CAST: Noah Centineo, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Laura Haddock, Colton Dunn, Aarti Mann, Kristian Bruun
DIRECTOR: Alexi Hawley
Alexi Hawley, the showrunner of both The Rookie and The Rookie: Feds has created a new series that centers around a new CIA lawyer who wastes no time in getting embroiled in some of the agency’s touchiest operations.
The Recruit has the traditional story arc starting with a scene from the end of the season to tease its audience, then rewinding back to the beginning of the story with a fast introduction of its main character, supporting cast, premise, and more only to contain several episodes of filler and minor plot movement in the series’ middle episodes before ramping up to a conclusion that not only closes several narrative loops while simultaneously creating several new ones for a potential second season.
The Recruit not only rewards the viewer’s investment in the protagonist’s journey but also immensely entertains through its drama and well-placed humor. It wears its predictability on its sleeve, never shying from having the audience see its next move, and pushes through this by maintaining a frenetic pace across the entire series that keeps the interest even in its rare quieter moments.
Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) sees something going wrong and tries to call the commander, but she orders him to get off the line. “This is what happens when we bring a lawyer on an op,” she says. So he takes matters in to his own hands.
Two weeks earlier, Hendricks, who joined the CIA’s general counsel’s office straight out of law school, is on his second day on the job. He’s ordered by the general counsel, Walter Nyland (Vondie Curtis-Hall) to go to Capital Hill to keep Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Smoot (Linus Roache) from reading classified documents into the public record.
Two veteran lawyers, Lester (Colton Dunn) and Violet (Aarti Mann), get wind of this and decide to give the rookie some scut work, namely hundreds of letters from “Crazies” who grey mail the agency and threaten them; his job is to assess if the threat is real. Most of them aren’t, but he sees a letter from Max Meladze (Laura Haddock), serving a stint for murder in Arizona. With help from extremely paranoid colleague Janus Ferber (Kristian Bruun), he looks into the operations she named in the letter.
What she finds out is the contact and ops name are real, but something that an asset shouldn’t know about. When he reports it to Nyland, he tells Hendricks to continue and gives Lester and Violet the crazies file back. When Hendricks decides he should go to Yemen to find Meladze’s former operative himself, the pair don’t give him any advice other than to “fly coach.” That gets him in trouble — and loses him a fingernail — when he goes unannounced to the black site where the operative is stationed, without a passport that would grant him diplomatic immunity.
But the operative eventually tells him more about Melazde, and he goes to Arizona to talk to her. She claims she has classified documents and sends him to a storage unit to retrieve them, but it ends up being a bag of money that two thugs chase and beat him to get. But he manages to get away, and lets Melazde know that she needs him more than she’s letting on. She also gives him the nickname of her handler, a nickname that she shouldn’t know; Ferber tells Hendricks that it refers to someone that’s extraordinarily high up in the government.
Hendricks is a lawyer, not a spy, but it seems that this series is going to be full of situations where this rookie with no experience either stumbles upon or actually digs up big and dangerous situations that he ends up insinuating himself into.
The Recruit is simple, fun, and most importantly, entertaining. It doesn’t demand much from its audience by requiring low emotional investment and has an unassuming premise that seems easy to predict, but as the series goes on, offers high entertainment value bolstered by humorous moments that relieve some of the mounting tension of the drama.
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