Warning: contains spoilers for The Night Agent season 2.
There’s a briefly gorgeous moment in the penultimate episode of The Night Agent season two. A stolen military laboratory in a warehouse filled with murderous terrorists and a creeping cloud of knockout gas is not a romantic setting, but it’s where Rose Larkin’s love for Peter Sutherland is made clear. Wearing a gasmask and hiding from would-be killers with an injured civilian, Rose spots Peter through a glass door and tells the woman she’s with: “It’s going to be okay.”
Rose doesn’t just say it because she’s good at telling people what they need to hear, but because to her, Peter’s presence means that it is going to be okay. He makes her feel safe – counterintuitively, seeing as ever since she met him, her life has gone from sipping Boba tea and playing Pickleball at a Californian tech campus, to stabbing rogue marines and masterminding black ops missions using only a cell phone and a Wi-Fi dongle.
Not that any of that is Peter’s fault. Though she didn’t know it until 10 months ago, Rose was born into a life of covert operations and danger. Before their murder kicked off this whole adventure, the aunt and uncle who were her safe haven in a chaotic childhood were revealed to have been undercover spies working for the elite Night Action programme. This stuff’s in Rose’s blood, which might be why she’s so damn good at it.
In season one (read our recap here), Rose was put under FBI agent Peter’s protection. As a witness in her aunt and uncle’s murders, higher-ups in a White House conspiracy wanted her dead. Peter successfully kept Rose alive, and a couple of times she did the same for him. Despite being told to run for her life or stay in the car (“Get out of here, Rose” is Peter’s catchphrase when a situation goes south), Rose came through for Peter on several occasions. She dealt some handy driftwood blows to the head of hired killer Dale, and pushed Dale’s sniper accomplice Ellen to her death before she could shoot the whole gang during the rescue of the VP’s daughter.
Though she doesn’t shy from a fight, tech is Rose’s specialism. She’s a coder who, by restoring comms to Camp David, proved instrumental in averting season one’s attempt on the president’s life. Not only can she hack, but in season two, she adapted the ad software she’d coded to turn it into a powerful tracking system and used it to find Peter when even Night Action couldn’t.
Rose has also proved her undercover skills on several occasions, posing as fictional IDs, manipulating people to access information and thinking fast on her feet. In season two, she not only charmed a file out of an official and infiltrated a UN mission party, but also convinced Viktor Bala’s goons that she was a post-doc chemistry student so well that they forced her to help produce a shipment of chemical weapons that could take out midtown Manhattan. She easily gained the trust of Iranian asset Noor, lying to her convincingly enough that she handed over her intel, but then staying friends with her afterwards. She’s great with people, is the point – clever, quick, resourceful and naturally trustworthy but with a core of steel when she needs one.
All of which is to say that Rose would make an excellent Night Agent, and that’s surely where this whole show is heading. No, she’s not FBI or CIA-trained, but there’s room in the programme for the niece of “Gazelle” and “Sidewinder”.
Night Action veteran Catherine Weaver clearly thinks so. In season two, Weaver told Rose that she had a lot of her aunt in her, and pressed for her help in the mission to stop the Foxglove attack. Since Alice was killed in action in Bangkok, Weaver is an agent down, remember, and with the right training, as a young American woman, Rose could slot in easily to her undercover work.
But here’s the crux: will she want to?
Between all the explosions, shoot-outs and car chases, The Night Agent season two made a point of showing how isolating and traumatic it was to be a part of Night Action. The story of Alice’s ashes being returned by her family because her work had alienated her from them to the extent that they no longer wanted or knew her, was devastating.
Rose was in therapy for anxiety attacks and night terrors following everything that happened to her in season one. Would she really choose to dive into more life-or-death situations? Despite clearly being in love, she and Peter were forced to separate again at the end of season two while he faced his next mission and she tried to recover from his last one. As Alice warned Peter in Bangkok, Night Action and personal relationships don’t mix…
…unless they do, but only if both halves of a couple are Night Agents. After all, Alice’s aunt and uncle managed to have several decades of happy marriage while working for Night Action. You see it all the time with teachers or doctors or soldiers, or any industry where only people who do the job properly understand its demands. You both need to be in the job for the relationship to work, and if Rose and Peter ultimately want to be together, that could be their only option.
That’s why, for The Night Agent’s love story to keep going, Rose has to join Night Action in the already-commissioned season three. She’s already helped to foil two major terrorist incidents, and now that history has repeated itself and Peter’s been forced into becoming a double agent like his dad, Rose lending her skills to Night Action is the only way those two can keep each other safe, and stay together. Remember Rose asking Peter at the start of season two whether she was safer with him or alone? With him, surely, because when he’s there, she knows that things are going to be okay. And though Peter’s love for Rose is a vulnerability, season two proves that they make such a useful team that he’s also safer with her than alone.
In fact, has anybody considered the possibility that Rose’s recruitment has already happened? When Rose had that cosy lunch with Noor in the closing moments of season two, who’s to say she wasn’t there as a friend but as a Night Agent handling an asset? Coding for a Silicon Valley tech company must seem pretty dull after all that Foxglove action. As Matthew Quirk’s The Night Agent novel only covered the action of season one, there’s no way to know until season three arrives.
The Night Agent season two is out now on Netflix.
The post The Night Agent Season 3 Theory: Will Rose Join Night Action? appeared first on Den of Geek.
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