{"id":504113,"date":"2026-06-21T15:27:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T15:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/504113\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T15:27:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T15:27:08","slug":"the-agency-season-2-review-in-from-the-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/504113\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agency season 2 review: In from the cold"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to be a spy. For every James Bond flick in which the iconic character gets to actually smile, there are a dozen dramas that center the human cost of loyalty to country over personal wants like family, love, or free time. More Le Carre than 007, Paramount+\u2019s The Agency introduced yet another spy whose Achille\u2019s heel is his heart. The first season elevated that stock arc<\/a> with brainy dialogue and one of the best ensembles in the streaming world, and creators Jez and John-Henry Butterworth top themselves in the second season by rippling their theme across The Agency\u2019s cast of characters, revealing how a spy\u2019s willingness to fall in love can impact an entire office, and maybe even world politics.<\/p>\n

Eschewing the weekly cadence of season one for a binge release, season two picks up with CIA operative Brandon Colby, aka \u201cMartian\u201d (Michael Fassbender) adjusting to being a double agent for the Brits, pushed into this position by MI6 slimeball Jim Richardson (Hugh Bonneville). The British will do everything in their immense power to retrieve Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), Brandon\u2019s lover, from Sudanese custody\u2014but only if Martian does something for them. Probably more than one something.<\/p>\n

The Butterworths use Martian\u2019s relationship with Samia as a foundation for multiple arcs this season, most of them about people who have buried their own personalities so deep that anything that forces human emotion to the surface becomes exploitable. The two A-plots force agents to take on new identities as Danny aka \u201cGremlin\u201d (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) becomes the fake girlfriend of an Iranian power player and Agent Owen Taylor (John Magaro) goes into the field with his own fake relationship in an effort to track the season\u2019s big bad, a mercenary named Viking (Clayne Crawford).<\/p>\n

How other key players respond to growing suspicion that there\u2019s a rat in their house feels like a natural outgrowth of the show\u2019s main theme, because the betrayals become personal. When Gremlin herself becomes a pawn in Martian\u2019s game, handler Naomi Ford (Katherine Waterston) and Chief Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright) go into action, both Waterson and Wright deftly finding the right gravity for their roles. The latter\u2019s work serves as a righteous throughline for the season as Ogletree attempts to turn his suspicions about Martian into verifiable facts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the discoveries and coincidences in season two might play as contrived if the Oscar nominee weren\u2019t there to ground them, ably assisted by a different kind of world-weariness from Richard Gere as his boss, James Bradley. The two have a clever dynamic in that they\u2019ve both seen it all, but they come at the search for a turncoat with complementary approaches rather than conflicting ones: Gere going with a disappointed sigh opposite Wright\u2019s unshakable furor.<\/p>\n

The Butterworths\u2019 sharp writing is helped by a cast capable of selling intellect and immediacy. Fassbender did the work in season one to anchor his character in unflappable love for Samia, and so every action he takes to retrieve her feels truthful. Her safety has become Martian\u2019s most important mission, even if it conflicts with the needs of the CIA, giving Fassbender a no-nonsense approach to the character, one who doesn\u2019t have time for emotion, even if he knows how much his choices are being influenced by his affections. He smartly avoids the melodrama that could\u2019ve sunk The Agency, making the few scenes in which he does let down his guard more powerful.<\/p>\n

Even more than in season one, the writing allows for individual performances to shine across the ensemble. The star of First Cow<\/a> may seem unorthodox casting for a super spy, but that allows Magaro\u2019s performance to stand out opposite the more Bond-esque Fassbender. He\u2019s arguably the MVP of the season as he navigates his undercover assignment to a stunning centerpiece episode that hums with an unpredictable threat of violence. The truth is there are no bad performances here\u2014just the occasional actor straining against an underwritten villain, a product of a show with more than a dozen characters to track across the world, and the writer\u2019s choice to rarely give us their POV.<\/p>\n

The intertwining narratives get a bit tangled roughly two-thirds through the season. The Butterworths let some slack into the pace to set up the endgame, but it leads to a few scenes of characters discovering and discussing things the audience already knows. It\u2019s the one stretch of this season where the scope of The Agency feels more like a flaw than an asset, and the first time the show resorts to the common streaming affliction of over-expositing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Luckily, the writing recovers for the finale, which brings all of the season\u2019s arcs together in unpredictable ways, building to a great cliffhanger. Once again, Martian has used his training to get everything he wants, ignoring orders and international law to do so, and The Agency ends its second season on a variation of spy fiction\u2019s defining question: At what cost?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s hard to be a spy. For every James Bond flick in which the iconic character gets to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-504113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}