It’s been almost a decade since The Night Manager debuted on Prime and became a massive streaming hit. Based on John LeCarré’s eponymous 1993 espionage novel, David Farr’s six-episode series followed former British soldier and nocturnal hotelier Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) as an undercover spy attempting to bring down infamous arms dealer and “worst person in the world” Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Well before streaming’s obsession with spy thrillers, the show made an immediate splash with its star-studded cast (Hiddleston, Laurie, and Olivia Colman all won Golden Globes for their performances), numerous international locales, and a high-stakes plot that relied more on cunning and clandestine maneuvering than gunplay.
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Now, Jonathan Pine—or should we say Alex Goodwin?—has returned. Nine years after foiling a lucrative weapons tradeoff and delivering Roper to Syrian captors, Pine has gone undercover again, reuniting with foreign investigator Angela Burr (Colman) as an MI6 operative. When one of Roper’s former mercenaries shows up in London, Pine and Burr find themselves embroiled in a South American conspiracy involving a Colombian arms dealer and an internal leak that gives them both deja vu. Though LeCarré never wrote a sequel (hence the delay), Farr says he eventually received his blessing to make a second season before the author’s death in 2020. “I’d always hoped I might return to the role,” Hiddleston told The Guardian. “David’s vision made that possibility real.”
Over that long hiatus, it’s understandable if you might have forgotten the first season’s thrilling twists and turns. With the long overdue Season 2 starting Sunday (and Season 3 already confirmed), we’ve put together a handy catch-up dossier to debrief you on the key details and plot points you’ll need to remember before Pine’s next dangerous mission.
How did Pine become a spy?
When we first meet Jonathan Pine in 2011, he’s a handsome night manager at the Nefertiti, a lavish, five-star hotel in the heart of Cairo. In the midst of the Egyptian revolution, he’s grown close to Sophie Alekan, the girlfriend of Egyptian playboy Freddie Hamid, but their relationship soon becomes strained when she delivers him documents detailing Hamid’s illegal chemical weapons deals with arms dealer Richard Roper. Pine covertly sends them to Angela Burr, a London investigator at the International Enforcement Agency, but when the information is leaked to Roper, he kills the deal and Hamid has Sophie beaten and eventually killed.
Four years later, Pine is the night manager at the Meisters Hotel in the Swiss Alps. Still deeply scarred by his ex-lover’s death, Pine surprisingly encounters his nemesis in person when Roper and his late-arriving entourage check into the hotel. With a chance for revenge, he steals the group’s phone SIM cards and sends them to Burr, but refuses to engage in further espionage. Already harboring her own personal vendetta against Roper, Burr visits Pine in Switzerland and convinces him to infiltrate Roper’s business and avenge Sophie’s death. With nothing to lose, Pine agrees and Operation Limpet begins.
What happens when Pine joins Richard Roper’s inner circle?
In order to go undetected and earn Roper’s trust, Burr gives Pine a fake criminal background and stages a kidnapping of Roper’s son, Danny (Noah Jupe), allowing Pine to play the hero by rescuing him. Enamored by his courageous display, Roper overlooks the suspicions of his right-hand man, Corky Corcoran (Tom Stoppard), who threatens to kill Pine if he learns of any deceitful intent. To get Corky off his back, Pine exposes his drinking issues, then takes over as the owner of Tradepass, the front company that Roper uses to sell weapons under the guise of agricultural equipment. With a new alias, Andrew Birch, Pine sneaks around Roper’s Majorca compound and relays key documents to Burr, all while keeping an indiscriminate profile.
Throughout his snooping and jet-setting, Pine becomes infatuated with Roper’s girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), who eventually learns his real identity and begins to plot a way out of her toxic relationship. Meanwhile, in London, Burr learns that an MI6 official and CIA station chief have been helping cover Roper’s deals—and have subsequently put red tape around Burr’s surveillance efforts, threatening her the more she digs into their records. It’s not until a trip to The Haven, a remote Syrian military base where Roper exhibits his weaponry to foreign assets, that the stakes increase. Over the course of their military demonstration, Roper’s men kill wandering father and son villagers, and Pine kills Corky in a violent fight, setting him up as an inside leak to keep his ruse alive.
The next morning, Pine alerts Burr that Roper’s weapons convoy, used as a philanthropic aid cover, is heading to the Turkish border. With help from Joel Steadman, an American ally, Burr orders the U.S. military to stop the cargo, but all they find is farming supplies. Roper’s con job effectively ends Operation Limpet, but Burr and Pine keep operating independently once they learn Roper is determined to finish the weapons trade in Cairo with Hamid and Barghati, another wealthy arms buyer.
How does Season 1 end?
The series comes full circle in the season finale when Roper checks into the Nefertiti. Inside his suite, Jed memorizes the code to Roper’s safe, which holds the arms trade certificate, then quietly shares the number with Pine (allowing Burr to access it from the hotel) when the whole group visits a local casino. As Hamid gambles, Pine drugs his whiskey, then offers to take him home, where he drowns him in the pool as payback for killing Sophie. Later that night, Pine visits the weapons site with his former hotel colleague and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who rig the cargo trucks with cell-phone detonating explosives.
The next morning, Roper discovers Jed attempting to return the certificate to the safe and learns she’s helped Pine leak information. Down the hall, Burr saves Jed by taking down one of Roper’s security heavies while Roper’s team takes Pine to the weapons compound, finally aware that he’s the mole. Once Barghati shows up, they force Pine to complete the transaction, but Pine detonates the explosives instead and, having transferred a $300-million down payment out of the Tradepass account, leaves Roper in debt to Barghati.
Upon Roper’s return to the hotel, Burr and Joel wait with Egyptian police to arrest him for breaking import laws and conspiracy to commit murder. This time, Roper can’t count on MI6 to help him thanks to a previous negotiation with Burr’s team. As Roper and his associates are cuffed and thrown into a police van, the arms dealer still believes he’ll find a way out of prison in a few days—until Barghati and his men infiltrate the vehicle and lead him elsewhere, implying his swift end. “He deserves it,” Burr states flatly.
It’s ultimately a positive ending for Pine. He survives, gets justice, and says goodbye to Jed, who returns to America to reconnect with her son.
What’s in store for Season 2?
Pine is in a much different headspace than when the series began. He’s suffered loss and heartache, and become much more cynical and hardened by the world thanks to Roper’s geo-political power. In Season 2, expect Pine to confront those feelings head-on, thanks to another likeminded arms dealer and alluring femme fatale who put him in the crosshairs again. Though the world has changed drastically over the last decade, Roper’s influence continues to haunt him. How will he escape his lingering grip this time?
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