'The Recruit' Season 2 Review: Noah Centineo's Netflix Spy Series Falls Short of Its Potential

Fish-out-of-water stories are common for at least one very good reason: they're a perfect introduction to a brand-new world, allowing writers a blank slate to create and explain new rules, characters, locales, and so on, as viewers discover their new landscape alongside a character (hopefully) worth following. The complicated, topsy-turvy world of spy or assassin movies and TV series often follow protagonists who are in the know about how the world works (see: your James Bond, Ethan Hunt, or John Wick types), but the genre remains perfect for the right fish-out-of-water character. This is part of why Season 1 of The Recruit worked so well; a neophyte CIA lawyer gets in way too deep, causing accidental chaos as he goes. Season 2 stays true to those same beats for a largely entertaining journey, though it stops short of meeting its true potential thanks to a short-changed story.