The Agency (season 1 – 2024)

The Agency follows covert CIA agent Martian (Michael Fassbender), who is ordered to abandon his undercover life in Africa and return to London Station. As he navigates the complexities of his mission, a past love reappears, pitting his professional duties against his personal desires.

The Agency (S1:E1-9) Review

In a letter written to Hellen Keller in 1903, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) stated, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn, and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

                   

While Clemens was broadly speaking about creativity, many believe it is a fundamental truth that underlies all narrative works of fiction. After all, for centuries, academics have claimed that Shakespeare explored every major theme in the human condition. If this is true, then all we are left with now to sate our thirst for originality is a well-thought-out and expertly delivered twist on one of these themes. The Agency gives us just that—for four episodes.

From the moment James Bond seduced Sylvia Trench with a game of Baccarat in 1963’s Dr. No to the oppressive realism of 2006’s The Lives of Others, tales of espionage have been among the most frequently mined genres. This is understandable, as no other style so naturally lends itself to dramatic shifts.

This is all to soften the blow and help you keep things in perspective when I say that The Agency doesn’t add anything new to the seedy underworld of fictional spy thrillers. Anyone who has been a fan of the genre has seen every single story beat that the show offers in one program or another. What does set it apart from many of its contemporaries is that, for almost its entire first half, it is nearly flawlessly executed.

Directors Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) and Philip Martin (The Crown), who are responsible for the initial quartet, deliver a symphonically-paced story with rich yet economic dialogue delivered by masterclass performances full of pregnant meaning and subtext. Michael Fassbender and crew deliver such nuance and depth of feeling as to compare to Joaquin Phoenix in the first Joker.

Each episode’s attention to detail and expositional restraint are perfect. As you soak it all in, you will be entranced and marvel at how good cinema can be.

It’s crushingly awful that the subsequent episodes are merely above average. Once Daytime Emmy Award-winning director Zetna Fuentes briefly takes the helm, the showrunners seem to lose focus and begin spending much too much time on the least original and least interesting subplots. Unsympathetic tertiary characters are artificially raised to prominence, and the main narrative is all but forgotten for the next two episodes.

One of The Agency’s biggest missteps was giving Fassbender’s love interest a husband and never showing him. Perhaps he was an evil man who manipulated and forced his wife to be with him, but all we see is that she is cheating on this man- a man who, against all the traditions of his country, allows his wife to become a very prominent and outspoken opposition leader. It robs both Fassbender and her of much sympathy, making it difficult to care about a relationship that begins to consume the series’ focus by its end.

While the program never dulls, and the performances from its core cast are more than sufficient to carry you through to the end, it’s doubtful that the season finale will be enough to recapture the glory of those initial episodes.

WOKE REPORT

It Wants To Chick, Hard

• Although they are secondary and tertiary characters in this season, as it progresses, it is clear that the showrunners want many of the female characters to take on more prominent roles in the future.
• 90% of the female characters feel contrived in one way or another. Just keep in mind that that only equates to three women.
  • The rookie on her first mission seems completely out of place, as does her mission. She’s a 20-something posing as a doctoral candidate in the hopes that she will be singled out to accompany an Iranian scientist (the man in charge of her program) to work for a time in Iran.
    • They insist on dressing her like a fashionable lesbian.
    • She refuses the sexual overtures of the man whom she is supposed to impress enough to choose her to go to Iran because it is beneath her, but she later seduces a female colleague to achieve the same goal. Keep in mind that her character is shown to be straight in earlier scenes.
    • There is so much wrong with her role that I don’t know where to begin. Rule number one in espionage is don’t stand out. Well, a pretty white European woman in Iran stands out.
    • It takes years to develop the kind of trust needed to be able to successfully build a network of assets and the means to relate intel back to the CIA. Regardless of their gender, European students who were allowed into sensitive areas in Iran would be under the highest level of scrutiny, making it that much more challenging to build, add to the fact that she is a woman (one who has shown that she’s unwilling to be used as a honey pot) and you’re needlessly exacerbating the difficulty.
  • There are three prominent analysts in the show. Two are women, and one is a man. The women are always together, tough-minded, and tough-talking. Hell, the one seems to also be a field operative trainer and expert marksman. Conversely, the man is short and paunchy, not particularly assertive, has back problems that require a comedic chair, and flubs his first field op for comedic effect.
    • Contrast this with the rest of the cast, who are almost entirely strong and competent men. However, while I didn’t ding the woke score too much for it this season (they don’t have big roles), it’s pretty clear that the showrunners are setting these women up for bigger (i.e., more obnoxious) roles in season 2.

The Path of Most Resistance

• I’m far from an expert, but it seems to me that if one’s job is to build a network of intelligence assets in a country in which 99% of its 100+ million residents are black, it might make things easier to insert a black agent for the job. With that in mind, it would be very easy to make the assumption that choosing to insert Fassbender’s character in Ethiopia was done to contrive a mixed-race relationship for some PC points. However, this show is based on the French program titled The Bureau, which does the same thing. So, it’s just following suit.

High and Chatty

• In one scene, the rookie female spy espouses just the most tired and trite feminist talking points. However, she is trying to seduce a feminist, and there’s no indication that she actually believes it.

The Agency (S1: Finale) Review

As expected, the show’s early divergence from its A plot in lieu of an unremarkable love story and a completely uninteresting C plot robbed so much momentum from the program that its ending didn’t have any of the intended emotional oomph.

It’s still a decent program, but I’m not certain that it’s worth watching it until season two comes out and we see if the series has any legs.