TV: The Night Agent, Season 2

Agent Peter Sutherland is back, more baffled and beaten up than ever

TV: The Night Agent, Season 2

Streaming on Netflix

Night Action is a fictional American intelligence apparatus more covert than the CIA. Officially, it doesn’t exist. In fact, it uncovers corruption in the upper echelons of U.S. intelligence.

Season 1 worked like this: Night Agents across the globe who were in trouble dialed a phone picked up in the basement of the White House by FBI agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso).

After two agents were killed Peter was upgraded from the basement and thrust into the field, where he kept putting his life on the line to rescue other intelligence assets.

By season’s end, he’d earned the job title Night Agent by thwarting an assassination plot steered from inside the White House.

As Season 2 begins, Peter is a full-fledged Night Agent. Episode 1 finds him in Bangkok, trailing bad guys holding a USB stick full of classified documents. When the Bangkok op goes wrong and his partner is killed, Peter fears that Night Action itself has been compromised.

Not knowing who to trust, he drops off the grid, flies to New York, and goes rogue in a rundown brownstone near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Yet who should track him down but his Season 1 love interest, Rose (Luciane Buchanan)? Burned by their Season 1 breakup, she’s returned to California, where she works as a tech specialist in futuristic facial recognition software.

She pines for Peter, and using her high-powered software, she spots him on the street looking frightened. So, she can’t stop herself from flying to New York to help him – one last time, she promises herself – get out of trouble.

She’s not the only one worried about Peter’s ability to keep a cool professional head. He’s under the watchful eye of Night Action’s chief operative Catherine (Amanda Warren). With Peter and Rose reunited, Catherine steps in to keep them from acting without the full picture of what they’re dealing with.

Rose (Luciane Buchanan, c.) craftily decoding the bomb threat for Peter and Catherine

Peter has stumbled onto a terrorist plot to sell classified U.S. intelligence documents on the black market. Even the savvy Catherine doesn’t yet fully understand that the documents outline steps to build a powerful chemical weapon.

Of course, this who-can-you-trust narrative is standard for a spy melodrama, and it’s the engine that keeps the second season humming. Everyone we meet is dissembling in one way or another, and only slowly do we learn why.

But that’s the main reason The Night Agent stays engaging, because it’s not just the plot we’re trying to keep track of, but the conflicted emotions written across faces. The cast does a fine job of inviting us to read their motives yet never quite leaving us assured that what they’re trying to get across is the whole truth.

Amanda Warren’s performance as Catherine is a refreshingly unsentimental portrait of a professional woman who doesn’t back down to men, those who partner with her as well as those trying to off her. She grabs them all where it hurts most, and squeezes.

This is especially fascinating in a parallel layer of the story that eventually ties into the chemical weapon threat. We meet Noor (Arianne Mandi), an aide to the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations.

She’s desperate to bring her mother and brother from Iran to New York, but that would mean defection, so she must keep her plans deeply hidden from Javad (Keon Alexander), the embassy’s top security adviser.

He’s smitten by Noor and courts her, but when he begins to suspect she may be tied to Peter and Rose, Javad is bound to move against her.

He’s right to suspect her, because the documents she wants to hand over to the U.S. lead directly to the plot to build and deploy the chemical weapon. She, Peter and Rose become reluctant allies.

Peter promises to guarantee her family’s safe transfer to the U.S., but only if she can supply him with the Iranian documents that will reveal the masterminds of the terrorist plot.

These mixed motives teeter back and forth so we’re never sure who’s controlling the flow of events, and the sharp direction delivers stunning surprises. Are the would-be despoilers going to triumph and release the deadly weapon, or can Peter and Catherine marshal the forces of the government to stop them?

Guns, crunching body blows, and massive government and police deployments begin to seem like they might not be enough.

The game cast makes the exercise fun to watch, with enough twists to make you wonder exactly how frail U.S. government protections may be.

Mandi is surprisingly moving as the troubled Noor. We have no trouble believing in her love for her family, and on the actress’s face we see the grave danger Noor is in if Javad finds out her escape plan.

Alexander seems sincerely earnest as Javad falls for Noor, making the security chief all the more sinister when his loyalty to Iran deepens his suspicion of her.

Musclebound Basso is once again an agile brawler, but he also pulls off the slight boyishness in Peter’s zeal. We sometimes doubt Peter’s ability to cut through the tangled web he finds himself in, but his earnestness, and stolid patriotism, are kept full frontal by the writers. There are no apologies for nationalism in this script.

Catherine (Amanda Warren) keeps warning Peter he’s putting himself in danger

What I find most delightful in Season 2 is the introduction of Catherine, a wearily cynical agent with a history more bitter than Peter can imagine. She doesn’t hesitate to rein him in and let him know his chances of staying a Night Agent are always in jeopardy.

Amanda Warren’s performance ices the screen with a stark portrayal of a woman who has nothing left to prove. The hotter the action gets, the cooler Catherine becomes.

It’s a refreshingly unsentimental portrait of a professional woman who doesn’t back down to men, those who partner with her as well as those trying to off her. She grabs them all where it hurts most, and squeezes.

I tingled in my seat. The season is filled with such moments. It’s good to know that Season 3 is already greenlit.