The Night Agent season 3 review: Gabriel Basso brilliantly delivers a middling espionage thriller

If a character has shot another, almost drowned, jumped out of a burning vehicle, or narrowly escaped an exploding bomb, why hasn’t he asked “Are you okay”? We will become lost, confused and pulled out of the influence of dopamine due to our endless scrolling on our phones.

so it’s with night agentA thriller originally based on Matthew Quirk’s 2019 novel, which has since expanded into lightly uncharted territory. Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is a former FBI agent who has worked his way up from taking care of a cemetery to becoming a night agent. In Season 2, he made a deal with the devil in the form of an intelligence broker, Jacob Monroe (Louis Hartham).

Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland in ‘The Night Agent’

Now plagued with guilt, Peter refuses to take time off, instead throwing himself into serial tasks while waiting for Monroe to collect his dues. One aircraft is shot down by the terrorist group, LFS. Peter’s latest assignment, reluctantly given to him by his boss Aiden Mosley (Albert Jones), is to bring FinCEN analyst Jai Batra (Sooraj Sharma), accused of murdering his boss and selling secrets, back to America from Istanbul.

Peter learns that Jay has found evidence of suspicious activity linking LFS to American companies and has since given incriminating documents to Isabel (Genesis Rodriguez), a financial journalist. Peter receives a threatening call from Monroe demanding that Jay leave.

In America, President Hagen (Ward Horton) and his wife Jenny (Jennifer Morrison) are the darlings of his press and staff. Jenny helps Theo (Jack Appelman) of the White House press team propose to Chelsea (Fola Evans-Akingbola), a Secret Service agent who is part of the President’s security.

However, with Jai’s revelations, cracks have started appearing in the golden veneer. Hagen calls in an old friend and brother, Adam (David Lyons), to keep an eye on Peter.

An unnamed killer (Stephen Moyer) travels with his adopted precocious boy (Callum Vinson) to take down tough guys. For each, there are background stories ranging from Monroe’s time as a corporate lawyer in 1995 and her fall into the CIA’s web of intelligence gathering to how the killer found and adopted the boy.

(Left to Right) Fola Evans-Akingbola as Chelsea Arrington, Genesis Rodriguez as Isabel, and Suraj Sharma as Jai Batra in ‘The Night Agent’

Ten episodes is a bit much for this twisted tale of lies, deception and dirty money. Either the show should have been layered like a big onion, with each peel removed to expose further betrayals, or it should have reduced the flab, repetition and frantic running around while bullets and bombs fly to tell a thin story in four or at most six episodes.

Rose (Luciene Buchanan), who overstayed her welcome in Season 2, is absent from Season 3. Basso and the rest of the crew do what they can with the limited material, filling in the blanks in the plot by frowning at the computer screen and running around. The conversation between the killer and the child is interesting, as is the conversation between the killer and Peter. Apparently there is going to be a season 4 of the show that demands nothing from its viewers, not even complete attention.

The Night Agent is currently streaming on Netflix