Martian and Samia’s Ending Heartbreak, Explained

Spoilers follow for the first season of Agencyincluding the finale, which debuts on Paramount+ with Showtime on Friday, January 24.

In the opening credits of CIA Thriller Agencyfor Jack White cover From U2’s “Love”, Wiroms swallows on the table setting photos: polygraph test, shredded passport, fingerprints, crashed helicopter, video camera shoot. This sequence is presented Agency As a maze of contradictory nationalist impulses, grandiosity-inducing surveillance, and a pervasive exteriority—and, at its hidden center, a love story.

White’s final utterance of “Blindness” wars against an American flag fluttering in the wind, a contrast between the lyrics and Rah-Rah imagery, and another abstract moment in a montage filled with them. In fact, in the previous minute, only two faces are clear: that of the sharply sorted and parked Martian, Michael Fassbender’s adorable Sudan Professor, and Jodie Turner-Smith’s Sudanese Professor Samia. The two hide behind walls and look over their shoulders, turning and moving. They’re heart Agencyand eventually “get over the events”, heartbreak. Remember the painful, the crippling, shocking Feeling watched Americans As Philip said Martha Was their relationship a sham, a sign of the Soviet Union? Mars turning into a double agent against the United States to save Samia in the final act of “Overcome by Events” is a reversal of those feelings, a moment that is both romantic and reckless in equal measure. In a crowded field of recent spy dramas – Slow horses and Black dovesfor Jackal day and Special OPS: Lioness – AgencyThe issue is the most human asset.

Agency Has barely any narrative hand in its first season, and is close to being invincible. Even if you watched its predecessor, the French series The officeYou’ll need to pay attention. There are about half a dozen separate stories unfolding over its 10 episodes, including the training of a young agent Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program and a covert operation in Ukraine to assassinate a number of Russian military targets. There are a similar number of timelines, including the Flash’s interview sequence with an infected Martian that is finally contextualized in “Overcome Events” as an interrogation by rogue MI6 agents who force him to work for them. Before this, Martian was introduced as a brilliant, intelligent, He is a quick thinker who can (and did) spend years developing secret sources, abandon them for information, and then disappear from their lives when the CIA decided his mission was done. This is even love, which is understandable to anyone Another in his line of work gives up or rejects him, en route.

The series begins with Mars abruptly leaving Sudan after six years, and breaking up with Samia after he really fell for her – and confessing to his face, Naomi (Katherine Waterston), that if only he could have stayed with Samia. When the Martian returns to London, Fassbender slips into a version of the aloof and vaguely contemptuous calculation perfected by a mutant revolutionary. Magneto in X-Men prequels And the killer clone David in foreign privilege. Agency“The cold cinematography, production design and degree of competing combinations add to this characterization: icy blue filters wash over his face, angular overhangs magnify his loneliness, floor-to-ceiling glass windows make us feel the stalkers imposing on his life. A man’s smiles do not reach his eyes; They only show his teeth but as “Paul,” the English professor’s identity he used as a cover in his relationship with Samia, Fassbender adopts a stagnant, yearning quality. , his glow of assessment, as he gives way to a soft gaze, as he wants to take in everything about Samia: the living shadows of her veil, the emotion with which she made a speech against the dangling forces of her country’s autonomy. It is not a performance, it is a revelation, and when Samia shows up in London and comes into contact with Paul, Mars slips into a desperate desire to hold on to her and protect her, a primary drive that pushes Mars into increasingly reckless territory before… Lead “Events Overtaken.”

Their known relationship with her is dangerous, and Agency Never underestimate the threat. Naomi, who has unspoken feelings for Martians, and CIA psychologist Dr. Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris), who is believed to be suffering from PPD, become increasingly suspicious of what Martians is not telling them. Sudanese intelligence officer Osman (Kurt Ejiawan), assigned to her side by Samia’s estranged husband while she is in London as an adviser to the Sudanese peace talks whom the CIA does not know about, has no problem using physical violence against her. The biggest threat facing the pair is senior MI6 official Jim Richardson (Hugh Bonneville), who has been keeping tabs on Sudanese, and sees Mars’s love for Sima as an opportunity to both humiliate and force his former ally into sharing CIA secrets. First, he jokingly offers to use his organization’s influence to save Samia if Martian turns out to be a double agent, and Jeri laughs at the sarcasm to which Martian agrees. Hours later, believing on his treatment that Al-Marikh will switch Samia’s loyalty, he returns to a car accident that lands him in the hospital for a secret meeting promised to extract Samia from a Sudanese prison if Al-Marikh fills him in on each of the CIA’s current operations. but Agency He manages to make all this danger feel secondary, even irrelevant, to the heat of Mars and Samia combined. If they were going to burn their worlds down by being with each other, Agency So be it, he suggests.

The flashback to the killing of an entire group of Samia’s attackers after she speaks at an opposition rally, offering her his bloody hand to help her escape, and with a net. The steadiness in Fassbender’s voice when Paul answers “I don’t need to think about it” to Samia’s suggestion that they get a hotel room, following a contentious argument about why she’s really in London, underscores their erotic connection. The frantic interest in Samia’s voice when she sees that one of Osman’s cronies has attacked Paul in an attempt to break up the relationship is a crack in her usually calm affect, and a sign of how caring she is. Allows intimacy for the husband Agency to shake itself out of the procedural Rigamarole and become a tactile, warm-hearted, almost romantic Michael Mann in the mold heatfor Public enemiesor Miami Vice – A grand, operatic exploration into the magnetism that brings men and women together, and the seismic ripple effects such relationships can have on the communities of those involved. When Mars tells Dr. Blake that he thinks governments calling their spies “crazy” (“Go pretend to be someone you’re not. Lying to everyone. Risking your life on a daily basis. Then go home, just a fucking deal”), he doesn’t just scream Against the demands of the job; He confesses how loving Samia felt that it was the only sane thing he had done in his entire life.

All that intense buildup in the first two-thirds of the season is why this narrative goes awry when Samia refuses to be recruited as a CIA asset and walks away from Paul after learning Martian’s true identity in episode eight. “You’re free,” and why would Mars give his life to save her anyway in the final two episodes of the season. He’s as good an agent as anyone could want, someone who has protected American lives and American interests and who realizes, after station chief Richard Gere refuses to help save Samia from imprisonment and torture in Sudan, which doesn’t make him feel all the way Samia did. Fassbender doesn’t play Martian as being particularly happy about leaking to Richardson, after all Richardson’s ambition overtakes him, and he is hit by a car driven by one of Richardson’s henchmen in this hospital bed As he returns to work, his smile appears pained.

But Secret Secret Richardson tasks the Martian while maintaining its true narrative engine AgencySeason two. To be sure, Mars will likely “continue as usual” despite its divided loyalties, and sure, there will likely be more complex missions to oversee. The weight of all of this is extremely heavy, because of how comprehensive Agency The bond between Samia and Martian is built, and how love is clearly presented as an act of self-destruction. She’s an embodiment of the demands of this job, much more so than Coyote (Alex Reznik), the Martian rescue double we never get a glimpse of, and Danny, whose interest in spy work is never explained. Samia ends up chained on the prison floor, tortured and abused, because of Mars; Mars betrays his country and ruins his career to get it out, not sure it will work.

Consider what Richardson’s assistant Martian told him about the spy vehicle and how easily those feelings tainted his relationship with Samia: “I was falling. When you’re falling, when you’re really falling, you never know how far away you are. After a while, it feels like flying. Then it hit the earth “. And think back to the lyrics of “Love is Blindness,” which White covered specially for Baz Luhrmann The Great Gatsbya story in which a man’s obsession with regaining a past love leads to his demise: “Love sinks / In a deep well / All the secrets / And no one tells.” By ending its first season with Mars and Samia dragging beneath the surface of their undeveloped love, with no one to pull them out of their mess but each other, Agency Rooting for them makes the reason for tuning into season two.