The Recruit Ending Explained: Who Kidnapped Max and Owen? Is Max Dead? Why Did Max Kill Kusnetsov?
Arriving as one of the main releases of December, The Recruit series has just been released in the Netflix catalog. Starring Noah Centineo, the action and spy series emerges as one of the most anticipated original productions on Netflix this second half. At first, the plot of the series accompanies the character Owen, a young rookie lawyer for the CIA who is played by Noah Centineo. With difficult missions throughout the series, the young lawyer and CIA agent are hired and assigned to deal with the gray mail received by the agency.
In addition, his journey completely changes course when his path crosses with Maxine “Max” Meladze, an extremely dangerous and manipulative woman who kept great secrets about the CIA during the time she worked for the organization. Thus, Owen will face and need to deal with the most difficult dangers while working alongside Max. But, after all, will this duo manage to get away from all the dangerous situations that surround them? Below, learn more about the season 1 finale of Netflix’s Recruit.
The Recruit: The Story
A rookie lawyer named Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) who has just started working for the CIA experiences a sudden upheaval in his life when he encounters an outside resource requesting a release from the agency. Once the asset tries to expose her long-term relationship with the agency, Owen Hendricks soon becomes entangled in a complex international intrigue. As the young lawyer negotiates with the asset, he soon finds himself at odds with menacing individuals and groups, risking his life as he tries to fulfill his duties, inside and outside the CIA offices.
The Recruit is a series written and created by Alexi Hawley that debuts on Netflix starting Friday, December 16; a serial product that, however, owes much to the cinematic legacy of recent decades, above all to that linked to action and spy feature films. Nothing to do with the immortal and evergreen adventures of James Bond in the British house, but more with the parts of the great entertainment cinema led by the direction of Doug Liman.
The Recruit: The Recap
Owen Hendricks is a young lawyer hired by the CIA for a very important job. However, right away the man collects some enemies in his work, Violet and Lester. The duo tries at all costs to sabotage Owen’s life in the CIA. Everything changes, however, when Owen receives the mission of the graymail folder that includes messages from several people who claim to know the secrets of the CIA. It is from there, therefore, that the man gets to know Maxine “Max” Meladze, a dangerous woman who is threatening to leak confidential information from the CIA if she is not released from prison. Shortly after verifying the veracity of such confidential information, Owen loses permission from his boss Nyland to work on the case, which is granted. So, Owen starts his work to release Max from prison.
On the other hand, the new job ends up wearing Owen down mentally. His friends end up getting worried about his routine and the dangers involved in the whole case. Hannah and Terence, therefore, are the most present friends and try to show support and concern for the newcomer. Eventually, Owen finds out about Max’s involvement with the Russian mob and also learns that the woman is a foreigner. In addition, he also discovers that Max was involved in a murder and killed a man when he attacked his friend, which makes the release of the woman an even more complex problem. However, Owen is eventually able to break Max out of prison. But his nightmare is far from over when his boss learns of Maxine’s connection to the Russian Council and the Russian mob. So, the man decided to use Maxine to gather information. Max, on the other hand, promises not to manipulate Owen and both agree to work together.
The Recruit Ending Explained: Why Did Max Kill Kusnetsov? Owen Quits The CIA?
At the end of the season, Maxine and Owen end up on a very dangerous mission. The CIA plans to reinstate Max on the Russian Council, which is why they decided to arrange a meeting between Max and General Kusnetsov. However, expectations regarding the agreement become almost non-existent given the woman’s past. During Max’s conversation with Kusnetsov, the facility is heavily attacked by mysterious assailants. That’s when chaos ensues, as Agent Gilbane, who was in charge of the operation, retaliates against the attacks along with his squad. Owen, on the other hand, also enters the place to help Maxine.
Owen kills one of the muggers to save Max while the woman ends up killing the rest. The climate begins to weigh when they both realize that General Kusnetsov is on holiday with a shot in his leg. Max then resolved to end the man’s life right then and there after learning that he would not be accepted back into the Council. With the argument that he couldn’t leave the general alive and under Owen’s protests, Max ends up shooting General Kusnetsov dead. The general’s murder ends up causing Owen to fall out with Max. Owen, therefore, decides to resign from the CIA after his displeasure with the violence and bloodshed. Max, in turn, fears that his action will now not go unpunished, since Owen will not be able to legally justify his action during the operation and will now have to answer for his crime.
Who Kidnapped Max and Owen? Is Max Dead?
Final moments of the episode, yet another twist. Maxine is mysteriously kidnapped by a group of masked men and at first, the public is unaware of her whereabouts. On the other hand, Owen is ready to meet with Hannah, who has come to Prague to help the man. With outstanding issues from the past, the two arrange to meet at the Prague Memorial Park to talk. But Owen doesn’t even get to meet the girl, since he is caught and kidnapped by the same group responsible for Maxine’s mysterious disappearance.
Upon opening his eyes, Owen realizes that he is in some kind of abandoned warehouse next to Max. The two don’t even have much time to talk, as they are surprised by the arrival of a mysterious woman who seems to know one of the two kidnapped well. Previously, the woman had appeared to Owen and identified herself as Marta, but Max ends up leaving the boy at his side completely shocked when he recognizes the woman not as Marta, but as Karolina, his daughter.
While Owen wonders why Maxine would lie about her daughter’s death, Karolina doesn’t expect her mother to justify her actions and ends up shooting her in the chest. Maxine is dead. Karolina breaks Owen’s daze with inquiries about her work with her mother. She questions Owen’s motivations and demands an explanation of Owen’s involvement in Max’s activities in Russia. Finally, Owen is lost, since he believes that he will not have the help of the CIA to save him from the situation. On the other hand, the boy also finds himself hopeless now without Max, since the woman would be essential for his possible escape from the place.
A Lawyer Who Becomes A Spy Against His Will
After a disastrous attempt at the action in Yemen, Owen becomes more and more involved in the story to which the former CIA asset is linked, so much so that he decides to meet her in the prison where she is being held, in Phoenix. There, the lawyer realizes how manipulative Max is about her, so he chooses to cooperate with her in getting her out of prison through a witness protection system and subsequently re-entered the retired ex-CIA resource program; by doing so, Owen would help unravel the Meladze case and he could start a new life with a new identity and a new job since he was now compromised. The lawyer can free Max after her case is transferred from state to federal administration with the approval of the general council of the agency.
The ex-CIA asset had planned to get back into the business and do business again with the Russian mafia, so she contacts Dawn Gilbrane from Yemen to arrange for Owen to be reinstated and to have Owen accompany her to Geneva to unfreeze a Swiss bank account necessary to be able to trade deals with the Russian underworld. Max reveals to Owen that Xander Goi, one of his moles, would have been waiting for them in Geneva, and Dawn would have been waiting for them in Germany at the end of the operation. An operation which, however, will not go as smooth as oil: convinced that they have unlocked the Swiss account, they arrive at the Geneva bank to discover that someone had already blocked it due to Owen’s lightness on the time zones between the United States and Switzerland. The only way to take possession of the assets inside the safe deposit box registered to Max was to convince the director of the banking institution to desist and let the two of them take possession of them. They will succeed thanks to an investigation into the director’s past which will discourage him from taking any action against them, while our two protagonists realize that there is no money or valuables inside the safety deposit box, but a kompromat.
Trip to Europe
Someone doesn’t want Max reinstated in dirty business in Belarus, so she uses those incriminating documents to set up a meeting with gangster Kirill and shift his attention from her to Xander Goi, her informant. It turns out that the latter had undertaken ongoing intimate relationships with Stasia, the wife of Kirill, reason enough for the Eastern European gangster to kill Xander in cold blood. Owen and Max understand that their position in Geneva is compromised and that Kirill would have tracked them down and killed them, so they board the first bus to Germany, where Dawn Gilbrane would have welcomed them with open arms, eager to be able to continue helping them. Hannah and Terrance arrive in Geneva to give moral support to the protagonist.
Once at Dawn’s, the three study CCTV footage in and around Geneva’s hotel, and learn that Xander Goi’s killer (the same one who was hunting them) was Nichka Lashin, a Russian mafia enforcer. She had previously tried to flirt with Owen, but luckily the boy had quickly realized that she had other intentions toward her. At this point, the stakes of the plan to follow change: Max would be sent to Prague and there, after a meeting with an agent of the Soviet mafia, she would be definitively reinstated in Belarus. But even in the Czechoslovakian city, things are going very badly…
How does The Recruit end?
We then come to the exciting events that conclude the eighth and final episode of The Recruit with a bang. Once in Prague, Max, Dawn and the entire team attend the meeting between Max and Lev, the intermediary that would have ensured her reinstatement in Belarus, but the building of the meeting is suddenly surrounded by a group of criminal rivals whom they had welcomed the return of Max. Owen then realizes that the life of the woman is in danger and so he goes out of the building and takes the machine gun of one of the members of the rival group; in the dangerous scuffle, Owen unintentionally kills one of the men and shoots Lev to save Max’s life. The two later flee by car although Owen, deeply shaken by the first kill of his career, decides he wants to abandon the path Max was leading him towards; the lawyer tries to get out of the moving car to escape from Max once and for all and return to his old life, but the woman points a gun at his head, threatening him with death. Action that Max, however, fails to accomplish because she is now too emotionally involved by the CIA guy who had helped her up to that moment.
Taken by total despair, Owen calls Hannah and confesses that in all those years he still loved her; the ex then moves from Geneva to Prague to meet with him under the War Memorial. Meanwhile, Max contacts Dawn and warns her that Owen was becoming dangerous trouble and that he needed to be monitored. The moment the boy meets his ex, he is suddenly kidnapped and put inside a car; a distraught Hannah, the witness of the kidnapping, notes that Max was among the kidnapped people inside the car. So, who was behind this unexpected action?
Will There Be A Second Season?
In the closing minutes of the season finale, we come to discover that Nichka Lashin, a Russian mob enforcer who had killed Xander in Geneva and was hot on their trail, is behind Owen and Max’s shocking kidnapping. Before firing a shot in Max’s chest, Karolina “Nichka” reveals that the former CIA asset was actually her mother and that Owen had essentially been duped; the latter was convinced that Max had lost her daughter when she had killed her husband and had fled from Belarus, instead Karolina had sided with the rival criminality that did not want her mother to be reinstated in the Russian mafia.
We don’t know if Max survived the fatal blow dealt to her by her daughter Karolina, but an ending suspended like this not only makes our mouths water as to what might happen in these characters’ futures, it questions the fate of The Recruit: Will it be confirmed for a second season? Waiting for confirmations or denials, we sincerely hope so!
