Warning! SPOILERS about The Night Agent season 1 ahead.Netflix’s The Night Agent includes many ambiguous characters whose goals aren’t manifest until the very end of the political spy-thriller, making the unveiling of the traitorous characters and their motives very rewarding in the end. Given the initial chaos caused by not knowing who the protagonists could trust inside the White House, The Night Agent offered many alternatives of who could have been the guilty party, capable of threatening Washington D.C. with impending terrorist attacks. While the villain reveals were many, The Night Agent provided a satisfying answer to the multiple questions about the traitors involved, what motives they had, and why.
Contrary to similar Netflix thrillers like The Recruit’s ending, The Night Agent didn’t shock its viewers with surprising twists in the season 1 finale, unveiling instead the truth behind the conspiracies involving Peter’s father’s traitorous past too. While some traitor reveals happened as early as in The Night Agent episode 6, the overall motives of all the treacherous parties involved became clear only at the very end, once the plot changed to kill the President in The Night Agent. Here’s why the three White House insiders wanted to stage a terror attack to kill the President and a foreign politician in The Night Agent.
The Night Agent Has More Than One Traitor
While only Vice President Redfield and military contractor Gordon Wick set in motion the D.C. metro bombing to assassinate Omar Zadar in a staged terrorist attack, they involved Chief of Staff Diane Farr in their plan to cover their tracks once Peter thwarted it. All three traitors bloodied their hands to keep the truth from surfacing, but Redfield and Wick’s opposition to Zadar as a possible leader of a foreign country caused their multiple traitorous actions that nearly killed President Travers. Instead, Farr only wanted to protect Travers’ political agenda from Redfield and Wick’s actions, given that the whole administration would have suffered if the truth surfaced about their involvement.
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The Night Agent Traitors' Plan Explained
Knowing they couldn’t have successfully pulled off an assassination on U.S. soil in The Night Agent season 1, episode 1, Wick and Redfield paid off someone to place a bomb on a metro train that would have caused so many deaths nobody would have thought about Zadar being the tragedy’s objective. While Peter thwarted the metro bombing, their plan in The Night Agent season 1 finale didn’t change. Indeed, Redfield and Wicks had bombs placed at both the photo-op inside Laurel Lodge at Camp David and on the President’s helicopter so that Travers and Zadar would have been killed, stopping the President’s attempts to show her support for Zadar publicly.
Given Farr’s closeness to President Travers, she would have never backed such a plan. However, given that she wanted to protect the President from the Vice President’s choices, she did support Redfield and Wick acting together to kill off Rose’s aunt and uncle to stop the President’s covert investigation about the metro attack from happening. Farr would have never harmed President Travers, but she had no problem harming anyone who would have let the truth surface if it potentially hurt their political agenda in The Night Agent, even if she disagreed with Wick’s business-related reasons nor Redfield’s ideological ones to oppose Zadar.
Was Peter's Dad Really A Traitor?
Peter spent most of his life trying to learn the truth about his father’s supposedly treasonous actions in The Night Agent. While Peter eventually discovered that his father’s actions led to the Pentagon leaks, he also learned straight from President Travers that his father agreed to become a double agent within the Night Action. In the end, Peter’s father was killed by a foreign agent while trying to right his wrongs, making him nevertheless a hero even if he made mistakes and making Peter’s promotion in The Night Agent season 1 finale feel particularly fitting, as Peter got to become a night agent like his father was supposed to be.
