Patriot: season two review complex spy caper gets lost in its own smugness

John Tavner’s hero is back and is valiantly trying get his failing mission back on track but a missing bag of money and the Iranians look to scupper his plans

To sum up: the first season of Patriot (Amazon Prime) is impossible to sum up. And the extensive montage that kicks off season two doesn’t help much. Partly this is due to the two-year gap between them – nobody’s memory is that good – and partly because the plot was impossible to follow in the first place and didn’t really matter anyway.

You might have come for the promise of a standard spy thriller involving John Tavner, an intelligence officer with PTSD and a dad higher up in the espionage biz who recruits him for one last job. It’s an opaque non-official cover role, meaning there is backup from the big guys. While posing as manager John Lakeman at an industrial piping firm in Milwaukee, our hero sets out to derail Iran’s nuclear plans. Those who stuck with it stayed for the oddballery that ran through it like an industrial pipe through Milwaukee.

The plot, which revolved around international nuke-foiling plans and the CIA’s bag of money that was being intercepted and re-intercepted on its planned journey to the pockets of the intelligence service’s preferred candidate in the upcoming Iranian election, was very much secondary.

Suffice it to say: Agathe, the French detective, now has the money. She took it on a train with her and John declined to follow. Instead, he is following her daughter and her nanny and hoping that one of his sidekicks, Jack Birdbath, will cosh Agathe for him and steal the money back in the meantime.

As is the way of Patriot, not much actually happens. Like the money bag, we loop around, meander and eventually end up someplace – maybe not much farther on – but people just shrug and make the best of it from there. So, the plan to cosh Agathe is mainly made up of conversations between Birdbath, bank tellers and John, because Birdbath is used to using a sockful of dimes (“I developed a nice touch, you know?”) to bash people with and now has to diversify into centimes. They’re heavier. He doesn’t know quite how hard to hit her. So he carries out a practice coshing on himself as he waits round a corner from her and knocks himself out. Agathe carries on walking.

Elsewhere Leslie, Lakeman’s piping boss, is in hospital recovering from being shot in the face by his employee last season. His situation has not just robbed the viewers of his customary delightful monologues on the intricacies of the industrial piping business but – thanks to the morphine drip he’s on – Leslie himself of his sobriety. Our last sight is of him wandering the corridors with a beatific smile on his face as he unhooks others’ drips to supplement his own. It looks as if he’s not going to make that reunion with his son.

Edward, John’s congressman brother, who basically wanted to become an attache so that he could flash his attache badge and, when told that no such thing existed, created one himself, is now sitting hostage in a garage with a bag over his head presumably regretting his decision to enter politics. The good news is that Debra Winger (as the Tavners’ mother Bernice, a high-ranking federal official whose professional duty to her country is at war with her instinct to protect her increasingly unstable older son) has been upgraded to series regular, presumably in order to thicken this plotline.

John himself continues to be a strange near-cipher of a protagonist; ever-pained, often seeming on the brink of tears, and wearily trying to do his best for Daddy as the mission crumbles round him. He’s a figure who silently asks the question of how far you should be expected to go for an ideal and how much weight one man can bear before he breaks.

So, for those who decided two years ago that this was the kind of thing they liked, this will still be the kind of thing they like. The Wes Andersonish aesthetic, a darkened dash of the Coen brothers’ attitude to life and narrative, leave things a little bloated. A large part of any series’ success is simply due to it not feeling like a film script being stretched to cover 10 episodes. But Patriot passes that bar and has just enough smiles to mask the melancholy at its heart and keep you urging its hero on. Patriot Series 2, episode 1 is available on Amazon Prime now. New episodes are released Fridays.

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