The Night Manager Recap Season 2 Episode 1: The Trees of Old England
- Jan 11
- 7 min read
Updated: Feb 2
‘I am the man who will not explode’, the now named Alex Goodwin calmly told his work therapist, and I was like, there he is. That’s the Tom Hiddleston I first saw on the big screen 15 (!) years ago. Take away all the internet noise, and we have a quietly brilliant actor who nearly a decade later slipped back into the skin of his night owl spy character as though no time had passed. Welcome back, Mr. Pine. Let’s get on with this.
Following his takedown of Richard Roper’s operations, and later confirmation with Angela Burr that Roper had died, Jonathan Pine was no more. Instead, there was Alex Goodwin, who headed Night Owls, a quiet, decidedly non-glamourous surveillance unit that focused on top hotels. Alex’s boss Rex Mayhew wanted him to retire, as Angela did, but Jonathan/ Alex wanted to stay, and so the Night Owls operation under his leadership was extended another three years.
One routine surveillance night, Jonathan/ Alex recognised a member of Roper’s old crew, Jaco Brouwer. He went to his boss Rex, who told him to forget about it. Rex also gave him a new number, which he told Jonathan/ Alex to memorise and destroy, a clear clue that this was going to be important later on. And it was. While the first season of The Night Manager was based on a 1993 John Le Carre novel, the second season is an original story, but I appreciate these careful breadcrumb laying that honoured old school spycraft. Let’s stick a pin on this for now, we will come back to this later.
The ghosts of his time with Richard Roper continued to haunt Jonathan/ Alex; the presence of one of his men in London was not something he could ignore. He got his team to tail Jaco, and saw him meet a man called Adam Holywell, a middleman who connected UK companies with shadowy clients. Their brief conversation mentioned a shipment to Cartagena in three days, something about an Anniversary, and a man who called himself ‘Richard Roper’s true disciple’. Jonathan/ Alex tailed Adam to a house that was apparently being run by MI-6, and saw Mayra Cavendish, the head of the River House Supervisory Council, exit.
Naturally, Jonathan/ Alex’s first call was to his boss Rex, who told him to come to his house but to park away, and to use the side entrance. As Jonathan/ Alex drove, he saw police cars heading toward Rex’s house. Rex’s wife Celia called him and told him Rex had died. When Jonathan/ Alex got to Rex’s house, a River House man named Basil was there; he told Jonathan/ Alex that Rex took a stash of pills his wife did not know about. Why was the apparent suicide of a high ranking MI-6 officer simply being accepted by River House without fuss?
Jonathan/ Alex knew there was something more, and he went to Rex’s office and searched it. He remembered the number Rex had given him and called it, and heard the ringing inside the office. There was a phone hidden in the bookcase, next to a book called The Trees of Old England. In the chapter for ‘The Pine’, the pages were underlined; that was the four-digit code that unlocked the phone. Old school spycraft.
There was a file called ‘The Chief’ with plenty of photos. One photo had a note, ‘Why is Mayra in business with this man’, with an arrow to the same man who appeared in multiple photos in the file. There were also photos of brutal killings. The phone rang, the caller identified only as ‘Broker’. Jonathan/ Alex’s team traced the number to Roxana Bolaños, the same woman whom Jonathan/ Alex saw leaving Rex’s house on the day of his birthday party.
Jonathan/ Alex had to tell his team that Rex Mayhew was murdered and that River House was involved to get them to help him with the next phase of what was now an unsanctioned operation. They located Roxana, and Jonathan/ Alex persuaded her to come with him because, he said, her life may be in danger. There were only two numbers on Rex’s phone, Roxana’s and Jonathan/ Alex’s. Jonathan/ Alex took Roxana to a hotel, and had one of his men, Tony, keep watch. As they walked in, I had a flashback of Season One Jonathan Pine taking Sophie Alekan to a friend’s house to keep her safe. This would not be the last Season One/ Two parallel in this episode.
According to Roxana, she met Rex in Miami. An import company, Barquero Commerce, based in Cartagena, was buying UK machine tools for oil pipelines, and she acted as the broker. Something felt wrong, as though she was not being told the whole story about what was in the shipment, and so she went to Rex, who told her he would look into it. She claimed never to have heard of Jaco, and when Jonathan/ Alex showed her a photo of the man Rex highlighted in his file, Roxana also claimed not to know him.
The vessel was The Alcestis, and the company Barquero Commerce was run by one Teddy Dos Santos, the same man on Rex’s photos. There was nothing in his background until 2018, which meant that whoever cleaned his footprints knew what they were doing. He had a very sudden entry into legitimate business in Colombia six years ago when his company Barquero Commerce along with his charity, The Aurora, were launched. This was the same playbook Richard Roper followed – legitimate business, hidden criminal activities, the Safe Haven project that gave him the face of a humanitarian.
Jonathan/ Alex went to the massive storage unit with Roper’s things and looked through his photos and documents. Photos of Danny, Roper’s sweet kid whom Jonathan bonded with, and his girlfriend Jed, who became Jonathan’s lover, added a poignancy to the spy work. When I first heard that they were making a second (and a third) season of The Night Manager, I wondered if it would still work since so much time has passed. It is working. The moment I heard Jonathan/ Alex’s neighbour refer to his cat as Corky, I heard Tom Hollander’s voice again. Nostalgia is part of the pleasure of this first episode, but it is not just that. It took serious skills to integrate a story that was from almost a decade ago into this new season without devolving into mawkishness, and I wanted to commend writer David Farr and everyone else involved in laying out this story.
Jonathan/ Alex found photos of Teddy Dos Santos amongst Roper’s files, and took one to Danny’s fancy boarding school, where he showed up as Michael Oakes, family friend. Despite the fall of his father’s criminal empire, Danny was clearly not hurting for money. But he was an angry young man, and he blamed Jonathan for ruining his family. He refused to tell him anything about the photograph. Before he left, Jonathan gently told Danny that his father was executed by his captors six years ago. Angela had earlier told Jonathan no one would be told of Roper’s death, not even his son Danny, so this was Jonathan breaking with the service to be human for a moment, for Danny.
In the hotel that served as her safe house, Roxana seemed desperate to leave. Since Tony had her phone, she pretended to be sick and ran to the bathroom, where she took out a hidden phone and messaged someone.
With Jaco headed to Barcelona with a diplomatic briefcase, Jonathan/ Alex had his team member Sally tag it with a bug. Sally remained in their office with Mike to run surveillance whilst Jonathan/ Alex followed Jaco to Barcelona with Waleed and Graham. At a Barcelona hotel, Jonathan/ Alex swiped a master key and handed it to Waleed, who with Graham waited for Jaco inside his room. Jonathan/ Alex watched Teddy arrive at the hotel, and he and Jaco had a friendly chat before heading up to Jaco’s room. Jaco was about to enter his room when Teddy pulled a gun on him and easily located the tracker Sally had placed on the diplomatic bag. Jaco insisted he had no idea it was there.
When Sally told Jonathan/ Alex the tracker had died, he urgently instructed her to delete everything off the system, and to move Roxana. He also called Waleed to get out of there, but it was too late. Sally tried to call Tony, but before he could answer, a gunman burst in and shot him. Waleed and Graham were also shot. Jonathan/ Alex headed to Teddy’s room with his gun out, but before he got in, Rex’s phone rang. It was Teddy on the line asking who he was. Inside the room, Jaco was on the bed with a bomb strapped to his chest. An explosion rocked the hotel as Teddy casually walked to his car.
Cerebral, tense, and with surprising multiple moments of poignance, The Night Manager’s return – at least this first episode – was a triumph.
Rating: A
Strays
🌳Angela and Jonathan were supposed to identify Roper's body together, but at the last minute, the men who held his body changed the rule, and insisted that only one of them could go in. Angela was about to protest, but Jonathan said it was fine, Angela could go ahead and do the identification. Angela did not just look at the face, she also felt the body's pulse, and confirmed it was Roper. But, officially, and even to his family, Roper would remain a missing person.
🌳The man at the warehouse mentioned they had already started auctioning off Roper's things due to the five-year rule, and that he had good taste. I bet.
🌳Jonathan/ Alex’s casual lie to his therapist about seeing his neighbour – she asked him to come to dinner, but they were not really dating as he implied – carried a slight chill of a man who did not much bother with the truth anymore.
🌳Waleed used to work for a hotel too. I loved how the episode integrated the Night Owls team’s hotel experience into their espionage work.
🌳Waleed asked Jonathan/ Alex about this past life he alluded to, and Jonathan/ Alex promised to tell him about it once the operation was done. When Waleed said he might just hold him to that, along with Waleed’s earlier mention of Jonathan/ Alex telling Graham to carry a gun, I knew he would get shot. I’m sorry Waleed. I liked you the moment I saw you.
🌳Angela retired to a French retreat, hmm.
🌳According to Celia Mayhew, on the day Rex died, she got a call from the vet that the dogs medicines were ready, so she left. When she came back, she saw the shed door was open. It was there that Rex was found.
🌳What was the writing, ‘Thought you’d like this’ on the back of a photo about?
🌳Jonathan/ Alex’s name on the Barcelona operation was Stephen Church. Just as a fun exercise, let’s try to keep track of the fake names Mr. Pine will use through the season, yes?
Episode Writer: David Farr
Episode Director: Georgi Banks-Davies
Original Release Date: January 1, 2026