Upamanyu Biswas
The espionage thriller ‘The Agency’ follows a CIA covert agent named Martian, whose life is upended after six years of living abroad under a false identity. The show’s first two episodes deal with Martian’s return from his long stint and his challenges while trying to go back to his original identity. However, things get complicated when a familiar face from his past life surfaces in London, England, forcing him to juggle his job responsibilities with personal desires. Meanwhile, the London Station has their work cut out after a sleeper agent goes missing, leading to a wholesale shift in the agency’s priorities. The show’s opening strikes the perfect balance of introducing the central mystery while fleshing out its intriguing tone, which focuses on character-driven moments in a high-stakes world of deception. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Martian Struggles to Adjust to His Life in London as a Former Lover Makes Her Entrance
After spending nearly six years on a mission in Ethiopia, Martian’s life becomes invariably attached to his duplicitous alter ego, Paul Lewis, and the vagaries of his made-up personality’s life. Nothing epitomizes this more than his affair with a married woman named Sami Zahir, a professor of social anthropology at the Addis Ababa Central University. The two share an intimate and unique bond that is challenged by Martian’s real purpose, which comes crashing down on him when he is ordered to pull out of Ethiopia and return to London. The harshest part of his mission ending is the abruptly short notice period he is allotted – 48 hours. It is too small a window to make final amendments with people in his past life. Naturally, when he returns, Martian finds it difficult to adjust to his old identity.
The transition is made even more challenging as he slowly realizes that the CIA has surveillance put on him around the clock. Their justification for tailing him stems from so-called protocol and ensuring that no one from a spy’s previous life comes back to target them in the present day. Little by little, the protagonist starts feeling that his new life has more restrictions put on it compared to the one he was leading for years. As such, Martian’s plight is reminiscent of the old adage “Out of the frying pan and into the fire.” However, most of his frustrations are rooted in his desire to reconnect with Sami. He eventually slips past the CIA’s tag team and manages to contact her once again, especially after he witnesses an explosion in Ethiopia on the news.
Martian is relieved upon learning that Sami is safe and sound. However, their discussion reveals that, like him, she, too, is staying in London. The two eventually meet up at the Sea Containers Hotel on the South Bank after the protagonist escapes the two agents who are surveilling him. Sami tells Martian that she is in London to attend a conference, and her husband, Mustafa, has accompanied her. Although this causes a slight hesitation in Martian, he still ends up having sex with her. Clearly, their affair has become personal for Martian beyond just his false identity. Still, he exercises caution and conducts an investigation into Sami, which reveals that she has not been attending the conference as promised, sparking new concerns in Martian that she may be hiding some skeletons in her closet.
An Undercover Agent’s Disappearance Starts a Fiasco at the London Station
Soon after returning to London, Martian is given a very short grace period before a critical situation develops in Belarus. An undercover operative named Coyote disappears after he is taken into police custody because of a drunk driving incident. However, the more the people at the London station look into the case, the more irregularities emerge. For instance, the revelation that Coyote had never undergone alcohol tolerance training because of his personal issues with alcoholism in the past. As such, his drunken state seems highly mysterious as Coyote had professed a complete no-no attitude towards consuming alcohol on the job. Moreover, his vanishing seems less and less coincidental because of how difficult it is for CIA operatives to go dark without a high degree of planning.
Martian is brought into the case as a primary investigator, using his vast experience on the field to find out precisely what transpired in Coyote’s ordeal. The team’s first order of business is to exfiltrate one of Coyote’s high-ranking contacts, Alexei Orekhov, a trucking company owner, whose identity is at risk of being exposed following the covert agent’s disappearance. After a series of trials and tribulations, the crew manages to construct a valid backstory for Alexei’s exfiltration, using his brother’s past challenges with cancer as a cover for moving him out of Belarus and to Gdansk, Poland. However, it is all a careful ruse that Martian uses to move him covertly out of Belarus and into the CIA London Station. The team interrogates him there, trying to determine how many of the agency’s operations are compromised.
The CIA team utilizes a whole host of questionable interrogation tactics that border on unethical territory. However, as Martian explains, it is a necessary evil to save the lives of numerous agents around the globe. One such agent is Henry Ogletree’s brother-in-law, who is stationed in Ukraine as a medical relief worker. He is sent a transmission to abort the operation and hastily leave as soon as possible. During their escape, they attract the attention of a number of military personnel on the road, who begin a high-pursuit chase. Somehow, he and his two partners wriggle out of the situation, killing a number of soldiers in the process. Meanwhile, Martian uses a clever ruse to ascertain without a doubt that Orekhov has no connection with any network, using made-up Russian names from ‘War and Peace’ to test his knowledge.
Danny Learns a Few Key Lessons Before Her Deployment
While Martian and the London Station team are busy sorting out the Coyote debacle, young, fledgling spy Danny prepares to take on a false identity for her covert operation in Iran. Her skills are effective, albeit a bit rough around the edges. As such, the agency sets up a meeting for her with Martian, who they hope will be able to give her some critical pointers for her new life. Martian takes the hard approach with her, tasking her with getting the name and contact information of two strangers within a restaurant seconds after meeting her for the first time. It instantly sets the tone and nature of the business she is going into. Ironically, one of the pieces of wisdom Martian delivers to her is not growing attached to her targets in any romantic or lustful capacity. One wonders if he would have the same advice for himself.
Regardless, Danny embraces her tasks with a tacit acceptance of what she is heading into. However, she is still given a final warning by Naomi, her handler, before she heads out to Iran. It is one of the more somber soliloquies in the show, reflecting the price of living a life as an undercover operative. Naomi asks Danny whether she is up to the task of living as someone else while leaving behind her own identity, possibly for months or years. It is a high cost to pay for a relatively meager outcome. Danny is clearly too far into the project to reject it now. Still, her job remains extremely precarious as she is given the seemingly impossible task of getting into the inner circle of Professor Reza Mortazevi, her target. She is resourceful enough to do so, but watching how she goes about it will be intriguing.
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