The Night Agent Recap: Information Is Leverage

With one episode to go, there’s still a decent bit of plot left to cover. For one, there’s an incredibly lethal chemical weapon in the hands of some seedy characters intent on killing as many people as they can. Even if our heroes manage to stop them, there are lots of other loose ends. Jacob, a businessman who treats people as pawns and sells dangerous information to the highest bidder, is still out there with Peter in his pocket. Peter still doesn’t know about his preexisting connection to Catherine, who investigated his father. And we’re all dying to know whether Rose will go back to California.

But “Cultural Exchange” does begin the work of wrapping up this season, especially when it comes to the Iranian characters. Early in the episode, Javad goes full mask-off villain, threatening to get the ambassador in trouble with the foreign minister after he let Noor steal the list of dissidents. First, his priority is to track down Noor and stop her. By the time he catches up with her at the Hagan rally outside the U.N., though, she’s already been in and out, and the French delegation has the list.

Javad can’t keep track of Noor for very long, and he’s forced to return to the mission. And in the time he was gone, Abbas has already made moves against him, arranging for his impeachment by framing him as Noor’s coconspirator. From the outside, it seems believable; there’s footage of Javad flirting with Noor (a.k.a. “information gathering”), and Javad’s choice to move the list from Abbas’s private residence to the mission seems suspicious. He makes one last attempt to threaten the ambassador, reminding him that he knows where his daughter lives, but it only makes him look worse, especially with Haleh and other witnesses there to hear it. The regime has some questions for Javad.

There’s still more story to come, of course, and I’m curious if Noor will face more consequences for her spying. (Narratively speaking, she’s already suffered enough.) But for the most part, this all works out pretty neatly: Noor gets to reunite with her mother, Abbas gets to save his daughter and blame his own slip-ups on some (deserving) scapegoats, and Javad will be sent back to Iran. It might seem like an overly tidy conclusion in another show, but it feels right for a slightly brainless action-oriented series like The Night Agent.

Peter and Noor’s trip to the U.N. allows a moment of subtle reconciliation between the two; they’ll never be buddies, but she can shake his hand and accept his apology for screwing up. Once they separate, Peter swipes a badge in the elevator and poses as IT to comb through the secretary general’s computer for the file he needs. He also enlists a very unhappy and unwilling underling named Lars Troost, who says that because the file is from 2018, it’d be kept in the archives. Poor Lars does try to alert someone while escorting Peter through security, but one measly guard isn’t nearly enough.

Jacob’s meeting place of choice is a stalled tram over the East River, where he identifies the file he had Peter obtain: It’s an ICC criminal case file for one Viktor Bala, who alleged the U.S. sold him chemical weapons but got shut down thanks to some cover-up. Peter does hand the drive over to Jacob, going “above and beyond” and giving him access to years of files, and Jacob agrees to somehow wipe Peter’s existence clean from the U.N. Building. Apparently he already has a contact there he could’ve used, but he wanted to collect Peter as a new source. This way, he has an inside man at Night Action, and plenty of leverage to keep Peter in line.

Jacob confirms that the Balas are the ones making K.X. now, and Peter heads to the meatpacking warehouse where his girlfriend is busy making weapons of mass destruction. I like that this story does acknowledge that Rose and Cole’s hands are kind of tied; they try to create an inactive batch, but Cole’s notes specify that the K.X. should be purple, so the more magenta-ish hue of the 16th canister sets off alarm bells for Markus. (Did it really take 15 canisters before it occurred to them to make a fake one?) He stabs Cole’s wife Gloria in the belly as a warning not to try another sabotage.

From there, Cole starts considering suicide. It’s kind of selfish not to, when the lives of thousands or more people are at stake. He could destroy the lab with just a little ethanol and sulfuric acid, and sure, they’d burn alive, but they could turn this mass casualty event into a slightly less massive casualty event. But then Rose comes up with a much better suggestion: creating a knockout gas. Again, why the hell were we not thinking of this before?

Now that Peter has reported the location of the lab to Catherine, help is on the way. But the knockout gas, while effective, isn’t enough to take out all the men in the warehouse. Peter swoops in just in time to help take care of the remaining guys while Cole and Rose find Gloria and Jesse. Like all season, the fight scenes here are solid, and it’s fitting to have Rose save Peter’s ass again by ripping off his attacker’s gas mask while Peter is pinned down.

Of course, Markus and his men have left with plenty of canisters already, so finding the lab only saves Cole’s family and Rose, not the thousands of other people who may be doomed. The cronies are already loading up the HVAC at the U.N. Building with the canisters, on the verge of taking out the General Assembly and, in the process, poisoning thousands of people across mid-Manhattan. Now that Peter has proven himself, will his superiors trust him to fix this? Or will following in the footsteps of his traitor father come back to bite him?

Classified Information

• This time the opening flashback shows Peter and Rose on their last day together before he left for his first mission ten months ago, which, snore.

• RIP Solomon! A little surprised it happened like this, casually and at Catherine’s hands, after this season has positioned him as an even more important character than Jacob in some ways.

• Noor escapes from Javad at the rally by provoking a fight, knocking a hat off some Hagan supporter’s head, and telling him that Javad said, “Your mother’s a whore.”

• Damn, Viktor is even more cold than I realized. When Markus calls with the unfortunate news that he had to kill Tomás, he barely has any reaction. “I will mourn the boy he was but less the man he grew to be,” he says. He also calls Markus his son, which makes his day.