Who is Karolina in The Recruit?

You can watch the official trailer for The Recruit Season 1 here on Youtube .

The Recruit: The Season 1 Plot Summary

Owen Hendricks is hired by the CIA. As one of his first tasks, he has to analyze the hundreds of letters the agency receives each year from people threatening to reveal classified information and filing lawsuits.

Owen identifies a real and potential threat among the many letters: a message from a certain Maxine Meladze, which concerns top-secret information that she could reveal publicly, demanding that she be released from prison.

Owen takes the initiative: he first goes to Yemen and talks to Dawn Gilbane, asking her for information on Maxine.

He then meets Maxine in her prison, and understands that the threat is real: she wants to get out of jail and he must take care of it.

His boss, Walter Nyland, is pleased to see Owen take the initiative, but he needs to make the threat as easy as possible.

After some teething trouble, Owen manages to get help from some of his colleagues, especially Amelia, who answers many of Owen’s questions in exchange for a brief romance with him.

In this way, Owen first gets the feds to take over Maxine’s case, and then, he manages to get Max back as a former CIA agent, preventing him from going on trial for murder.

While doing his job, Owen makes contact with Xander Goi, a compromised CIA agent about whom Maxine has a lot of dangerous information.

Owen also meets “not Bob”, a high-level head of the president’s office who is concerned that his name has been made: he asks Owen to find out how his name came to be, which Owen does, realizing that the name “not Bob” was summoned by Max just to speed things up – he knew his name because Xander Goi mentioned it once while drunk.

Dawn Gilbane returns from Yemen and leads the CIA’s new mission: recruiting Max Meladze as a valuable connection to the Russian secret services.

At some point, it seems clear that Dawn and Xander plan to kill Max because she knows too much, but this plan doesn’t come to light as the plot continues: on the contrary, both Dawn Gilbane and Xander Goi contribute to the interest of the CIA, help Max get to Belarus and restore his Russian connections.

The plan takes shape in the plot of The Recruit: he will travel to Geneva to allow Max to withdraw money from one of his frozen accounts.

Max will use the money to buy his house and connections in Belarus. Owen gets a time window when the account will be unfrozen, using a contact provided by his roommates.

But his plan fails due to a time zone misunderstanding: when Max and Owen enter the Swiss bank, the manager confirms that the account is still frozen, which blocks their request to take money.

Max has another idea: he will collect from his safe deposit box a set of photos that he will sell to Kirill, a Russian mafia boss.

Those photographs will reveal the identity of the man with whom his wife was cheating on him: CIA agent Xander Goi. This brings us to the end of The Recruit;

The Recruit ending explained: Who is Karolina/ Nichka?

After Max sells Xander’s secret, we see Xander Goi walk into Max and Owen’s hotel room and once in the room he is killed.

This complicates the operation: Max and Owen escape and lose contact with everyone, and the CIA suspects that they are involved in Xander’s death.

The truth is that Xander is killed by the army led by Nichka Lashin, a Russian mob personality trying to kill Max: Xander is in the wrong place at the wrong time in the plot of The Recruit.

Max and Owen cross the border and contact Dawn again.

Max explains that Xander is dead because she revealed to Kirill that he was his wife’s lover: it’s a lie because Xander dies a few minutes after the deal between Max and Kirill, but she prefers this version to hide the fact that someone is trying to kill them.

The operation continues and Max is supposed to meet Lev and give him the money that will allow him to re-enter Belarus.

Max meets with Lev, and the two begin to discuss the terms of the deal, but the Russian mob shows up again and starts shooting, trying to kill Max.

Max survives and kills Lev because he would now be one more enemy since he believed her to be a traitor. Max and Owen escape in a car with no real plan.

Here, Owen decides to take a step back and leave the mission and the CIA. Max threatens to shoot her, but she has feelings for him, so she lets him go.

But she calls Dawn and explains that Owen is now a problem. Meanwhile, Owen contacts Hannah, his roommate and ex-girlfriend, who flew to Europe to help him.

She is one of the few people who knows that Owen is in Prague because she received a message from an unknown number informing her: the message was probably sent by Nichka, who is trying to catch Owen and Max and could make use of the presence of Hannah for this purpose.

As the plot of The Recruit comes to a close, we see Owen being kidnapped by a black van in front of Hannah’s eyes. He wakes up in a dark room, tied up, and Max is next to him, kidnapped like him.

The kidnapper appears: it is Nichka Lashin, the girl from the Russian mafia who is trying to kill Max. The plot twist happens quickly: Max addresses Nichka as Karolina, the name of his daughter, and we learn that her daughter is actually alive, working for the Russian mafia.

Karolina shoots Max and we won’t know if she dies (that’s left for a possible season 2). Nichka/Karolina confronts Owen and asks who she is.

Nichka Lashin is therefore Karolina, Max’s daughter. We don’t know her story, but we do understand that, at some point, her path took a different direction than her mother’s, and now the two are enemies. Nichka/Karolina wanted her mother dead from her, and in the end we don’t know if Max will survive or not.

Who is Nichka Lashin?

Nichka Lashin is featured in the sixth episode of The Recruit . In this episode, Max returns to the CIA and goes through a process to become a verified asset. Her mission is to regain the high rank she held within the Russian mafia. Agent Gilbane and Max therefore study a chart of all the Mafia lieutenants working for the Council. Among them is Nichka Lashin.

Gilbane expresses that she and her team are working to eliminate any lieutenants who might pose a threat to Max’s return to the Russian Mafia. However, Max convinces Gilbane that she can get Nichka Lashin and a few others to go over to her side, hinting that there is a history between her and Nichka .

Later, when Owen and Max arrive in Vienna, Max meets a mysterious woman who introduces herself as Marta. However, that woman is none other than Nichka Lashin , who is trying to find out more about Owen and assess the threat he poses.

To the surprise of Owen and the viewers, Max identifies the woman as his daughter. So it’s obvious that Nichka Lashin is actually Max’s daughter. While we don’t know why Max lied about Karolina’s whereabouts, it’s likely to protect his daughter from the CIA and mob. Nevertheless, Nichka Lashin , alias Karolina, has a grudge against her mother. Before Max can say anything else, Karolina shoots him in the chest, thus appearing to kill Max.

What could happen in season 2 of The Recruit?

Although the plot ends with an open ending, there is no confirmation yet if The Recruit will be confirmed for season 2, but Netflix will likely comment on this soon.

In fact, the series has been written with a second season in mind: too many open points and mysteries to be solved.

Owen is undoubtedly alive and will have to escape from the dangerous situation: he is in the hands of the Russian mafia, and Karolina questions him about what he was doing with her mother.

Max could still be alive; in that case, we will have to understand whether he will manage to restore his position in Belarus and what money he will use for it.

We’ll need to better understand Dawn Gilbane’s true intentions: does she really want to handle Max as an agency asset, or is she waiting for the first reasonable opportunity to kill her? And we’ll have to see what happens between Hannah and Owen: the two still seem to have feelings for each other, and maybe they could get back together.

All of this, along with the other collateral plot elements of The Recruit Season 1, would have to play out in an eventual Season 2.

But while we wait, we always have in this article the full plot summary of The Recruit and the ending explained, including the theories about Nichka Lashin / Karolina.