How “The Night Manager” brings back one of its biggest stars in shocking midseason twist
- - How “The Night Manager” brings back one of its biggest stars in shocking midseason twist
Wesley StenzelJanuary 12, 2026 at 4:00 AM
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Tom Hiddleston in 'The Night Manager'
This article contains spoilers for The Night Manager season 2, episodes 1-3.
The Night Manager is back — and, in a mid-season twist, so is one of its biggest stars.
The espionage series, which is based on the John le Carré book of the same name, debuted its first season in 2016. The show followed Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), a former British military officer who goes undercover to help take down Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), a cunning, amoral arms dealer helping to destabilize the Middle East.
Now, after a decade off the air, The Night Manager has returned — and so has Richard Roper.
At the end of the third episode of the season, the show makes the shocking revelation that Roper is, in fact, alive and well, despite the fact that his death was all but confirmed at the beginning of the season.
Des Willie/AMC
Hugh Laurie in 'The Night Manager'
The new season begins with a flashback that seemingly explains Roper's fate. The scene shows Foreign Office employee Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) identifying Roper's lifeless body four years after the events of season 1. Pine is alongside Burr as she confirms the arms dealer's death, and sees the body himself.
However, that sequence ends with Pine waking up in bed, which means that some (or all?) of the preceding scene could have been a fabricated dream rather than an accurate flashback to the actual events he experienced.
Throughout the first three episodes of the season, characters repeatedly insist that Roper is dead — specifically, that he was killed after being abducted by would-be buyers of his weapons at the conclusion of the first season.
After adopting a new identity and spending several years running a surveillance team for the government, Pine leaps back into the field when his supervisor Rex (Douglas Hodge) is seemingly murdered, and Pine suspects that Jaco Brouwer (Gijs Naber), a mercenary who worked for Roper, has something to do with it.
Pine follows Jaco to an explosive meeting with the mysterious businessman Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), whom one associate describes as "Richard Roper's true disciple." The meeting doesn't go according to plan, and ends with Pine's teammates dead after a shootout and an explosion. Since his government superiors believe that he, too, died in the explosion, and because Teddy didn't see his face at the meeting, Pine takes the opportunity to go undercover to investigate Teddy's operations in Colombia, where episodes 2 and 3 of the season primarily take place.
While posing as fictional businessman Matthew Ellis, Pine befriends Teddy and attempts to ascertain information about a shipment of weapons that Teddy hopes to send out in the coming days. After hiring private investigator Martín Álvarez (Diego Santos) to look into Teddy's past, Pine discovers that Teddy is almost certainly Roper's illegitimate son, as the arms dealer ran guns in Colombia in the 1990s, and Teddy says that his father was an Englishman whom he seldom saw.
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Diego Calva in 'The Night Manager'
Later, Pine concludes that Teddy is in league with an associate named Gilberto Hanson, but his ally Sally Price-Jones (Hayley Squires) discovers that Hanson died 17 years prior in a helicopter crash that was never publicized.
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At the end of the third episode, Pine and Álvarez track Teddy's helicopter to a secretive meeting in a remote location, and stumble upon a house registered to Hanson — shady! They then find Teddy meeting with several associates in a secluded restaurant, including former political leader José Cabrera (Luis Fernando Hoyos), General Sánchez (Mario Bolaños), and Hanson himself.
Des Willie/Prime
Tom Hiddleston in 'The Night Manager'
After Cabrera asks if Hanson trusts Teddy, the mystery man responds in a booming voice with an unmistakable English accent, "Absolutely, José, old boy. I've known Teddy a very long time. Almost as long as I've known you. He runs a tight ship. He's never let me down, and he never will. So, are we doing this?"
As he speaks, Hanson walks into frame, revealing that he's none other than Richard Roper himself.
How did Roper survive captivity after Pine and Burr confirmed his death firsthand? What unspeakable deeds is he up to now? Is Teddy actually his son? All these questions and more will (hopefully) be answered in the next three episodes of the season.
The first three episodes of The Night Manager season 2 are now streaming on Prime Video. The next three episodes will release weekly on Sundays.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
