Anyone who caught Tom Hiddleston’s recent appearance on Graham Norton may have sensed something was afoot. Norton, responding to a new trailer for The Night Manager that showed Hugh Laurie’s season one villain Richard Roper lying motionless on a mortuary slab, turned to his guest and asked: “He dead?” Hiddleston, momentarily caught off guard, resorted to an old TV catchphrase: “Say what you see,” he squirmed. The implication was clear: Roper, that silken merchant of international arms dealing, was rather less deceased than the BBC’s feted spy series would have us believe, after he was handed over to his vengeful enemies in 2016.
Far be it from me to begrudge a show like this its coup de théâtre resurrection, but even in an era when television drama has become addicted to the bombshell reveal, this feels particularly brazen. The twist arrives in episode three’s closing minutes: Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), having tailed Roper’s criminal heir Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) to a secret rendezvous, discovers his old nemesis very much alive and operating under the alias Gilberto Hanson. Father and son, it turns out, are building a private militia together. How terribly cosy.
