Freevee's Bringing Alex Rider Back for a Final Round of Teen Spy Drama This April

Freevee, Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service, is pushing back against rumors of its impending demise with the return of Alex Rider, Alex Horowitz’s rousing teen spy thriller. The adaptation began its life at Prime Video, where it debuted in 2020. For Season 2, the YA series moved to IMDb TV (aka The Streaming Service Formerly Known as IMDb Freedive), and continued to garner praise from critics. Now, Amazon has announced that the final chapter of Alex Rider’s (Otto Farrant) journey from ordinary student to secret agent will unfold April 5 on Freevee.

When it premiered in late 2020, Alex Rider was the perfect lockdown watch (and encapsulation of teen spirit): earnest, propulsive, and distrustful of authority. Horowitz’s book series, which offers an adolescent riff on James Bond (Horowitz has also contributed to the Bond canon), provides the foundation for the series, which began with Alex realizing he’d been surreptitiously trained by his uncle Ian (Andrew Buchan) to be a spy. He infiltrated a shadowy organization in Season 1, while also showing flashes of teen rebellion. Season 2 upped the stakes for Alex and his friends, Tom (Brenock O’Connor) and Kyra (Marli Siu); it ended with a huge cliffhanger, and a late-hour escape by the deadly Yassen (Thomas Levin).

The third and final season of the show is based on the fifth book in Horowitz’s series, Scorpia (feel free to look up book spoilers, because Horowitz and series writer Guy Burt have always ensured the series has its own twists and turns). When the new season begins, Alex is older and certainly more experienced, but the mystery of what happened to Yassen and the meaning of his final words to Alex — "Find Widow, find SCORPIA" — still haunt him. Along with returning stars Farrant, O'Connor, Siu, Levin, Stephen Dillane, and Vicky McClure, Season 3's cast includes Sofia Helin (Lust, The Bridge), Shelley Conn (Gen V, Bridgerton), Kevin McNally (The Crown), and Jason Wong (Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves.

Executive producer Eve Gutierrez said in a press release that Season 3 is “a personal [favorite] of mine and a huge turning point in Alex’s journey.” She teased that the new episodes throw "a spotlight on how all of the characters have grown and evolved over the last few years,” describing our teen protagonist as being “on the cusp of adulthood and torn between two dangerous organizations." Horowitz, who’s lived with this Bond analog longer than anyone else, was delighted by the fan reaction to Alex Rider in its first two seasons. He promises that the Scorpia-inspired storyline will lead Alex and viewers “to question everything they’ve learned so far.”

Freevee’s carved out its own programming niche with the sweet but gut-busting Sprung, the genre-blurring Jury Duty, and the heartwarming yet razor-sharp comedy of Primo. As Netflix’s recent successes have shown, international spy dramas have no borders/demographic boundaries, so hanging on to this globe-trotting thriller with a YA bent could bolster Freevee’s profile.

Danette Chavez is the Editor-in-Chief of Primetimer and its biggest fan of puns.