The first season of Netflix’s explosive spy-thriller The Night Agent was a rollicking good time. It’s not the smartest spy show out there—not everything can be Slow Horses—but it makes up for some of its more preposterous moments by sticking to what makes it tick: Likeable characters up against overwhelming odds, plenty of fun twists and turns, and cliffhangers galore.
Season 2 doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but it does expand the conflict with more subplots to keep track of and some globetrotting espionage. While the first season introduced us to Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) and the secretive Night Action program all with a tense presidential assassination plot, the second season takes us on a high-stakes adventure filled with ruthless terrorists, Iranian double agents and a cunning intelligence broker named Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum).
Sutherland is now a full Night Action agent, though he’s still green as far as his superiors are concerned. When an operation in Bangkok goes bad, he doesn’t know who he can trust—other than Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) of course—so he goes underground. The season hits the ground running and never really lets up.
There’s a whole new cast of characters onboard in Season 2. Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren) is Sutherland’s handler, a veteran Night Action agent whose history is intimately tied to Sutherland’s own. We also meet Sami (Marwan Kenzari) a multilingual ex-soldier and Night Action agent who ended up as one of my favorite new characters (I’d watch a Sami spinoff, Netflix).
Our heroes go toe-to-toe with Monroe’s goons, led by Solomon (Berto Colon) as well as a terrorist group led by the dastardly Markus (Michael Malarkey) and his reluctant cousin, Tomas (Rob Heaps). And since two groups of antagonists aren’t enough, there’s also Iranian intelligence officer, Javad (Keon Alexander) to contend with.
A great deal of the season actually takes place within the Iranian embassy, where we meet Noor (Arienne Mandi) an Iranian embassy employee who wants to help her family flee Iran, and goes to great—and dangerous—lengths to make that happen. All these various characters and subplots converge in a high-stakes race against the clock, as a terrorist group seeks to carry out a deadly attack and exact terrible revenge.
I found the season every bit as bingeable and entertaining as the first, even though there are plenty of little moments where you shake your head at just how implausible a lot of it is. That’s okay! When a show manages to be this much fun with this likeable a cast, you can forgive the little things. Even the bad guys are likable this time around, which is good because we spend quite a lot of time with them. The Night Agent’s second season isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s a genuinely fun ride from start to finish, and I’m already excited for Season 3.
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