‘Night Agent’ Season 2 Ending: Peter’s New Role Explained

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “Buyer’s Remorse,” the season 2 finale of “The Night Agent,” streaming now on Netflix.

In its final moments, Season 2 of “The Night Agent” elegantly set up a Season 3.

Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), the off-books government agent of the show’s title, has been given a new mission. Since Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum), an information broker whose tactical intelligence leak turned the presidential election, believes Peter is under his spell, Peter will play the role, gathering information on Louis to bring back to the government. . “He still believes he is your property,” Peter’s supervisor, Catherine (Amanda Warren), tells him. “So we let him.”

“We wanted Season 2 to be satisfying,” said series creator Shawn Ryan. “We didn’t want to end on a complete cliffhanger. There are consequences that serve as a launching pad for Season 3.”

That third season is now being filmed; Basso says that, based on the scripts, “it’s my favorite season.” One of the questions it asks, he says, is: ‘How can you have objective morality in a subjective environment? It is difficult to do this in the name of good, when good is subjective.”

All season, Peter has had to sort through conflicting pieces of information; he’s also responsible for spreading a bit of misinformation, in a pivotal scene in episode 5 where he lies to Noor (Arienne Mandi) about her brother’s safety to keep her trust. (“That’s really subtle, beautiful acting if we asked for it [Basso] what he could do in season 1, he could do have, but we knew he was able to do that in season 2, Ryan says.)

This moral complication was welcome for Basso. “The path is very clear in season 1: preventing the president from being assassinated. Those are easy decisions. Season 2, the objectives may be similar, but the path is less clear, and that’s when he starts to deviate, hit dead ends, and justify things.

“One of our Iranian actors talked about how they felt,” says Ryan. “Part of the appeal of the show was: there’s so much confusion in the world and so many confusing things to figure out. There is so much distrust towards the people who influence our lives. A character like Peter, who works hard to find out a verifiable truth, is really appealing.”

That said, Peter’s search for the truth will likely take a psychological toll. “He thwarted this attack on the United Nations and the hotel where many delegates were living,” Ryan says, “but his actions to stop that attack consisted of taking information from the UN and handing it over. [to Monroe]. That information, which has the unintended consequence of influencing the presidential election, will weigh incredibly heavily on Peter’s shoulders.”

The show’s first season was a global phenomenon for Netflix, and the second season may just rival it in success. How long could ‘The Night Agent’ run? “I think there are a lot of great streaming shows whose ideas are more like movie ideas, and therefore may not have as long a shelf life,” Ryan says. “It’s an even more popular show than ours, but I’m not surprised that Season 3 of ‘Squid Game’ will be the last season, right? As great as the concept and execution are, it doesn’t feel like a show built to last.

Ryan, on the other hand, notes, “We essentially create a new world and a new set of problems and a whole new set of characters every season, and introduce Peter into that world.” The only limiting factor may be Basso’s willingness to continue with the series. He discussed his ambivalence about his acting career and his desire to walk away in one Variety profile – but Ryan is optimistic. “In the DNA of this show is the ability to run as long as Netflix, Sony and I want, and for Gabriel to be involved for as long as he wants to be involved.”