Type: Romantic
Show: The Night Agent
Featured Characters: Peter Sutherland and Rose Larkin
The Night Agent isn’t a romance, but what it offers with Peter Sutherland and Rose Larkin is inarguably one of the best fictional relationships on TV—a bond shared between two people who care tremendously about each other and who’d do anything to ensure that the other is taken care of.
What starts as a distress call turns into the purest form of love they’ve both had in a long while. What begins as a friendship becomes a story about two people who understand each other on deeply molecular levels. Everything between them is sincere, untarnished, and restorative. Where the series will take them from here on out is unpredictable at this time, but what’s clear as the day is the detail that they’ll both carry each other’s love wherever they go.
Peter Sutherland and Rose Larkin Are Everything to Each Other
I said it in our scene breakdown for the last conversation they have in The Night Agent Season 2, but everything is a big word. Sure, people on the internet throw it around flippantly when describing various things, but a person doesn’t call someone their everything if they don’t mean it with every fiber of their being. A man like Peter Sutherland, especially, doesn’t use the word like it’s stuck in his vernacular. That’s not who he is, and that’s not who Rose Larkin is, either. Therefore, where their relationship is concerned, the word everything holds profound gravitas. It means how the dictionary defines it—all things.
They can’t trust many people in their line of work, including those above them, but from the moment the show starts, what they build is a steady foundation around each other. They fortify all the different ways they can trust each other and how that’ll help them feel a little more safe. At the same time, as two people who are mostly alone in the world, meeting each other when they did meant that they had someone perpetually in their corner who owed them nothing. They stayed because they cared. From their first kiss to their last, it’s always been their choice to stay.
Still, what they also go through in Season 1 is nothing short of traumatic, which then leads Rose to have nightmares and seek therapy. Trauma bonding is real, but it’s also not always a bad thing. When the people bound together are fighting external forces as opposed to each other, then it’s ultimately a way for them to seek solace together. It’s necessary to find people you trust when everything else around you is falling apart.
Forced proximity led Peter and Rose together, but they chose to put their trust in each other. They chose to take care of each other, and most importantly, they chose to fall in love. Those three little words aren’t exchanged during the first two seasons of The Night Agent, but again, this is where we can return to Peter calling Rose his everything. He tells her he loves her at that moment by choosing her safety and well-being over his own desires to keep her close. He tells her he loves her by being selfless in his act of letting her go. Simultaneously, while getting involved with Peter led Rose down some paths she normally wouldn’t have crossed, it doesn’t mean that he’s bad for her. Perhaps her life is a little less calm, and danger follows her in every corner, but it doesn’t change the fact that she knows his heart. He isn’t the one bringing suffering into her life.
These perils don’t change the fact that they know each other’s takeout orders, can read each other like an open book, and that behind closed doors, their smiles are given freely and effortlessly. Some of the best scenes between Peter and Rose in The Night Agent occur in dingy hotel rooms or close quarters away from large crowds. It’s when the dust settles and the threat subsides for five minutes when they turn to find each other standing beside them, arms wide open to give them a bit of reprieve. For two people who rarely get a chance at true serenity, together, they’re at ease.
Season 2 also delivers some of the show’s best hugs, driven by desperate moments where the need to take a breath is dependent on holding each other. Where they can’t help but draw closer just to ensure for a few seconds that they’re okay—they’re here, and they’re together. They can take this beat for themselves to remember that in the midst of all the terrors around them, they have a safe place with each other—armor and an anchor—a home.
A traumatic event brought them together, but finding a safe place in each other is why they choose to love. Rose Larkin is, in every way, Peter Sutherland’s entire world—the one person he’d sacrifice anything for. And their “breakup” is solely to ensure that she is safe because he knows that as long as she tangles herself with him, her safety will always be compromised.
Again, I fully acknowledge that The Night Agent isn’t a romance, and a happy ending is far from guaranteed on a show like this, but I’d still argue that they’re it for each other. They are each other’s unmistakable happy ending, no matter where their lives go, because whatever else they find in different people, it’d never compare to what they have with each other. They can search far and wide, but their meeting wasn’t accidental. Fated, tied by invisible springs, whatever you want to call it. It was meant to happen, and they were not only meant to fall in love, but they chose to.
There are few truly healthy pairs in genre shows like this, and it’s entirely understandable that the series would amplify the stakes by keeping them apart. However, everything that we see between Peter and Rose in The Night Agent Season 2 is concrete proof of the fact that together, there’s nothing the two of them can’t achieve. So, while it’s apparent that maybe they’ll spend time apart, what’s even more apart is that the love they have for each other runs deeper than anything else. It’s not the type of relationship you simply move on from—it’s one you compare all others to, and one day, when the time is right again, you choose to pick up the phone when they call. You decide to meet them wherever they are because no matter how tired or how heartbroken or sad you are, being there for the other person is the easiest choice you’ll make.
And today, if nothing else, Peter Sutherland and Rose Larkin have proven that they’ll show up for each other even when the other person tells them not to. With the kiss in the hotel and the moment where he comforts her through a nightmare, they show viewers how it’s impossible for them not to prioritize the other person’s safety and happiness.
First Featured Image Credit: ©Netflix