Summary
The Night Manager returns for Season 2 with more explicit connections to the first season than people were necessarily expecting. But it remains a spy thriller of real quality.
Mental health seems to be a growing concern in the espionage business. The Agency was almost entirely about the psychological toll of being a spy, and Season 2 of The Night Manager, which finally returns after almost a decade since its surprise-hit debut, features Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine speaking with a therapist played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste. He can’t sleep. He’s stressed. She’s frightened of him. And this is before Episode 1 of the new outing turns his world upside-down (again).
Ordinarily, so long after the first season, a continuation would have little, if anything, to do with its predecessor outside of a couple of returning characters. But the inciting events of this season seem intimately connected to the events of the first, which, given how long it has been, mandates a very brief recap of how we left things. So, here we go.
Past Is Prologue
In the first season, Pine had managed to upset the operations of notorious arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), leading to his capture not by the authorities but by a criminal cartel who were less than pleased about their shipment of arms and hundreds of millions of dollars going missing.
Episode 1 of The Night Manager Season 2 picks up four years after this, in Syria, with Pine and Angela Burr meeting up to discuss identifying Roper’s now heavily bearded body (he was, one assumed, kept alive a distressingly long time before his inevitable death). This is a formality, or so we’re told. Once identified, Roper’s body will be disposed of, and there will be no official records of it ever having existed in the first place. Nobody will know what happened to him, not even his own family.
Grim as this is, it should constitute the end of this particular narrative strand. But Pine’s out of luck in that regard, as we’ll see.
The Night Owls
Pine, now known as Alex Goodwin, is leading the Night Owls, a clandestine MI6 surveillance unit that keeps tabs on London’s luxury hotels with a mind to catching any dodgy characters in characteristically dodgy acts. He’s knackered and still reeling from the events of Season 1, hence the therapy, but he’s losing himself in his work to remain distracted. Healthy!
Naturally, when he spots the familiar face of Jaco, one of Roper’s old goons, on what would otherwise be fairly routine surveillance, he’s alarmed. His boss, Rex Mayhew, tells him to leave it alone. But Rex has a secret new phone number, which means something’s definitely amiss. So, Pine gets his team – comprising Sally, Mike, Waleed, and Graham – to tail Jaco, whom they overhear telling a contact named Adam Hollywell that a shipment will be arriving in Cartagena in three days, coming from “Richard Roper’s true disciple”.
Adam leads the team to a London house connected to the head of River House’s supervisory council, Mayra, and when Rex tries to contact Pine to tell him something, he dies, ostensibly by suicide. Barely a moment has elapsed, and we’re already in the midst of a double-crossing arms-dealing conspiracy.
Hidden Messages
Rex’s new secret phone number leads Pine to a new secret phone, hidden in a bookshelf, locked with a code that Pine has to figure out through highlighted page numbers in a book of trees of old England, containing a URL with a Dropbox of incriminating images connecting Jaco to Mayra to a man named Teddy Dos Santos, and coming preprogrammed with only two numbers: Pine’s own, and one belonging to Roxana Bolaños, a Miami-based Colombian shipping broker.
Pine does the only logical thing given these connections and has Roxana kidnapped and held under armed guard while he connects a few more dots. In short, Jaco is working for Dos Santos, the CEO of Barquero, who is also Roxana’s boss. Dos Santos has a philanthropic cover in the form of a charity named Aurora, which was connected to Roper, and those two definitely had a relationship of some kind since there are picture message exchanges testifying to such.
Roper’s son, Danny, who must be important since he’s played by Noah Jupe, doesn’t seem to know anything about his old man’s relationship with Teddy. But he wouldn’t be inclined to tell Pine anyway, since Pine is wildly unsympathetic to the idea that this kid’s dad was tortured and executed by a cartel and burned to ashes in the middle of Nowhere, Syria.
An Explosive Climax
The Night Manager Season 2, Episode 1 ends with a flurry of action to build a big cliffhanger for the follow-up. Fittingly, the climax takes place in a Spanish hotel, where Pine’s team is trying to spy on Jaco’s meeting with Teddy. Meanwhile, Roxana is still being held in London, though she’s able to feign a distraction for long enough to get a message to someone.
In Colombia, Teddy finds the tracker that was planted on Jaco’s briefcase, alerting him to the idea of a setup. In response, he kills Jaco, Waleed, and Graham. In London, someone kills Roxana’s babysitter, Tony, and takes her elsewhere.
By the time Pine gets to the hotel room, he finds Jaco’s body wrapped in an explosive vest. He sets off running just as the thing explodes, with Teddy rather smugly getting into his car as the hotel blows up.
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