TV Review: The Night Agent Season 3
I was unusually grateful that the third season of The Night Agent, Netflix’s political action thriller, began with a decent recap of things we’ve already seen: only as I kept responding with “oh, that’s right, that happened” did I realise just how little memory of it I actually had. That’s appropriate enough, I think: it’s a fairly derivative show (somewhere between Bourne and 24), and delivers thrills and characters that are solid rather than engrossing.
Gabriel Basso as Peter in The Night Agent
That said, you can’t deny a certain efficiency in it, not just on the screen but even in the production: it’s back for a third, continent-spanning story just a year after the last season. This time around, after an opening flashback to Peter’s childhood, we meet him again as an adult (played as always by Gabriel Basso) keeping busy as an agent after the still-unresolved events of last year. Then, following a terrorist attack and the theft of some valuable files, he’s off to Turkiye to track down the thief – and soon finds himself on the run and mixed up in a conspiracy that reaches to the White House itself (and indeed back to the villain at the heart of season two).
Well, if that idea is a bit less shocking than it once was, The Night Agent at least remains an enjoyable, if not totally satisfying, man-on-the-run kind of story. Smartly, though, it makes Peter more of a hunter as well as the hunted here, and expands the cast with a few worthwhile additions (like Genesis Rodriguez as reporter Isabel De Leon and a chilly Stephen Moyer as a hired assassin) and an iffy US Presidential family (!). It does lose Luciane Buchanan as Peter’s accidental partner Rose Larkin, which has created a bit of controversy – but her character was sometimes distracting, and really there’s no obvious spot for her in this storyline (though she could return next year).
It’s boilerplate material, with a lighter tone than you’d really like; but for the most part it’s paced and performed well enough, and the dialogue seems a little more natural this time around. It doesn’t delve very deeply into its themes, but there’s always room for a straight-ahead bit of political escapism: this is still engaging and undemanding enough to pass a few evenings.
