Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Night Agent Season 2.
When The Night Agent premiered on Netflix in 2023, it didn’t take long to find an audience. The undercover spy thriller, based on the eponymous Matthew Quirk novel, became the most viewed series on the streamer for the first half of the year. And for good reason. The 10-episode series blended engaging protagonists, thrilling action set pieces, and just enough twists to have you on the edge of your seat without leaning back into full disbelief. Not necessarily prestige and not exactly a pulpy paperback, it tightroped comfortably in between.
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The first season set a high narrative bar (it’s hard to top a government conspiracy that leads all the way to the White House and ends with our hero saving the president from a helicopter bomb), but instead of going bigger, Season 2 wisely goes wider and deeper. This time around, Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) graduates from the desk to the field (he starts in Bangkok then jets to New York), while his tech-whiz sidekick and love interest Rose Larkin (Lucianne Buchanon) reteams with him, attempting to decipher the ramifications and grapple with ethics of their high-risk, covert operations and subsequent trauma.
In the Season 2 finale, “Buyer’s Remorse,” Peter and Rose ultimately thwart the Midtown Manhattan chemical catastrophe they’ve been racing to prevent, but there’s plenty more to break down and unpack after the dust settles and the yellow tape has been unfurled. With Netflix already confirming a third season of the show, here’s where things stand and what burning questions this season leaves us asking.
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Peter and Rose’s chemistry saves the day, literally
Throughout the majority of the show’s sophomore season, Peter and Rose spend time researching, committing side missions, and escaping tight jams to understand and uncover a shuttered government chemical weapons project called “Foxglove.” The classified information (containing all the chemical compounds necessary to build the weapon, called KX) has fallen into the wrong hands thanks to Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum), an intelligence broker, who eventually strikes a deal with Peter: If the agent can get him a special file within the U.N., Monroe will give him the whereabouts of the terrorists—led by a man named Markus (Michael Malarkey)—who plan to unleash the killing agent throughout Manhattan.
The police’s bomb squad and FBI apprehend or kill most of the terrorists and capture 14 canisters of the chemical weapon attached to the U.N. building’s air vents, but Markus escapes and puts the final canister inside the HVAC system of a nearby hotel. After Peter and Rose shoot and kill Markus inside a hotel room, they scramble to evacuate everyone from the building before a trip wire unleashes the deadly gas. What’s their next move? Start a fire inside the HVAC system, which will automatically close all the vents and prevent the KX from spreading. With a few minutes left, Rose grabs sulfuric acid and ethanol from a cleaning cart and watches it slowly combust, sparking enough flames to close the vents just as KX begins to diffuse.
It’s another last-second victory, which ends with an embrace between Peter and Rose. It also leads to a sobering conversation. Much like the speech a superhero gives to their significant other, Peter explains to Rose that he can’t keep putting her into life-threatening situations every time they’re together. “I need you to promise me something. As long as I’m a Night Agent, people are gonna try to use you to get to me,” Peter tells her. “As long as you come searching for me you’ll be at risk. Promise me you’re not gonna wait for me to call. You hear I’m in trouble, you’re not gonna come look for me. Just forget about me.”
Then, Peter turns himself in to his FBI handler, Catherine (Amanda Warren), who handcuffs him to her SUV. Despite saving thousands of lives, the Night Agent had freed one of Monroe’s detained assassins to get a meeting with him. In a vacuum, it’s a treasonous act. But Peter knows it helped save another mass casualty event.
Did Peter help influence the next presidential election?
That’s how Catherine sees it, and it’s hard to blame her. During Peter’s subsequent interrogation, he admits that he went on a private mission for Monroe that required him to sneak into the U.N. (thanks largely to his Iranian asset Noor, played by Arienne Mandi, who printed him out an official badge) and steal a valuable file from the archives. What was inside? We soon find out it contained incriminating evidence against presidential hopeful Patrick Knox, who spearheaded the Foxglove project and oversaw its sale to Viktor Bala (Dikran Tulaine), the dictatorial leader who enlisted Markus to build and unleash it on American soil.
Thanks to Peter, Monroe was able to deliver that file to Knox’s opponent, Governor Hagan. With the implicating information, it’s not long before this “October surprise” forces Knox to withdraw from the presidential race, all but assuring Hagan the White House. Why does that matter to Monroe? As hinted at throughout the season, Hagan plans to enact an isolationist foreign policy from the Oval Office, meaning the price for information and intelligence will skyrocket. It’s an ideal situation for Monroe, who now has the president in his hip pocket, which now suggests, as Catherine fears, “that every piece of classified intelligence that crosses the resolute desk is up for sale to the highest bidder.”
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Season 3 will require Peter to become a double agent
At the end of the finale, Catherine explains to Peter how he aided and abetted the swing of an election—but that doesn’t mean he’s going to spend life in a cell. As it stands, Monroe believes he has Peter at his beck and call (Monroe even gave him a personal phone to answer his calls) to ensure information gets into the right hands. Instead of burning up their deal, Catherine explains that Peter will continue the relationship as an FBI double agent, just like his disgraced father.
“We need you to determine the exact nature of their relationship,” Catherine tells him. “He still believes he owns you, so we’re gonna let him. There’s going to be a day when he will call on you for a favor, or to give orders, and when he does I want you to do exactly as he asks. Gain his trust, and we’ll cover every snake on his payroll and then expose him.” “You already know I’m in,” Peter says.
Much like the ending of Season 1, Peter has renewed purpose and another challenging job ahead of him. But will Rose become involved a third time, especially after he explicitly told her not to wait for his phone call? As of now, she’s returned to California, busy with a work promotion, in therapy twice a week, with no idea what Peter has been up to. Unless The Night Agent plans to completely flip its formula in Season 3, it’s hard to believe they won’t find each other again and prevent more mass terror together.
