‘The Night Agent’ Recap, Season 2, Episode 6

Conspiracy thrillers like The Night Agent can get convoluted over time as more and more characters from different places and organizations come into conflict. For the most part, this particular series manages to overcome that; the plot can get messy and ridiculous, but on a scene-by-scene basis, it’s usually easy enough to understand what’s going on. With the momentum and reveals of the last two episodes, I’ve felt like we’re starting to get a handle on the larger story and grasp the stakes for each of the characters here.

“A Good Agent” isn’t a bad episode at all, but it has less of that satisfying clarity, once again muddying the waters and complicating what once seemed simple-ish. That begins early on, when Peter and Catherine finally access photos of the documents from the ambassador’s briefcase, only to realize they have nothing to do with Foxglove. Well, there’s no obvious connection, at least. It’s a list of Iranian dissidents in Europe, the type of information that doesn’t hold as much interest for the U.S. as it does for Iran.

What is the nature of the relationship between the ambassador and Jacob? Peter speculates that Jacob and Solomon are foreign assets on the Iranian payroll, supplying the regime with chemical weapons and potential targets. Either way, there’s no way to learn more without making direct contact with Solomon. So Catherine sets off to do some risky spy work.

The files from the briefcase came from DGSE, France’s foreign intelligence agency, and like many color prints, they contain tracking dots unique to the device that printed them. Catherine quickly uses that watermark and some surveillance footage to identify the leak as French diplomat and undercover DGSE agent Jacqueline Laurent, who knows Solomon well and can help score a meeting. Jacqueline sets it up, though alarm bells are going off early for Jacob.

Rose spends much of this episode in a grumpy mood, frustrated with Peter and Catherine for how they’ve handled the Noor situation (more on that later) and depressed at her own complicity. But an earnest visit from Catherine brings the two closer together, especially after she reads her in on Foxglove (with preapproval from Mosley, of course). It’s also helpful to get some background on what was going on with Catherine and the other Night Action case officers throughout season one: They went dark after the killing of Jamie Hawkins as well as Rose’s uncle and aunt, not knowing who to trust.

Rose agrees to tap into her evil algorithm and help Peter with surveillance while Catherine and Jacqueline meet Solomon at the designated apartment. But neither of them can see inside the place, and Rose’s extra eyes around the block aren’t able to keep track of Solomon’s other cronies at every given moment. After a few minutes of communicating over comms, Rose realizes those cronies must be listening in somehow, expecting them to show up. That means Catherine is in danger, too.

It’s pretty easy work to throw the cronies off by faking a dialogue over the comms about boarding a nearby bus — but not before Peter does some impressive (and then not) stealth work, scaling the side of a building to evade one of Solomon’s men until an AC unit crashes to the ground and announces his presence.

Jacqueline, an interesting one-off character à la Lorna from season one, is a diplomat who was forced out of fieldwork due to her age until winning back the agency’s respect by securing some highly sought-after intelligence. The only wrinkle? She got that intel by trading another piece of DGSE info away. It’s an interesting twist on the expected story; you’d think that Jacqueline sold secrets to get back at her discriminatory employers, but she actually did it because she loves her job too much. She’s like Catherine in that way.

Jacqueline’s years-long professional relationship with Solomon is almost sweet to witness until it suddenly isn’t. In all these years, this is the first time a source has referred him to someone else, and he doesn’t at all buy Catherine’s story. So he takes Jacqueline to another room and shoots her dead, then asks Catherine at gunpoint about Peter and Night Action. That’s when Peter comes in, perfectly timed, to subdue Solomon and secure that meeting they really need.

This is all well and good, but I’m still finding myself most drawn to Noor, whose story has the highest emotional stakes right now. Early in the episode, she senses from Rose’s obvious expressions that Peter and Catherine are hiding something from her, but Rose lies straight to her face to get her to hand over the flash drive. She just says that Farhad “broke his arm” and that Peter and Catherine were afraid to tell her.

Noor finds out the truth before long, though. Abbas has heard about the disturbance at her home that left her mom missing and her brother dead in the road near her home. He even shows her a photo of Farhad and she responds with denial, convinced it can’t be true that Night Action lied to her. She’s genuinely distraught, of course, and I can’t tell what Javad’s reaction indicates. He’s been onto her all episode, taking her phone to run scans and questioning her bathroom story, but maybe seeing what she’s going through will convince him to go even easier on her than he has been. In this episode, we again see that menacing, threatening side to Javad, and it complicates his early characterization as a sweet, simple guy who’d make the ideal romantic partner.

What can Noor really do now that she has already sacrificed the flash drive and given up her leverage with Night Action? I’m excited and scared to find out. Despite not personally harming anyone herself, she feels like one of the most dangerous and unpredictable characters in this cast, but also one of the most endearing. Oddly, I’m also starting to take a smaller liking to Tomás, whose recent turn for the cold-blooded feels like a transparent ploy for his war-criminal dad’s affection. (Men will literally greenlight a terrorist attack on American soil instead of going to therapy.)

I still have questions about the complex interrelationships of these three pairs of dangerous men (Abbas/Javad, Jacob/Solomon, and Tomás/Markus), and I’m impatient to find out how exactly the two little-seen but much-remarked-upon presidential candidates tie into everything. But I can feel everything starting to come together now. Here’s to hoping the convergence lives up to expectations.

• Peter’s father gets a mention in the opening flashback to 13 years ago, when Catherine’s Night Action partner Noah got killed. During a surprise appearance from Jamie Hawkins (Robert Patrick, last seen in episode two of the show), we learn that Peter Sr. was the FBI mole identified by Noah’s killer.

• Rose has a much-needed therapy session with Gretchen, opening up about Peter in as vague terms as possible. Gretchen’s conclusion after about a minute of Rose speaking is that she and Peter bonded over shared trauma, and those types of connections aren’t always healthy or permanent. “You have to ask yourself whether you’ll still feel the same way when the smoke clears.”

• In Solomon’s latest meeting with Abbas and Javad, he sticks to his code and refuses to identify the source of the list he gave them. He doesn’t even help them out when they show photos of Peter and Rose, so that’s pretty interesting.

• As you might’ve expected even before meeting Tomás’s father, he’s impressed with Markus’s work ethic, not disappointed. Tomás is the real disappointment, someone who liked to claim boar tusks as trophies after his dad’s hunts as a kid despite not participating. “All the glory, none of the blood,” his dad remarks. Logan Roy vibes.

• Javad has a lot to say to Noor about Abbas’s estranged daughter Shirin, who never came home after falling in love while abroad and then set her father’s career back by publicly criticizing Iran. This is the second time we’ve heard about her; is she an important part of this story, maybe to explain Abbas’s motivations in some way?