‘The Night Agent’ Season 3 review: Gabriel Basso gamely goads the middling spy thriller along

What would one do if a character did not ask “are you okay” after the other had been shot at, nearly drowned, jumped out of a burning vehicle or narrowly escaped a detonating bomb? We would be lost, confused and dragged out of the dopamine hits our endless scrolling on our phones supplied us with.

So it is with The Night Agent, a thriller originally based on Matthew Quirk’s 2019 novel that has since branched out into mildly unhinged territory. Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is the FBI agent with a past, who has graduated from manning the graveyard shift to being a Night Agent. In season 2, he made a deal with the devil in the form of an intelligence broker, Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum).

Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland in ‘The Night Agent’

Now plagued by guilt, Peter refuses to take time off, instead throwing himself into successive assignments while waiting for Monroe to collect his dues. A plane is brought down by a terror group, LFS. Peter’s latest assignment, reluctantly given to him by his boss, Aiden Mosley (Albert Jones), is to get FinCEN analyst Jay Batra (Suraj Sharma), who is accused of killing his boss and selling secrets, out from Istanbul back to the US.

Peter learns that Jay found proof of suspicious activity linking American companies to the LFS and has since given the incriminating documents to a financial journalist, Isabel (Genesis Rodriguez). Peter gets the dreaded call from Monroe demanding he give up Jay.

Back in the US, the President Hagan (Ward Horton) and his wife Jenny (Jennifer Morrison) are the darlings of their press and staff, with Jenny helping Theo (Zach Appelman), from the White House press team, propose to Chelsea (Fola Evans-Akingbola), a secret service agent who is part of the President’s security detail.

With Jay’s revelations, however, the cracks in the golden veneer are beginning to show. Hagan calls in an old friend and brother in arms, Adam (David Lyons), to keep an eye on Peter.

A nameless assassin (Stephen Moyer) travels with his adopted precocious boy (Callum Vinson) to remove difficult people. There are backstories for everyone from Monroe’s time in 1995 as a corporate lawyer and falling into the CIA trap of intelligence gathering to how the assassin found and adopted the boy.

(L to R) Fola Evans-Akingbola as Chelsea Arrington, Genesis Rodriguez as Isabel, and Suraj Sharma as Jay Batra in ‘The Night Agent’

Ten episodes are a bit much for this curly tale of lies, deception and dirty money. Either the show should have been layered like a massive onion, with each peel removed to reveal further betrayals, or it should have cut the flab, repetitions and frantic running while bullets and bombs fly, to tell a lean tale in four or a maximum of six episodes.

Rose (Luciane Buchanan), who had outstayed her welcome in Season 2, is absent from Season 3. Basso and the rest of the crew do what they can with the limited material, filling in blanks in the plot with frowns at computer screens and running. The interactions between the assassin and the child are interesting, as is the interaction between the assassin and Peter. There is apparently going to be a season 4 of the show that does not ask anything of its viewers, not even complete attention.

The Night Agent is presently streaming on Netflix