Netflix The Night Agent season 1 recap guide: All 10 episodes explained

The Night Agent episode 3 recap: The Zookeeper

Everyone is a suspect at the start of The Night Agent episode 3, which takes us back one year earlier to just after the metro bombing, showing when and how Diane Farr recruited Peter for night action. That little snippet helps explain why Peter trusts Farr so much and is willing to vouch for her even though Rose thinks Farr could be a mole, just like Hawkins.

They put Farr to the test. Peter calls her, and only her, and then he and Rose camp out in the woods to surveil the cabin. If Farr is the leak, then the assassins can track her phone and find them. At first, it looks like Rose worried for nothing, but then, sure enough, Dale and Ellen arrive at the cabin to kill them. Thankfully, Rose and Peter are one step ahead, so they escape before they get shot and even use their headstart to get the license plate on the killers’ car.

Farr meets with President Travers and several other executives at the White House. They discuss the case as it stands. Basically, they have nothing. They don’t know how Hawkins was connected to the Campbell murders and have no suspects. Travers is also concerned by Peter still being on the field with Rose, but Farr notes that it’s hard for her to act accordingly because she doesn’t entirely know what’s going on and what the Campbells were working on at their time of death. Travers finally fills her in.

Across town at a college campus, we meet Chelsea Arrington (Fola Evans-Akingbola), the head of the Secret Service detail for Vice President Ashley Redfield’s daughter, Maddie Redfield (Sarah Desjardins). Chelsea gets a call from Ben regarding the status of one of her agents. He’s out, and Ben is sending in a replacement, an old-school guy who used to be on the Secret Service for the former President, Erik Monks (D.B. Woodside).

Erik rather famously took a bullet for the President during an assassination attempt. During his recovery, he got addicted to painkillers and was sent to rehab. He’s clean now but still getting tested weekly for drugs. Chelsea isn’t thrilled to have him on the team because he’s a recovering addict and does things differently than her. She’s worried about anyone messing up this operation for her now that she’s been running it for so long.

As a young black woman in the Secret Service with an important op to herself, it’s understandable why she would be prickly about a newcomer who could disrupt things, especially a recovering addict. To Monks’s credit, he seems willing to play by Chelsea’s rules, even if it might take him some time to acclimate.

Chelsea has been working with Maddie for a long time now, and she also looks young enough to blend in seamlessly on the campus. Maddie trusts her. It’s a good gig that could help her get promoted. Monks could threaten all of that for her if he messes up.

Despite the cabin incident, Peter still doesn’t think Farr betrayed them. Rose points out that even if Farr is clean, clearly, someone she’s working near isn’t and has access to her call log, meaning it’s still dangerous to talk to her or be in the same room as her for the time being.

Rose and Peter devise a plan to go back to the White House and use Peter to distract Diane, allowing Rose to infiltrate the back room to hack into the hard drive and copy the contents onto a separate disc to keep it from Farr. But Farr is more intelligent than they realize, and once she sees the hard drive has been wiped clean, she realizes that Peter is trying to pull one over on her.

Farr and Peter face off, as Farr now thinks Peter is hiding something. Once Peter explains what happened with the phone call and the cabin, Farr believes that he’s innocent as Farr swears she had nothing to do with that and agrees to check her phone for tampering or a hacker.

Elsewhere, Chelsea and Monks accompany Maddie to a bar that night. She gets into an altercation with a guy who attempts to assault her because he hates her father. Monks intervene, but not quickly enough, and the guy gets a good grip on Maddie’s hair. Ultimately, Monks puts the man and his friends down, but it still causes a significant incident at the bar. Chelsea is not happy.

Debriefing with Ben, Chelsea reveals Monks should have defused the situation but made things messier than needed. Ben wants Chelsea to keep him on the team as he has a past with Monks. They used to be partners. He thinks Monks is an excellent asset, and as long as Chelsea keeps an eye on him and lets Ben know how he’s doing, things should be fine.

Chelsea is apprehensive but has no choice since Ben is her boss. However, she contacts a friend and asks him to look into Erik Monks. Why would a man once hailed as a hero for protecting the President be willingly assigned to the most thankless job in the Secret Service?

Then there’s Maddie, who has something going on with her much older art professor, Paulo. It’s sketchy, as confirmed by a text thread between Paulo and an anonymous person on the other end. The teacher says he’s “close” to convincing Maddie of something. He receives a text back saying, “they need to move faster.”

We then find out that the man Paulo is texting is Matteo, the bomber with the rattlesnake tattoo! It cannot be a good sign that Paulo is courting the VP’s daughter on behalf of that man.

Once she’s alone again, Rose goes through the contents of the hard drive and sees an old interview clip from a man named Omar Zadar, the former leader of an extremist group known as the People’s Independence Freedom (PIF) who was believed to be responsible for the metro bombing because of past incidences where they’d done similar things. Zadar denies having anything to do with the bombing.

She also finds blueprints from a café and, after adjusting the contrast on the computer screen, notices a secret address hidden in the background. Rose writes down the address so she can look into it further. But her research is interrupted by Peter, who brings Farr along with him. Rose isn’t happy to see Farr, but Farr says she can tell Rose who her aunt and uncle really were and provide more information on what they were working on.

This episode also has a C-plot focusing on Dale and Ellen. Ellen has dreams and aspirations of her and Dale living a normal life with the perfect house and white picket fence someday. They sneak into an empty house with a for sale sign and take a bath together, imagining what their life could be like once they’re done being murderers, I guess? Honestly, I don’t know what the point of this sub-plot is as these characters don’t have much plot relevance beyond being standard fare henchmen types.

Written by Maddy Lennon