Yes, Jonathan Pine is back, and I'm sorry to say as personality-less as ever. Over the years, when I've reread my first blog post about The Night Manager, I've felt guilty about my cattiness regarding Tom Hiddleston in the role. What did I mean when I called him "not conventionally handsome"? He is too! There's nothing wrong at all with the spacing of his eyes. Just look what an absolute dish he is as Loki in numerous Marvel films. What was I thinking?
The second season of The Night Manager comforts me a little, as it reminds me what a yawn-inducing cipher Pine is. The role settles itself over Hiddleston like a wet blanket, dousing all mischievous Loki charm. Pine doesn't even have a sense of humour; he just spends the whole series looking anxious. At least he's not all bronzed and beefcaked this time around, so he looks all right, from my point of view. Oh, and at the start of the season, we see that he has a cat called Corky (of whom he seems fond – the cat, that is, not his season one murder victim). With that, I've run out of nice things to say about the character. Better luck in Doomsday, Tom.
Why this neglect of proper character development for the hero? I suspect the head writer of the series, David Farr, is a bit of a villain-lover. He certainly invests more vim into depicting the baddies: although by no means complex, they are a lot more colourful than Pine and his allies. It's funny, because I didn't get this feeling from the first season, which had a certain tone of moral outrage. Now, although the villain plan is so evil you just have to root for Pine & Co regardless, the slight disdain towards the rich, privileged and criminal is replaced by shameless fascination. Pine seemed perfectly fine shrugging off Richard Roper and his fate at the end of season one. In season two, ten years later, he's still obsessed by Roper and his legacy, and so is the series.
It's hard to review season two of The Night Manager without spoilers (English newspapers didn't even try, so I got the main twist spoiled and was miffed, although it was rather an obvious one). Anyway, the setup is that Pine once again has to go undercover after he gets wind of the dealings of Teddy Dos Santos, who calls himself "Roper's true heir". Dos Santos is also into illegal arms dealing, in spite of having his HQ in Colombia, where you'd have thought it would be tempting to get into other kinds of shady trades. I don't quite understand why they made the Night Manager baddies arms dealers. Wouldn't drugs be more boo-hissable? Or is this just my Swedish bias?
At the start, I thought I'd like season two more than the sluggishly paced first season. The thriller elements worked well, and Diego Calva's Dos Santos was a charming villain. He had lots more chemistry with Hiddleston's Pine than Pine's potential love interest, sultry Roxana (Camila Morrone), and single-handedly provided most of it. It soon becomes clear that Dos Santos is merely a pawn and not the Big Bad (of course not, he's way too cute). After That Twist at the end of episode three, there are still many enjoyable scenes and nail-biting sequences, but there's no denying the plot's bizarre. One of the protagonists from the first season has to act completely out of character for it all to happen.
Still, if you see it as entertaining, high-octane thriller nonsense with no pretensions to hard-hitting realism, season two of The Night Manager is a good time – up until the highly disappointing ending. I know there's a season three in the works, but really, what was that? I'm not sure how a third season will be able to salvage the whole, to be honest. Though I'll watch it, naturally. I need to know what happened to Corky the cat.
The show I alluded to in the first paragraph? The Legend of Vox Machina, animated, R-rated fantasy inspired by a game I've never played. And yet, it has considerably more complex and likeable characters than a supposedly high-prestige BBC drama like The Night Manager. That's the way of the world.
