How Does ‘The Night Agent’ Finale Set up Peter’s Season 3 Mission?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Night Agent Season 2.]

Well, maybe Gabriel Basso was right when he told TV Insider as part of our in-depth digital cover story for The Night Agent Season 2, “I don’t know if there are any good decisions [Peter] could have made.” The good news? While a bad decision does land in some seriously hot water, it also sets the stage for an exciting third season (which has already started filming).

In Season 2, Peter is a night agent, working in the field on off-the-books investigations as part of the Night Action program, and what starts as an investigation into leaked CIA intel in Bangkok, Thailand, leads to him and Rose (Luciane Buchanan), the civilian with whom he crossed paths in Season 1, stopping a major attack in New York. But along the way, Peter does make some choices that are … questionable, to say the least.

While tracking down information about a chemical agent being made, Rose ends up being kidnapped along with one of the scientists who worked on the original project; they’re forced to create more, which would devastate Manhattan (or the scientist’s family will be killed). To find her, Peter breaks Solomon (Berto Colon) out of their custody to set him up with his boss, powerful businessman Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum). But in order for Peter to get Rose’s location from Jacob, he has to break into the UN and steal a case file for him. He does — even after his boss Catherine (Amanda Warren) has warned him that for setting Solomon free, she has to take him in. (He says he’s willing to spend his life in cell to save thousands, but she wonders if it’s just for Rose. He locks her in a bathroom.)

Courtesy of Netflix

When Peter brings the file to Jacob, the businessman tells him that his face and prints will be wiped clean from the theft; he already has someone at the UN but wanted someone at Night Action. His secret will remain safe with him, as long as Peter answers when he calls. And so Peter is able to help Rose (and the scientist and his family). But then there’s still the matter of the KX being deployed; fortunately, Peter and Rose stop the men responsible, namely Markus (Michael Malarkey), loyal to his dictator uncle (whose own son turned on him and was subsequently gruesomely killed with the KX).

Knowing what will happen once that’s done, Peter tells Rose that as long as he’s a night agent, people will use her to get to him because they know she means everything to him. As long as she comes searching for him, she’ll be at risk. She admits he’s not wrong and she’s tired of running and wants a normal life. And so he wants her to promise she won’t wait for him to call or come looking if she hears he’s in trouble. But she can’t. After that, he turns himself over to Catherine.

Meanwhile, Jacob brings information to Governor Hagan (Ward Horton), a presidential candidate. Hagan tells him a story about a lie he told about his boots (voters loved it) and the lesson that taught him: Sometimes it’s better to let people believe what they want about you.

At the end of the Season 2 finale, Catherine gets Peter from his cell and takes him for a walk to the White House. Among the headlines he’s missed in the past weeks: Knox No More! Candidate Withdraws From Race After October Surprise. That’s two weeks before the general election. When he was the CIA director, he spearheaded a classified chemicals weapon program. He authorized Foxglove and oversaw the sale of those weapons to Viktor (who then used them and tasked his nephew with following in his footsteps). That was what was in the file that Peter stole from the UN; the New York Times received an audio recording about it. The plan was to use the chaos of the attack to get it. Hagan is now guaranteed the presidency. That means America will spend the next four years pursuing an isolationist agenda and it helps intelligence brokers like Jacob. In other words, Peter aided and abetted in the swing of a presidential election.

This is when Catherine informs Peter that she and her partner were the ones charged with finding the mole in the Pentagon breach, which led to his father. She hadn’t wanted to sour their relationship from the beginning. What changed him was Peter; he’d wanted his son to know that he did what he could to make up for his mistakes if the truth ever got out. And so now she’s giving him the same chance to atone with his new mission.

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There’s a strong possibility that Jacob is working with or about to control the sitting president and every piece of classified intelligence that crosses the desk is up for sale to highest bidder. She needs Peter to determine the exact nature of their relationship. Jacob removed every trace of him at the UN because he wants him around for some reason and believes he owns him, so they’re going to let him keep thinking that. When Jacob calls on him for a favor or tells him to do something, Peter is to do as he asks, gain his trust, uncover everyone on the payroll, then expose and destroy it all. And if it leads to the president, they’ll cross that bridge when they get to it. This is a mission that’s top secret even from Night Action. He’s in. And so his slate will be wiped clean.

Basso told us ahead of the season that he found it “refreshing” to see his character facing consequences for his actions. “Now, his future options are limited,” he said. “The show isn’t insulated from or its own thing. Decisions compound. It carries and snowballs. Every decision Peter makes in Season 2 will have an effect for Season 3. Having been shooting it now, I can tell you that he is in a tight spot.”

But as the star sees it, Season 2 was all about seeing “how far he would go to do what he thought was the right thing to do or the right thing to do objectively, regardless of what that means for him. So I think that’s Peter’s biggest battle is staying objective and saying, is this the right thing to do or is this the subjectively selfish right thing to do? Is this the right thing for me or is this the right thing? And he definitely makes some bad decisions, in my opinion, in Season 2, but he’s living with it now.”

While we wait to see what this means for Peter in Season 3, we do already have a tease about one of the stunts, which Basso shared is his favorite so far. “They let me do something that I can’t believe they let me do, and I only did it once because I think when they realized what I was doing, they shot it down immediately,” he revealed to us. “But they got it on camera, and then they all ran in and were like, stop this now. I’m psyched we got away with it. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s pretty awesome.”

What did you think of Season 2 and its ending? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Night Agent, Seasons 1-2, Streaming Now, Netflix