The Night Agent Recap: False Tongue

In an otherwise simplistic story of good versus evil, watching two good guys at cross-purposes is often fun. That’s why Noor has been such a strong character from the beginning and why I was pretty pumped to watch her go after Peter to save her own skin. But it can also be supremely satisfying to watch the tension between two people resolve, especially when miscommunication is involved, and that’s what happens in “Divergence.”

When Peter calls Noor after his meeting with Jacob, he asks for a favor. In order to save both Rose and the thousands of people who could die from a chemical attack — but especially Rose — he’ll need to ID the people responsible and locate the site of the weapon assembly. Jacob can give him that information since he sold the Foxglove intel in the first place, and he doesn’t mind selling out a client if he can get something in return. All he’s asking for is some file belonging to the U.N. secretary general, which is only available on his computer in the U.N. Building. Doing this would officially make Peter a traitor, though Jacob is quick to reassure him that the memory of his treasonous father should have no bearing on his decision. Oh, okay.

Of course, Noor has no reason to do this guy a solid, especially because she still thinks he’s lying about her mother being in New York with Sami. Peter should probably sense that, especially with how quickly she insists on meeting him in person. But during their meeting, he gives Noor a genuine apology and gets Azita on the phone to convince her of the truth. It’s a deeply moving moment, especially Noor’s first reaction on hearing her mother’s voice.

Knowing her mom is safe, Noor agrees to make a U.N. badge for Peter at the mission, warning him that Javad and four of his guards are waiting outside. It’s exciting to watch the two work together: Noor handles one of the guards by tasering him while he escorts her back, and Peter bonks the remaining four men with his baton in one of my favorite action moments of the whole show. Peter and Javad have the nasty brawl I’ve been waiting for this whole season, which leads into the subway, where Peter chokes him with the baton just long enough to make it onto an approaching train without leaving time for Javad to follow.

Everything’s coming up Peter so far, despite Catherine’s best efforts to track and arrest him. (Mosley even told her to prioritize the search over Foxglove.) He runs into her at home and quickly explains himself, wriggling out of her grasp again. This is classic Night Agent stuff: Peter Sutherland on the run again, setting out to prevent an attack while the oblivious U.S. government tries to stop him.

Noor is having some much-needed luck, too. Yes, she gets caught by the ambassador while hiding under his desk, but she works out a smart new deal for herself: If Abbas just lets her go right now, she can slip into the U.N. and pass along the DGSE report to the French delegation to warn his daughter that she’s on the dissidents list (she moved to Paris with her boyfriend). “Let me keep being the traitor,” she pleads, and it works. Looks like Peter won’t be alone on this next heist after all.

There’s not much Rose and Cole can do while waiting for Peter to save them. Tomás and Markus are watching closely from outside the mobile lab, with Cole’s family kept in the fridge unit as leverage. So they start by creating a pilot batch of K.X., a small sample that can be replicated on a larger scale. Even just this tiny amount is difficult to contain; as soon as it’s exposed to air, it’ll run amok and kill anyone in the vicinity.

Luckily, Tomás still has an element of goodness in him (or cowardice, if you think like Markus). He questions Rose in private, knowing from her lack of scientific knowledge and the Foxglove files in her bag that she isn’t a lab assistant. So she pivots, appealing to his conscience and reminding him of the thousands of people he would be killing. That idea bothers him a little more than it bothers Jacob, especially for what it represents: a blatant act of capitulation to his psychotic father and Viktor’s lapdog nephew. Thinking of Sloane reminds him that he’s better than the Bala name.

That sense of superiority, while warranted, has been a problem for Tomás and his family in the past. This really is the most Tomás-centric episode of the season, and that begins with the opening flashback to 17 years ago. After some time at boarding school in England, the teenager had already turned his back on his “family of warmongers,” which infuriated Viktor and Markus alike. (I imagine this is what Trump and Melania might be dealing with while Barron is at NYU.) For Viktor, it’s a matter of wounded pride, with maybe some element of genuine love and hurt feelings involved. For Markus, who was taken in by Viktor when his father died, ignoring the Bala name is an act of profound ingratitude. He’d give anything to be a real part of the family, but nobody looks at him that way.

And in the end, that jealousy and bitterness causes Markus to snap, locking his cousin in the fridge and then visiting to berate him about his loss of faith in their revenge mission against the U.S. Tomás makes one last ill-advised effort to win Markus back to his side, suggesting they work together to bring peace to their people and essentially leave their father to rot in the Hague like he deserves. But it’s obvious his appeal isn’t going to work, especially with all the language that still elevates himself over his cousin. So Markus tosses the K.X. sample into the fridge and shuts the door behind him, and we watch the process Cole described play out: exposure to air, exponential increase in molarity, suffocation and awful, excruciating blistering.

As Tomás screams through his final moments, the episode ends on a chilling image: more and more purple pooling in a glass tank, already possibly enough K.X. to take out dozens with much more product to come. Cole and Rose are doing their best to stall, but they can’t do nothing, and Markus has shown that his threats are serious. They’re doing their best to protect Cole’s family, but before long, it might not matter anyway. Markus surely won’t let any of these people make it out alive. Now that the one check on his madness is burning and blistering in a fridge down the hall, he’s a rabid dog. Let’s hope someone will come to put him down.

Classified Information

• Nice to see Solomon hold Peter a little accountable for the man he killed in Bangkok, someone named Caleb who had a family of his own. Point taken, although it’s hard to view Night Action as the aggressors in that scenario.

• I do really like that meeting scene with Peter and Jacob, the latter of whom has an interesting monologue about his grandfather’s aftershave and the different value we assign to different objects (and, in this case, human lives).