Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fauda’ Season 4 On Netflix, Where Doron Comes Out Of Forced Retirement To Fight An Old Enemy

Fauda has proven to be a consistent hit for Netflix because there no grey areas on the show. It’s good guys and bad guys, and a feeling of family among the people fighting the bad guys. The series’ first new season since 2020 drops, and the show has gone international.

FAUDA SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An armored truck drives down a street in Jenin, a city in the Palestinian Authority.

The Gist: A group of robbers with automatic weapons intercepts the armored truck, but little do the robbers know that this is actually a sting operation by the IDF’s Mista’arvim unit. The robbers are ambushed by a hidden agent, Sagi (Idan Amedi), who chases one of the robbers through the streets, on orders from the mission’s commander, Dana (Meirav Shirom), to bring one of the robbers in alive. Another agent, Nurit (Rona-Lee Shim’on), drives the truck while her colleagues Eli (Yaakov Zada Daniel) and Steve Pinto (Doron Ben-David) tend to an injured robber, making sure they pick up Sagi.

After Dana questions the surviving robber, she finds out that they are stealing from their boss, an ally of the unit. After they enlist him to question his employee, he yields an address. A raid of that address shows that a group is planning something big, but it’s not known if it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, or some unknown group.

Doron Kavillo (Lior Raz) is working on his family’s farm after being banished from Mista’arvim after the death of one of his team. We see him beat the snot out of two guys trying to steal one of his horses, but a familiar face greets him at the police station: Gabi aka Captain Eyov (Itzik Cohen). He wants Doron to accompany him to Brussels, where he needs to talk to an informant named Omar (Amir Boutrous); he thinks of Omar as a son, and the guy is getting cold feet as he’s undercover in a Hezbollah cell that’s planning a massive operation.

But first, he wants Doron to show up at the wedding of Sagi and Nurit. He’s greeted warmly by the team there, though he gets into a bit of a spat with a drunken Eli, who, as commander, testified that Doron isn’t fit to serve.

In Brussels, Doron questions why he was even removed from the team, and explains to Gabi why he stayed away from his old colleagues for the last few years. When Omar changes the meeting point from a safe house to his own apartment, Gabi rolls with it, despite the fact that it goes against protocol. When he sends Doron out to the front to guard the entrance, the rest of the agents get ambushed; when Doron finally gets up to the apartment, both Omar and Gabi are gone.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Fauda certainly takes its cues from Hatufim (aka Prisoners of War), the series that Homeland was based on.

Our Take: Raz and Avi Issacharoff are still firmly in charge of Fauda, basing their stories on their real-life experience in the IDF’s intelligence service. There’s moral dilemmas, sure, but there’s mostly a lot of shooting, high-stakes antiterrorism operations, and the camaraderie between members of the team that Doron used to consider family.

This is the most ambitious mission of the show’s four seasons, however, because it takes the team outside of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, out to Belgium and Lebanon, as the team tries to rescue Gabi and flush out this massive Hezbollah plot. Of course, Doron will also get the opportunity to reintegrate himself with his work family, which is always the second major source of drama.

Fauda is just one of those shows that continues to bring the right level of action and tension, and each season is accessible to people who may not have watched all of the previous seasons. But your comfort with the series will vary, as it continues to be a series where the heroes and the villains are pretty well defined: The unit’s reason for being is to flush out Palestinian terror cells who are intent on killing as many Israelis as possible.

Those kinds of plots wore thin on us a number of years ago, but we don’t live in a country that’s constantly under threat by its immediate neighbors.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Doron enters the apartment where Omar and Gabi are meeting, and both men are gone.

Sleeper Star: We’re looking forward to seeing what Inbar Lavi, new to the cast, does as Shani Russo.

Most Pilot-y Line: When one of Doron’s colleagues asks him why he has a cut on his face, he calls it a “ratchet accident.” Even he knows that his colleagues are too smart to believe that.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you put global politics aside Fauda is still a pulse-pounding show that is never boring to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.