Netflix’s breakout spy thriller The Night Agent became one of the streaming giant’s most-watched series of all time, racking up over 812 million hours viewed in its first season alone. Created by Shawn Ryan and based on Matthew Quirk’s novel, the show follows Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), a principled FBI agent whose life changes the night a phone that was never supposed to ring finally does. With Season 3 arriving today, here is a full recap of everything that happened across the first two seasons.
What Is Night Action and Who Is Peter Sutherland?
Before anything else, it helps to understand the world Peter operates in. Night Action is a classified White House intelligence program containing a small, elite unit of undercover agents who answer directly to the President. Their existence is entirely off the books.
Peter Sutherland starts the series on its lowest rung: a windowless White House basement and a phone that is never supposed to ring. He saved hundreds of lives during a D.C. Metro bombing, but conspiracy theorists believe he planted the bomb to clear his father’s name, as the elder Sutherland was a suspected traitor.
Who Is Rose Larkin and Why Does She Call?
The night the phone rings, a woman named Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) is on the other end. Rose is a tech entrepreneur whose startup recently imploded. She had been staying with her aunt and uncle, Henry and Emma Campbell, when two professional assassins broke into the house and killed them in the middle of the night. Rose barely escaped. Now she is calling a number her aunt pressed into her hand with instructions to call before she died.
Peter answers and becomes her de facto protector while they both try to figure out what exactly her aunt and uncle were involved in and who had them killed.
What Was on the Hard Drive That Started the Conspiracy?
As Peter and Rose go on the run together, dodging two relentless assassins named Dale and Ellen, they piece together what Henry and Emma had been sitting on. The couple were not just government assets. They had uncovered evidence connecting a seemingly random Metro bombing from months earlier to a deliberate political assassination attempt. That evidence was stored on a hard drive they had been holding for safekeeping.
Who Was Behind the Metro Bombing?
The conspiracy traces back to three powerful figures: White House Chief of Staff Diane Farr (Hong Chau), Vice President Ashley Redfield (Christopher Shyer), and a wealthy private-sector CEO named Gordon Wick.
Their plan was to assassinate a foreign leader named Omar Zadar, and the Metro bombing was their first messy, failed attempt.
Diane Farr is particularly devastating as a villain because she is Peter’s boss and mentor. the woman who, in some ways, gave him a lifeline when the rest of Washington wanted nothing to do with him. She presents herself as a person of principle. She is anything but.
Peter figures out Farr is the mole when she mentions something specific about Rose that Peter never actually told her. The moment he realizes it, he is framed for kidnapping the Vice President’s daughter, Maddie.
The real kidnapper is Colin Worley, the original Metro bomber, who wants revenge because Farr, Redfield, and Wick accidentally killed his twin brother while trying to cover up their operation.
How Did Season 1 End? The Camp David Showdown
The finale centers on Camp David, where the villains plan to take out Omar Zadar and the President in one go. President Travers is scheduled to board Marine One, and the conspirators plan to blow up the helicopter with Travers on it.
Peter physically prevents President Travers from boarding the helicopter by holding her at gunpoint. It is obviously not a great look in the moment, but it keeps her alive. The Vice President is arrested. Diane Farr is exposed, though Gordon Wick manages to slip away.
In the aftermath, Peter gets the truth he has been chasing his whole life: his father did sell government secrets. But he was already working as a double agent to make things right before he was killed.
What Happens to Peter and Rose at the End of Season 1?
President Travers, grateful and impressed, offers Peter a real field position in Night Action which He accepts, leaving Rose behind on the tarmac.
Where Does Maddie Redfield End Up?
Maddie (Eve Harlow) survives her kidnapping ordeal and plays a crucial role in her father’s downfall, though not in the way viewers might expect.
Colin Worley kidnapped Maddie to force Vice President Redfield to confess to ordering the Metro bombing. However, during her captivity, Maddie revealed to Colin that she hated her father and offered to help expose him. She had secretly recorded evidence of her father’s abuse, including nanny cam footage showing Redfield blaming her for her younger sister Sarah’s drowning, which was actually caused by his own negligence.
Chelsea decoded a hidden clue Maddie embedded in a ransom video and launched a rescue operation with her partner Erik Monks. They found Maddie, but during the escape, the assassin Ellen shot and killed Erik Monks. Rose then tracked Ellen to her sniper position and killed her.
At Camp David, Redfield confessed the entire conspiracy to Maddie while they were in the underground bunker, attempting to justify his actions as patriotism. When Maddie threatened to expose him, he callously released her, expecting her to be killed outside so her death would garner him sympathy votes. Instead, Maddie survived and Redfield was subsequently arrested.
What Happened to Peter in Season 2?
Season 2 takes Peter out of the basement and drops him into the humid streets of Bangkok. Now a field operative, he is paired with a veteran named Alice to hunt down a man named Warren Stocker suspected of selling intelligence on the black market.
The mission falls apart almost immediately. Alice is killed by a fixer named Solomon Vega, and Peter goes AWOL because he is convinced there is a leak within Night Action.
How Does Rose Come Back in Season 2?
Rose has been in California, trying to rebuild her life after Season 1. But an intelligence broker named Jacob Monroe makes contact, looking for Peter, and Rose despite herself, still cares enough to want to warn him.
Using her tech skills, she tracks Peter down in New York just as he is closing in on Stocker. The two reconnect, and the chemistry of people who have history and unfinished emotional business is immediately present.
What Is Foxglove and What Is the KX Gas?
Everything in Season 2 eventually connects back to one classified program: Foxglove. It was a top-secret U.S. government initiative designed to develop synthetic chemical weapons so American scientists could engineer antidotes before adversaries deployed similar agents. The crown jewel of Foxglove was a lethal gas called KX, capable of causing a mass-casualty incident.
Officially, Foxglove was shut down. Unofficially, CIA Director Patrick Knox secretly sold the KX technology to Viktor Bala, a dictator who used it to massacre his own people. When the United Nations investigated Bala for war crimes, he claimed truthfully that he had obtained the weapon from the Americans. The U.S. government denied everything, buried the evidence, and let Bala take the fall as the sole villain while Knox’s involvement was scrubbed from the record.
Now Bala’s son, Tomás, and his nephew, Markus, have found the Foxglove data on the black market.
Their plan: bring the KX gas to the United Nations building in New York and release it as a statement.
Who Is Noor Taheri and What Happened to Her?
Noor Taheri (Arienne Mandi) is an aide at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, working under Ambassador Abbas Mansouri. She wants out badly enough to approach the CIA with a deal: she will provide intelligence in exchange for asylum for herself and her family in America. Her primary motivation is her brother, Farhad, who is about to be conscripted into the Iranian military, and she cannot let that happen.
When Noor photographs Ambassador Mansouri meeting secretly with Solomon Vega—the same fixer who killed Alice—she suddenly has something Peter and the Night Action team desperately want. She uses it as leverage, refusing to hand over the evidence until her family is extracted from Iran.
Night Action agrees. A former Delta Force operator named Sami Saidi is dispatched to Iran to pull Noor’s mother and Farhad out of the country, but the extraction goes catastrophically wrong.
Farhad is in love with a local girl and refuses to leave his life behind. During the extraction, the group is stopped by police. Sami is forced to kill the officers to protect the mission. Farhad, not fully briefed on what is actually happening, grabs a fallen weapon and fires at Sami, convinced that he and his mother are being kidnapped. Sami returns fire in self-defense. Farhad is killed in the crossfire.
Noor is not told the truth about her brother’s death immediately. Peter lies to her because he needs her to hand over the flash drive containing the pictures she took.
She gives up the drive. The files inside reveal that a French diplomat has been selling the locations of Iranian dissidents living in Europe to the Iranian government. This is a separate crime from Foxglove, but one that proves Solomon Vega is working for an intelligence broker.
Noor eventually learns the truth about Farhad, but she takes solace in the fact that her mother got out. She is discovered as a traitor by Javad, the security officer who has feelings for her, but she knows the ambassador bought the dissident list from Solomon because his daughter is on it. His daughter defected years ago, fell in love with a Frenchman, became an activist against the Iranian government, and never came home.
Noor makes a deal with the ambassador: she will personally deliver the list to the French delegation so that the dissidents including his daughter can be warned and protected. He lets her go.
But Javad also finds out and tries to expose the ambassador. Abbas turns the tables on him, framing him as the traitor using security footage of Javad’s private conversations with Noor.
By the season’s end, Noor is granted asylum in the United States along with her mother. She and Rose connect in the aftermath of everything and form an unlikely friendship.
Who Is Jacob Monroe and What Does He Want?
Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum) is Season 2’s most dangerous character. He is the intelligence broker Solomon works for.
Monroe reached out to Rose initially because he wanted an inside man inside Night Action. He pitches Peter on working for him in exchange for information about the real traitors who killed Alice, but Peter initially refuses.
What Happened With Solomon Vega?
Solomon Vega is a hired killer operating as a fixer for Jacob Monroe.
Catherine Weaver, Peter’s Night Action handler sets up a trap using a French intelligence contact named Jacqueline Laurent. The plan is to lure Solomon into a meeting, but Solomon sees through the setup, kills Jacqueline, and tries to take Catherine hostage. Peter arrives in time, and together they manage to take Solomon into custody until Peter lets him out.
What Does Peter Do Wrong in Season 2 and What Are the Consequences?
This is the most important question heading into Season 3.
With Rose kidnapped by the Bala network (the family is using her as leverage to force former Foxglove scientist Dr. Wilfred Cole to recreate the KX gas), Peter is out of options and out of time.
Solomon propositions him that Jacob Monroe can give him the Bala network’s location. Peter, who has fallen deeply for Rose, breaks Solomon out of custody and uses him as leverage to secure a meeting with Monroe. But Monroe demands something in return: Peter must steal a specific hard drive from the United Nations.
The hard drive contains audio recordings proving CIA Director Patrick Knox personally authorized the sale of Foxglove weapons to Viktor Bala years earlier. To get into the UN building, Peter turns to Noor, who despite her grief and anger agrees to help because she understands what is at stake. She creates a fake badge, which is what ultimately gets her caught by the ambassador, leading to the confrontation and deal described above.
Peter breaks into the UN and steals the files. Monroe gives him the location. Peter launches a solo raid on the Bala compound and rescues Rose.
Monroe uses the Knox recordings not just for blackmail against the CIA, but to force Knox now running for president into withdrawing from the presidencial election , clearing the path for Governor Hagan, Monroe’s puppet, to take the White House. By stealing those files and handing them to Monroe, Peter inadvertently helps install a compromised president.
What Happened to Tomás and Markus Bala?
Tomás Bala, Viktor’s son, begins the season as a true believer in his father’s vindication mission. He helps acquire the Foxglove data and plan the UN attack. But as the plan moves toward execution and the scale of the potential massacre becomes real. thousands of innocent people in the UN building, plus whatever the KX gas would do to the surrounding neighborhood, Tomás develops a conscience. He realizes what they are about to do cannot be justified, even by what America did to their family.
Markus Bala the nephew has no such crisis. He kills Tomás with the KX gas itself and proceeds with the attack.
The Night Agent Season 2 Ending Explained
The finale takes place in and around the UN building in Midtown Manhattan. Law enforcement, working with Peter’s intelligence, manages to locate and neutralize fourteen of the fifteen canisters Markus has planted in the ventilation system. Markus escapes with the final canister and retreats to a nearby hotel where Tomás’s girlfriend, Sloane, is staying.
Peter and Rose track him down and the standoff ends with Markus’s death. But the canister is still armed, and disarming it is not an option. Rose realizes they do not need to defuse the bomb, they just need to trigger the hotel’s fire-suppression system. The resulting heat causes the ventilation vents to seal automatically, containing the gas inside and preventing it from spreading.
Thousands of lives are saved. The crisis is averted.
What Happened to Peter and Rose at the End of Season 2?
It is, definitively, the end.
In the aftermath of the attack, Peter tells Rose she is the most important person in his life and that is exactly why she cannot be in it. As long as Peter exists in this world, as long as he has enemies, the people who love him are weapons waiting to be used against him.
Rose returns to California to rebuild her life, this time on her own terms. Luciane Buchanan has confirmed she will not return in Season 3. The goodbye is real, and it is final at least for now.
What Is Catherine Weaver’s Arc?
Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren) is Peter’s assigned handler in Season 2. She begins the season wanting almost nothing to do with him. She resents that he was fast-tracked into Night Action without going through normal channels. She does not trust his judgment and considers him a liability.
Over the course of the season, she is proven wrong about almost every specific criticism but right about the general risk. Peter’s instincts are extraordinary.
By the finale, Catherine’s respect for Peter is genuine. She is the one who comes to Peter in custody and lays out the full picture: Monroe’s connection to Hagan means a compromised president is about to take the White House. Every secret flowing through the Oval Office could potentially be for sale. The damage would be catastrophic.
Rather than let Peter go to prison where he would be useless Catherine offers him a different kind of sentence: go back to work. Monroe believes he has Peter in his pocket. Let him keep believing that. Peter becomes a double agent, feeding Monroe what he wants to hear while secretly reporting everything back to Night Action.
Peter accepts.
Where Does Everything Stand Heading Into Season 3?
Peter is now a double agent embedded with Jacob Monroe, while the newly elected Governor Hagan Monroe’s puppet prepares to take the White House. The threat has evolved from a mole inside a government program to something far more systemic: a compromised democracy operating in plain sight.
Season 3 premieres today with Peter facing a mission his father would have recognized: infiltrating an intelligence network while pretending to be compromised himself. Rose is gone, building a normal life in California. Noor and her mother have asylum in Illinois. And somewhere in the background, Gordon Wick remains at large as a loose end that may yet resurface.
The groundwork is laid for Peter’s most dangerous mission yet, with the fate of American democracy hanging in the balance.