🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

In The Night Agent, it’s a slippery slope from bombing the DC Metro to attempting a presidential coup — as undervalued FBI agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) learns over the course of the action thriller’s twisty 10-episode first season. 

As the titular night agent, Peter has one job: to sit in the basement of the White House all night and man an emergency phone line for undercover spies. He does that job so well that when down-on-her-luck tech CEO Rose (Luciane Buchanan) calls in the murder of her aunt and uncle, Peter doesn’t just answer the phone. Instead, he risks his career and life to not only protect her from two assassins but also to untangle a dark conspiracy involving the president, the White House chief of staff, the vice president, the vice president’s daughter and many more. Cue the car chases, gunfights, exploding bombs, kidnappings and assassination attempts! 

By the end of the season, Peter and Rose find her family’s killers, uncover the truth about a terrorist attack on the DC Metro from a year earlier — and save the president’s life. Below, showrunner Shawn Ryan helps Tudum break down the many unexpected turns along the way to the season’s explosive conclusion. 

Who are the killers in The Night Agent? 

The Night Agent is filled with baddies. Although they don’t make it to the final episode, Dale (Phoenix Raei) and Ellen (Eve Harlow) are the embodiment of cold-hearted killers, who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, whether it means murdering old women or kidnapping babies in order to get what they want. Another person who isn’t afraid to kill people outright is Colin (Andre Anthony), a former military man with a history of substance abuse, who’s hired to carry out the DC Metro bombing (more on this later). 

Then there are those people who are downright despicable, like shady CEO Gordon Wick (Ben Cotton) and Vice President Ashley Redfield (Christopher Shyer),  those whose evil deeds are more about pulling strings, so that they themselves can appear blameless. Meanwhile White House Chief of Staff Diane Farr (Hong Chau) also works covertly, but does bad things less for reasons of personal gain, and more because of a sense of the greater good — too bad her moral compass is completely shattered. 

“There are people here who make bad choices for what they think are the right reasons,” Ryan says. “But that’s a slippery slope that leads to increased bad decisions, where suddenly you look up and you’ve kind of lost your way and you’ve lost your soul.” 

Christopher Shyer as Vice President Ashley Redfield in Season 1 of The Night Agent.

Who is the bomber in The Night Agent? 

While the actual bomber in the series premiere is Colin, it’s Wick and Redfield who plan the Metro bombing as an elaborate ruse to assassinate Omar Zadar (Adam Tsekhman), a foreign political leader. They knew that Zadar would be at a coffee shop on the Metro line during the time of the attack. If the bomb had gone off when — and where — they’d intended, it would’ve killed Zadar. But because Peter stopped the train ahead of schedule, Zadar survived — and the cover-up began. 

In the interest of shielding the White House after Redfield's deadly wrongdoing, he pulls Farr into the conspiracy. She works with Wick and Redfield to hide everyone's involvement, minimize threats and ensure scapegoats are available.

Following the bombing, Redfield worries that night action spies Emma (Simone Kessell) and Henry Campbell (William MacDonald) are close to uncovering who’s responsible for the bombing. So Wick dispatches his assassins Ellen and Dale to eliminate Emma and Henry, which they do, but they let Emma and Henry’s niece, Rose, slip through their fingers and into the arms of Peter. 

By the finale, Wick and Redfield are ready to try to kill Zadar again. Only this time, they expand the scope of the assassination to include current President Michelle Travers (Kari Matchett), who’s meeting with Zadar at Camp David. 

Was the president killed in The Night Agent?

No, although it’s a close call! Working together (teamwork is dreamwork, after all), Peter and Rose join forces with Secret Service agent Chelsea Arrington (Fola Evans-Akingbola) and Redfield’s daughter Maddie (Sarah Desjardins) and block the assassination scheme. They don’t stop presidential helicopter Marine One from exploding, but at least the president isn’t on it.

What happened to the vice president? 

Vice President Redfield, who prizes self-preservation above all else, survives the bombing from the Camp David bunker. His co-conspirator Wick is also alive — and on the run. 

“While urging everyone else to go along with a coup, Gordon [Wick] was secretly getting on his plane to escape in case things didn’t turn out well. Which they didn’t,” Ryan says. “We liked the idea that this wasn’t so clean. That there is at least one person [who], because of his resources, is able to slink away.” 

Dan Power/Netflix

What happens to Diane Farr?

While Farr also survives, Ryan doubts she’ll be able to slink off anywhere in the immediate future. Instead, she’ll be nursing the painful gunshot wound she sustains in the finale. 

“We can safely assume that Diane Farr has a very difficult criminal trial in her future after probably a difficult hospital stay,” Ryan says. “Her life is about to get decidedly worse.”  

Who kidnapped Maddie — and why? 

Colin, the Metro bomber, kidnaps Maddie for retribution following a tragic case of mistaken identity. Following the bombing, Wick has his assassins go to Colin’s home to kill him and tie up that loose end in the cover-up. Unbeknownst to Emma and Dale, however, they don’t kill Colin — they murder his identical twin brother, Matteo, who is innocent of any crime. 

A heartbroken Colin then assumes Matteo’s identity, and allows the world to believe he’s dead. In the months after the bombing, Colin enacts a plan to blackmail Redfield into admitting his wrongdoing. He decides to get close to Redfield’s daughter Maddie and assumes that abducting her will force the vice president to confess. What Colin doesn’t know is that Redfield’s running a much bigger deadly scheme of his own, which draws his attention away from his missing daughter. For that reason, and many many others, Redfield is pretty much the worst dad ever.

What was going on with Rose’s aunt and uncle? 

Emma and Henry are killed for getting too close to the truth about the Metro bombing — and possibly for informing Zadar that his life is in danger. 

“I believe that they told Zadar that there was an attempt on his life, but I think they were still gathering evidence,” Ryan says. But the Night Agent couple isn’t able to obtain a full picture of the scheme before they’re killed, and so they don’t anticipate how imminent the danger is when it comes to their own safety. 

Was Peter’s father actually a traitor? 

Yes, but it’s complicated. In the finale, President Travers offers Peter a reward for his heroics during the Camp David assassination attempt. Rather than receive a medal, Peter asks to know the truth about his dad, Peter Sutherland Sr. (Sebastien Roberts), who was an FBI agent accused of committing treason. Peter Sr. died before he could be convicted of the alleged crime, and a cloud of mystery remained over his life. 

Following his conversation with Travers, Peter watches his father’s confession tape, in which Peter Sr. admits he was approached by a foreign agent in 2004. At first he didn’t know their intentions, but soon realized that they were seditious. Still, though, Peter Sr. accepted the money and fed the agent information on private contractors, assuming it wouldn’t cause harm, even though it ultimately led to a breach at the Pentagon.    

Despite Peter’s intense defense of his father up until this moment, Gabriel Basso doubts Peter was surprised to learn the truth. “I think that Peter always knew. I think he knew deep down, because everyone he respected in his life was telling him,” he says. “But I think the biggest thing for him is having the truth not change the values that he was told by his dad.”

Basso doubts this new information will change Peter’s morals very much. “If it is a core belief, it shouldn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks,” he says. “So realizing his dad was guilty or whatever extenuating circumstance resulted in his dad being killed shouldn't matter.” 

And if it’s any further comfort to Peter, his father wasn’t killed because he was a spy for another country — he was killed because he was working as a double agent for the US, and trying to rectify the damage he had done.
 

Dan Power/Netflix

Is Peter a night agent now? 

In the final scene of Season 1, Peter walks across a tarmac and hops onto a jet. He’s handed a mysterious tablet. After he opens it, eventually a folder loads, reading “Night Action: Mission Brief.” Peter is now a night agent, retroactively making him the titular character. “I love the symbolism in that,” Ryan says. “That he’s the guy who, from the beginning, has been trying to do more, has been trying to be of service, has been trying to be noticed for his good qualities since his father was accused of bad qualities and people were suspicious about him.” And now his dream has finally come true. 

Ryan cautions, though, that Peter’s new gig is “going to bring new problems” for the morality-loving hero. 

“One of the reasons we like Peter so much is he's a rule follower who has such a strict moral code that he lives by. We admire the choices he makes,” Ryan explains. “[As a night agent] those choices will become difficult, the stakes will become even higher and the danger he's in will grow even bigger.” 

What happens next for Peter and Rose? 

Ryan personally can’t wait to find out. “We’d love to tell that story,” he says, “if viewers react to the show the way that we hope they will, and if people come and check it out.”

Currently, the writing team is mulling over two big questions. “What does Peter getting on this plane to enter into some new wild adventure mean — with Rose going back to California to try to pursue her Silicon Valley dreams again? And where would that lead them?” he asks. 

Will there be a Season 2 of The Night Agent?

Yes, there will be. Less than a week after The Night Agent premiered, Ryan confirmed the series was renewed for Season 2. All 10 episodes are now streaming on Netflix. 

And to ring up even more info on all things related to The Night Agent, keep coming back to Tudum — top level security clearance not required.

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