Catherine and even Noor, for rushing this? Azita, for neglecting to discuss the plan with her son beforehand? Farhad, for ignoring his sister and firing a weapon at the man assigned to help them?
What about Sami, for failing to adequately communicate his supposed trustworthiness, and for firing the fatal shot? Couldn’t he have gone for Farhad’s leg or just disarmed him somehow? This is a highly trained operative, and perhaps it’s that very training that allows Sami to treat Farhad as expendable, like he’s unfortunate collateral damage and not, you know, the whole point of the extraction in the first place. Like the FBI and CIA themselves, Night Action’s official stance on this kind of thing is “shit happens!” As long as Noor holds up her end of the bargain and turns in the photos, losing Farhad is no sweat off their back.
That’s why, after Peter gets the report from Sami in the final scene, we’re left to watch him plaster on a straight face to lie and tell Noor that her family is safe. It’s the darkest thing we’ve ever seen him do, but in The Night Agent’s twisted action-movie logic, it may be necessary to prevent even more violence. It might even end up saving the world.
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• No sign of Tomás or Markus this time, which is the right move to keep the episode tight.
• It turns out Rose’s boss loves her changes to the source code, and the investors want to take AdVerse global as a tracking tool! She immediately leverages her contribution to get a chief technology officer role and an ethics board, which she feels strongly about (as she should). Still not sure that will be enough to stop the tool from being abused, but sure.