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The Night Agent Season-Premiere Recap: AWOL

The Night Agent

Call Tracking
Season 2 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating 3 stars

The Night Agent

Call Tracking
Season 2 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: Siviroon Srisuwan/Netflix

Shawn Ryan’s series The Night Agent was a surprise hit for Netflix in 2023, a familiar yet addictive conspiracy thriller about a covert counterintelligence program rooting out moles at the highest level of the U.S. government. But without more source material to adapt — season one covered the entirety of Matthew Quirk’s novel of the same name, and there’s no sequel — the road ahead is less clear. Outside of the two leads, Night Action telephone operator turned agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) and cybersecurity entrepreneur Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), the announced main cast for season two is entirely new. And this isn’t just a one-off follow-up; the show has already been renewed for a third season.

Based on this premiere, though, the show should feel pretty similar to what we’re used to, even if we won’t spend nearly as much time in D.C. “Call Tracking” even seems to ape the beginning of the series in some ways, separately showing us Peter and Rose’s current circumstances before pairing them up again later on. We meet a few new characters, but there are likely more to come; just like the series premiere, the focus here is squarely on Peter and Rose.

The episode picks up some months after season one ended, showing Peter’s first mission since becoming a full-fledged Night Agent. He’s in Bangkok with his superior, Alice (Brittany Snow), tracking a CIA agent named Warren Stocker (Teddy Sears) suspected of leaking classified information. However, Peter and Alice’s identities are somehow compromised when they split up to tail Warren and his bald associate (Berto Colón). Peter spots Warren making a drop, leaving a thumb drive for another man to pick up, but there’s no time to ID the other parties and retrieve the drive; he can only hide and then flee from his attackers, which becomes much harder when they show up to the Night Action extraction point. As a result of some act of sabotage, Alice loses her life, shot by the bald guy just as they arrive.

I’m bummed but not surprised that Brittany Snow won’t be a regular part of this series, especially considering Peter has more chemistry with Alice in that one sequence than most of the awkward lovey-dovey scenes between him and Rose. But I assume she’ll show up again in flashbacks because there’s a lot going on here we don’t yet understand. For example: Who is the man who bought the intel on the flash drive?

Peter doesn’t make it out of the mission without a gunshot wound of his own, but he manages to survive. A month later, though, he’s still MIA, holed up in a New York City apartment and going by “David” while tracking the same target. He somehow managed to get a gig coaching Warren’s son Ethan at basketball, which gives him the opportunity to learn more about his target’s divorce and which encrypted messaging apps he uses. After swapping phones one day, Peter pretends to be Ethan and makes plans to meet with Warren when he’s in town.

The following sequence, with Peter riding the bus and getting as close as possible to Warren’s location without revealing himself, is pretty tense — my favorite detail is Peter’s fake dropped calls. But Warren gets spooked eventually, and their chase ends in a hand-to-hand struggle in an abandoned theater. The target gets away once again, for the time being, but at least Peter reunites with an old ally: Rose, who has tracked him down using the phone number she got from a phoneless and abandoned Ethan.

When we first see Rose in this premiere, she’s in therapy, making an effort to open up about her lingering anxiety without getting into the details of what happened at Camp David — not to mention her long-distance AWOL boyfriend, the murder of her aunt and uncle, or anything else related to Night Action. After what happened, she got a job as the lead programmer for AdVerse, working on their supposedly groundbreaking algorithm geared toward generating advertising profiles for users. They’re still looking for investors, though nobody seems interested in yet another marketing algorithm.

Then an unidentified man calls Rose asking about Peter, and she’s sucked back into the world of conspiracies. Needing someone to talk to, she goes straight to the top, calling the phone number President Michelle Travers provided her. Travers sends Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren), Peter’s manager at Night Action, to meet Rose, but Catherine isn’t there to provide answers or comfort. She’s a bit cold to Rose, reminding her she’s a civilian who shouldn’t have any involvement in the search for Peter or even say the phrase “Night Action” out loud.

We know Rose, though, and she’s not one to back down. She feeds some photos of Peter through her own algorithm, which turns out to be as miraculous as advertised, a terrifying search engine on the level of Person of Interest’s Machine or the invasive surveillance network from The Dark Knight. (I know facial-recognition technology has leveled up in recent years, but this is a new level.) Almost instantly she finds Peter in the background of a photo taken at an urgent care in New York, and with that, she’s making up a story to her boss about her mom’s surgery and promising to work remotely. How early do we think Rose will lose her job? Episode four?

The premiere doesn’t end on much of a cliffhanger; Alice’s killer is in New York and shooting at our heroes, but I’m not concerned for either of their lives at this point, so it feels like an arbitrary ending mid-action scene. On a broader level, I’m a little concerned about the lack of personal stakes so far. In season one, Peter had something to prove, still convinced of his traitor father’s innocence and torn up about the Metro bombing. And Rose wanted answers about her beloved aunt and uncle’s private lives as spies while also seeking justice for their deaths. This time, we’re told that Rose is anxious and Peter’s mental health is also suffering, but we haven’t really seen that yet. There’s still a sense of paranoia — Peter is still here because he doesn’t know whom he can trust — but the stakes are generally more abstract, especially because so little is known about the contents of that flash drive.

Then again, we don’t really come to this show for character drama; we’re in this for the action and spy stuff, and in that regard, “Call Tracking” mostly delivers, even without an immediate hook akin to season one. Creating a story as intense and byzantine as last time could be an uphill battle — losing Hong Chau is a big hit, even if Catherine seems intriguing — but there should be some solid thrills while we’re here.

Classified Information

• In our one scene without Peter or Rose, we learn that Travers isn’t running for reelection, nor has she endorsed party nominee Richard Hagan. We also learn that Catherine has some history with Peter’s father, which should come up again once she heads to New York to track our hero down.

The Night Agent Season-Premiere Recap: AWOL