The Night Agent 3: Father and Son

I thought the third season of The Night Agent was easily the best of the three -- I liked the first season a lot (here's my review), the second season more (but I didn't have the time to review), but this third season was really top-notch unusual and exceptional.

Here's what I especially liked:

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The hitman father -- with no name other than The Father -- and his son -- known only as The Son -- made for a really original, compelling story, that even ultimately managed against all odds to be close to heartwarming.  The Father acquires his Son after killing The Son's parents.  The Father hitman has some human decency, and although the son was then just a little baby, who would not have been able to tell the police anything, The Father just couldn't leave the baby crying there, an even worse, in an apartment filled with carbon monoxide.

The little boy that we see in the present day, about eight years old, is paralleled in the story we see of Peter as a boy.  Death is near to both boys, since Peter's mother will soon be dying of cancer.  And just to throw a well-known book into this mix, there's a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales that also plays a part in Season 3.

Meanwhile, the corrupt President Hagan, willing to permanently dispose of anyone who stands in his way, couldn't have been a more timely character.   The Night Agent in all three seasons has had a lot in common with 24, but Season 3 has the greatest similarity, with someone in the White House as a central villain.  Peter Sutherland helps bring down Richard Hagan, just as Jack Bauer did with Charles Logan in Season aka Day 5 of 24.  And Chelsea Arrington gave a great assist, and indeed led the charge against Hagan.

I did miss Rose in the first part of Season 3, but the gripping breakneck pace of the narrative soon became enjoyably all-consuming. I expect we'll see her back in some way in Season 4.  We did get Chelsea -- who may well be Peter's new professional partner in Season 4. And I'm glad that Adam survived, too.  His coming around in the end to do the right thing shows the winning subtlety in Season 3, with shades of grey playing a major role between heroes and villains.

Gabriel Basso was excellent again as Peter Sutherland, as was Louis Herthum as Jacob Monroe and everyone else from previous seasons.  And new additions Fola Evans-Akingbola as Chelsea, David Lyons as Adam, and Stephen Moyer as The Father were especially notable.  I look forward to see those three and how their stories play out in Season 4.

See also The Night Agent (Season 1): The Right Good

A House of Dynamite: MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction -- In Our Day and Age

I grew up in a world in which Dr. Strangelove was a plausible movie, a world in which we lived with the Soviet Union, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, as were we, and our best chance that we wouldn't blow up the Earth, if not to smithereens, to an uninhabitable planet, was MAD -- the mutually assured destruction that a nuclear war would engender, which would stop we human beings from ever starting such a no-win war.

As A House of Dynamite on Netflix tells us, at the beginning, we the world gradually learned to scale down our armaments, but the world has gone back to at least verbal apocalyptic belligerence in the past decade, with Russia, in particular, refusing to rule out nuclear weapons if the US and NATO attacked it in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, or maybe if we gave Ukraine too much assistance.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

A House of Dynamite posits such world in which a missile is launched towards the United States.  Attempts to intercept it with our missiles unaccountably fail.  Maybe our defense system has been compromised by prior surreptitious cyber attacks.  Maybe the system wasn't that effective in the first place. We’re told that stopping a missile like that is like “a bullet hitting a bullet”.

We soon learn that Chicago is the target.  (Here I'll say that the movie was made before Trump unconstitutionally targeted Chicago for National Guard deployment.  Just sayin'.)  We see this story play out from three different simultaneous angles, from the standpoints of American military and political leaders and personnel.  The actors are top notch: Idris Elba as US President (he's been great in everything I've seen since Stringer Bell in The Wire), Jared Harris as Secretary of Defence (Hari Seldon in Foundation), and Rebecca Ferguson as a Captain who finds herself heading the White House Situation Room (Juliette Nichols in Silo), are just three of many examples.

All three stories end with the missile seconds from hitting Chicago, and the President struggling to make a decision.  Retaliate?  Against which country?  Russia, China, North Korea?  And what kind of retaliation -- how much of the presumed enemy will be destroyed?  How much of the Earth will be left inhabitable?

And here the movie ends.  Right.  Just like the last scene of The Sopranos.   We the audience need to fill in the ending.  Or at least think about it.   Is this good movie-making?  I actually thought it worked great in The Sopranos (see my reviews, beginning here, for what I think happened to Tony).  But The Sopranos was clearly a totally fictitious story about familiar characters in our reality.  A House of Dynamite is fiction, too, but somehow seems less a fiction, much closer to our reality, the world I grew up in, the world we now inhabit.

And as a denizen of that world, I found the ending unsatisfying.  But maybe in such a scenario there is no narratively satisfying ending.  A happy ending would have been the missile hitting Chicago with no bomb, or no bomb going off.  Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (played by Gabriel Basso, who believe it or not played J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy) tells the President this a possibility, in an attempt to caution him not to launch a massive nuclear counter-strike.  This of course goes against the military advice of General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts, Elvis and Nixon -- hey, it's a movie about a President).

So who would the President listen to?  I'd hope it would be Baerington not Brady.  But maybe that's not realistic, after all.  

The Night Agent: Right Good

The wife and I binged The Night Agent on the Netflix the past few nights, and enjoyed it.  Both the story, and the fact it was streaming rather than spun out episode by episode over ten weeks, or shown in two parts.

Shawn Ryan put it all together. He did The Shield, probably the best cop show ever on television, and Timeless, not the best time travel ever on television, but pretty good.  I'd say The Night Agent is better than Timeless and not as good as The Shield, but that means The Night Agent is well worth watching indeed.

It's the most reminiscent of 24, even though it takes longer to unfold than a day, and there's no clock literally ticking.  In fact, two of the medium important actors from 24 -- D. B. Woodside and Kari Matchett -- had important roles in The Night Agent, and they both did well.  Woodside played a President (of the United States) in 24, and Matchett plays the same in The Night Agent.

The two lead characters -- Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland who works for the Night Agents and Luciane Buchanan as Rose Larkin -- who evolves from depending on Sutherland for her very life to saving his more than once -- are a sharp, spunky couple, and I look forward to seeing them again, whether in another season of The Night Agent (just renewed for a second season) or in other shows.

The villains are probably the weakest part of the story, on all levels, because we've seen something like all of them in one way or another many times before.  But they propel a plot with surprises in every episode, and take part in lots of superb action scenes.

So, yeah, see The Night Agent,  hold on to your seat, and enjoy.