Spoilers for The Night Agent are all over this article. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
Over the past few years Amazon has had great success with shows about level-headed dudes that can handle their shit in a crisis. Jack Ryan is already heading into its fourth season and Jack Reacher Season 2 is following a similar path on the streamer. Those with a Netflix subscription also recently got a chance to dive into the genre with the action thriller The Night Agent, which has already been renewed for Season 2 with lead 2.
While I wouldn’t say The Night Agent has a perfect first season – in fact occasionally the motivations of characters or the sequence of events that play out are borderline outlandish – it does have going for it a slew of actors who were just extremely, in my opinion, well-cast. Unfortunately, one character death left a really a sour taste in my mouth, and it’s not just from the orange-flavored Vitamin C gummies I’ve been taking.
The Night Agent Thought It Had Enough Emotional Arc To Kill Off A Character. It Didn’t.
While the bulk of The Night Agent’s plot follows Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) and Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) as they unveil corruption and an assassination plot in the White House, there’s a secondary storyline following two secret service agents. Those agents, Chelsea Arrington (Fola Evans-Akingbola) and Erik Monks (D.B. Woodside), eventually connect with our hero and heroine, but it was their storyline that I found to be the most interesting dynamic on the show, and I wanted more of it in Season 2.
Which is why I was unhappy when the show killed off Erik Monks.
Look, I get it. I hate when shows and movies, despite the odds, despite myriad bullets being shot at them, let all of the heroes survive. Monks was the character on a downswing in his career; he was older and he’d already been shot in the line of duty once. Plus, I assume the thought process was: How bittersweet was it for him to speak about hoping to take his daughter camping in the summer only to die on some pavement weeks before he got the chance? (I actually think this is emotionally manipulative but more on this later.)
It’s not terrible writing, and given the way Season 1 ended, Season 2’s focus will likely be on Peter Sutherland going on some sort of mission as an actual “night agent,” maybe with some help from his hacker girlfriend, if his co-star comes back. I don’t know what room that would leave for Secret Service agents, though Arrington is still alive and I’d like to see her back in some capacity. With Arrington’s promotion to the President’s detail, would she and Monks have even been able to continue their mentee/mentor relationship? He was likely the ideal character to kill off when crafting the script.
Yet, there are two reasons this death still makes me mad thinking about it. First, I’m not sure the script understood that D.B. Woodside was the most fun part about watching this show. Sure, I kind of like Peter and Rose, he’s stoic in just the right way and she’s spunky in a way that makes sense for a female action heroine with no fighting experience. But Woodside was killing it in an underrated way in all of his scenes. I just wanted more Monks and Arrington. That was the show I was most interested in!
Secondly, and supplemented by the fact Woodside is so great, I think this was crafted with the assumption that given Monks’ trajectory as a former addict and given he was trying to make a turnaround in the twilight of his career, there would be emotional payoff when he died. Wrong. That scene where he died on the pavement didn’t feel bittersweet, it felt emotionally manipulative; in fact, the only “feeling” I honestly had was annoyance that we didn’t get a chance to fully invest in the character before the show unceremoniously killed him off.
Maybe Monks did need to die in the line of duty. But he didn’t need to die the way he did, getting shot by some long-range gun. And he didn’t need to die in Season 1 at all.
The payoff would have been greater if Monks and Arrington had a longer window of time to bond and become closer. It would have been greater if we had watched him make more strides to clean up his personal life. It would have been awesome if he’d gotten the chance to actually go camping with his daughter again and if we as the audience would have had the time to say, “This is my guy, this is why I watch this show.” If he’d died after all that, it would have been heart-wrenching. As it played out, he was expendable and it was a plot device. It just makes me feel like the show didn't know what it actually had.
So, while I’m still going to throw on The Night Agent when it returns to the Netflix schedule for Season 2, the Netflix series is going to need to do a little work to make up for what could have been.
