After years of waiting — almost a decade, in fact — the BBC has given us all the news that we’ve been praying for. The Night Manager is finally coming back to our screens, with Tom Hiddleston reprising the central role of Jonathan Pine, and we couldn’t be more excited.
First-look images have already dropped, giving us our first glimpse of Hiddleston back in the lead role, as well as Olivia Colman as Angela Burr and several newcomers in the form of Camila Morrone and Diego Calva.
It’s going to be must-watch television, but it’s certainly been a while since it last aired. What exactly happened in season one? Fear not: we’ve racked our brains and recapped it all for you here.
The start
We begin in the depths of the Arab Spring. Our hero: Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), though here he’s mainly referred to as Pine, in the tradition of most great spy characters.
He’s a middling sort of MI6 secret agent, whose job here seems to involve working in a hotel, giving free cocktails to the guests and flirting with Sophie (Aure Atika), the mistress to local gangster Freddie Hamid. Naturally, they sleep together — there will be a lot of that over the course of the season.
At this point, we learn that Sophie is actually called Samira, and she’s a spy too; in fact, she’s stolen a stock list of weapons from Hamid (including, but not limited to, napalm, chlorine gas and sarin, lovely) — which Pine photocopies and gives to a diplomat friend to spirit out of the country.
All well and good, but this kick-starts a chain of events that ultimately leads to Samira’s death at the hands of the person selling those weapons to Hamid: a stone-cold villain by the name of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). He seems squeaky clean on the outside (the season opens with him speaking about his humanitarian work on a YouTube clip) but we all know he’s a bastard.
After this, the action picks up four years later. Pine has taken himself off to Zermatt to lick his wounds and brood, when who should walk into his new hotel (where he is of course working as the Night Manager, drumroll): Roper.
Naturally, this means vengeance, and after a bit of snooping, the first episode ends with Pine sneaking into Roper’s room and giving a bunch of his stolen SIM cards to Angela Burr, the intelligence operative played by Olivia Colman.
The action
As the series continues, Pine ingratiates himself further into Roper’s good graces. As part of operation ‘Limpet’, he’s given a fake criminal background (which requires a trip to Devon where he showers under a waterfalls and woos the local ladies). Then, MI6 stage a kidnapping of Roper’s supermodel girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), and son, so that Pine can swoop in and save the day. Just like that, he’s in good with Roper.
Kind of. Corcoran (Tom Hollander, fabulous as ever), Roper’s right hand man, has a lot of suspicions. “I’m not sure at all about you, Pine. I think you might be stringing us along,” he says at one point. If that’s true, “I will hood you and hang you up by those lovely ankles until the truth falls out of you by gravity. Toodle-oo.”
After some lengthy interrogation by Roper in his Mallorcan fortress, Roper seems to accept that Pine is who he says he is (his skills as a criminal mastermind leave a lot to be desired, to be honest). And after having cheerfully cleared him of seemingly all suspicion, Pine is free to get to work as a spy, inveigling himself into Roper’s glamorous, high-flying world of ‘business’ while getting ever closer to the ugly arms-dealing truth lying underneath.
He infiltrates Roper’s Citadel inner sanctum, photographing documents relating to Roper’s cover company Tradepass, which sells ‘agricultural equipment’ that are really weapons.
Then, he naturally falls for Jed. The two have some rather angsty sex and it seems like she’s willing to help Pine bring down Roper. However, the two’s rather flagrant transgressions come under suspicion from Roper’s henchman Corky. They just about get away with it, and Corky soon falls from favour due to his rampant alcoholism: in fact, Pine then gets his job as frontman for Tradepass. Lovely.
Back at MI6 headquarters, we (and Burr) discover two rather suspicious weapon sales that are codenamed Halo and Felix. After a bit of digging, it’s revealed that Halo is Geoffrey Dromgoole (Tobias Menzies), a senior MI6 official, and Felix is Barbara Vandom, the CIA station chief in London.
The pair have been helping falsify documents to help Roper’s sales, and have kept him out of trouble with the law. This discovery, though, eventually gets back to Roper, who has his lawyer Apo murdered, suspecting him of being the mole. Then, he tells Pine he still suspects one of his inner circle of being the mole (hmm, could it be his loyal henchmen or the newbie?).
With that ominous pronouncement, it’s time for a business trip on the private jet to the Haven, Roper’s ‘kingdom’ in Syria, where Pine has been tasked with organising a weapons demonstration for a consortium of wealthy buyers.
We see a fleet of remote controlled warplanes bomb the living daylights out of neighbouring villages, and we see him kill a local father and son — something Pine tries to stop, and Jed has to hear. It’s all very grisly, but maybe not as grisly as Pine beating Corky to death after Corky almost grasses up Pine.
Pine also discovers the registration numbers of an ‘aid convoy’ delivering weapons over the border to them, for which Burr organises a US military inspection.
When the trucks are stopped, though, they realise that it’s only agricultural equipment in there after all: Roper was playing them. Has Pine turned traitor, and is he feeding them false information? Burr doesn’t believe it, but nevertheless, Roper’s entourage soon leaves for Cairo, where he contacts the man who started it all: Hamid.
The ending
From there, things shift into overdrive. Burr travels to Cairo, and Pine tells her they can still stop the weapons from being sold.
Meanwhile, Pine spikes Hamid’s drinks at a casino, and learns that Roper ordered Sophie’s death (Hamid then gets drowned in his own pool). Pine then taps up his old hotel colleague Youssuf, for his contacts in the Muslim Brotherhood, and asks them to try and infiltrate the compound where the weapons are being stored.
Finally, at this point, Roper realises Pine is the mole (after torturing Jed, his own girlfriend). Everybody rushes to the compound, where Roper threatens Jed’s life if Pine doesn’t go through with the weapons sale.
Instead, Pine uses a remote control to blow up the trucks and effectively bankrupts Tradepass in one go. Roper, faced with a load of angry buyers without their promised weapons, attempts to go to his friend Dromgoole in MI6 for support, but Burr has managed to get ahead of him and cuts off all support for Roper.
We end with Roper facing prison (or worse), Jed leaving for America to visit her son and Pine promising to visit her. Phew.
The Night Manager Season 2 is coming to BBC One later this year
Olivia Colman to return to award-winning role for The Night Manager series two
The Night Manager confirmed for second series with new script ‘being developed’
Tom Hiddleston reveals he 'peed' on Night Manager co-star Tom Hollander
Roy Greenslade: Why The Night Manager showed there will always be big money in playing the spy game
