Summary
A location change gives The Night Manager a different vibe, which may or may not be welcomed by fans who are expecting more le Carré and less Fleming. But there’s still plenty to like.
The Night Manager has never been a particularly vibes-heavy show, unless, of course, the vibes you’re looking for are rather grounded and intense ones. But Season 2 has evidently said, “Sod that,” and in Episode 2 it takes the full James Bond route, with swanky locations, gorgeous femme fatales, and believability an extremely minor concern. After a relatively on-brand opening, this comes as quite a surprise, though whether it’s welcome or not will depend, I suppose, on what you come to a show like this looking for in the first place.
Needless to say, Pine survived the hotel explosion that capped off the premiere, though everyone else, including Mayra and the rest of the corrupt River House, believes him to be dead. This allows Pine to surreptitiously hook up with Sally, the only member of his previous Night Owls team still in the land of the living. She becomes his Q analogue, someone to help him out behind the scenes and hook him up with fake identities and cover stories. And that’s the main hook of this episode, since it transplants Pine to Colombia, cosplaying as someone else.
A Whole New Man
The new Pine identity is a merchant banker’s son from Norfolk who has spent the last few years working for a Swiss bank in Hong Kong. He has left under mysterious circumstances – or so the story goes – to pursue new investment opportunities in Colombia. He likes a drink, is prone to risk-taking, and immediately ingratiates himself with Teddy Dos Santos, who gets significantly more screen time here.
This is largely an excuse for Tom Hiddleston to do a James Bond impression. Aspects of it don’t ring entirely true – working-class Sally telling him not to wear socks with his loafers, for instance – but it doesn’t matter a great deal since it’s all about the general vibes. You can really see this in a swanky fundraiser where Pine runs into – who else? – Roxana, who turns out to be Teddy’s favoured squeeze despite having claimed in the premiere not to know him. Oops.
A Love Triangle
In the absence of an obvious romance option for Pine like Elizabeth Debicki’s character in Season 1, Season 2 provides two, one of them quite unconventional. But it can’t just be me who thinks there’s pretty obvious sexual chemistry between Pine and Teddy, can it?
And, of course, there’s a good amount between Pine and Roxana. The casting of Camila Morrone turns out to have been rather inspired, since if you want someone to be believable as the kind of stunner an international gun runner and a beleaguered secret agent would tussle over, you might as well start flicking through Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rolodex of former flings.
I’m not sure where all this is going romantically, but I’m convinced I’m not imagining it. The final scene – more on this in a moment – has a very detectable air of supplication to it, as if Pine is realising in that moment that all he really wants in life is the handsome, suavely-dressed criminal he’s supposed to be hunting down. “Make me clean,” indeed.
The James Bond Connection
I keep mentioning Bond, which seems ill-fitting for a show that has historically embraced its John le Carré source material rather than leapt the transom to a more Fleming-flavoured spy story. But Episode 2 of The Night Manager Season 2 doesn’t just evoke Bond in Pine’s stylish cover and knockout potential beau, but it also cribs a few recognisable sequences and ideas from the franchise’s recent past.
Again, this might just be me, but there is an unmistakable air of Javier Bardem’s Skyfall villain to Teddy (and, lest we forget, there was a homoerotic contour to that, too). A couple of conversations – interrogations in all but name – feel deeply reminiscent of that movie. And then there’s the climactic stretch where Teddy tries to find out what Pine is really up to by giving him a truckload of cocaine and spiked champagne, which has a touch of the poisoning scene from Casino Royale about it.
It’s ridiculous, this bit. Pine ends up falling in the pool and survives only because one of Teddy’s goons drags him from the water and drapes him, barely conscious, across Teddy’s lap. Teddy, while stroking Pine’s face, asks him what he’s really after, and Pine delivers a note-perfect cover story suggesting he defrauded his former Swiss bank employer of a few hundred million dollars and would like to launder it through Teddy’s operation. Either this guy’s the best agent who ever lived, or someone’s having me on.
The More Things Change
This is the point where I feel like mileage may start to vary. Season 2 wasn’t written by John le Carré, and you can tell, which is doubtlessly going to turn people off. It remains propulsive and well-performed, and exceedingly nice to look at, but some of that essential character has been planed away in the decade since the first season.
We’re clearly not supposed to be purging that first season from our memories, though, since events and characters in it keep getting mentioned. There’s an entire plot point here about Roper having potentially had an illegitimate child who was secretly raised in a monastery – no points for guessing who this kid might have grown up to be – that connects the respective gun-running plotlines more directly. But it’s very much not the same show, for better or for worse.
We’ll have to see how things develop.
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