‘The Night Manager’ Season 2 Episode 3 Review

There is no real time jump when Episode 3 of The Night Manager begins. Where the previous hour ended — with Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) pressed together in the shallows of a pool — this episode simply continues, as if refusing to let either man really come up for air.

Pine wakes not in a bed, but on a bench beside the pool, damp, disoriented, and half-aware of voices he can’t quite place. The intimacy of the night before hasn’t been resolved, only suspended, hanging of him. Over them. Teddy, calm and composed, instructs Roxana (Camila Morrone) to take Pine back to his hotel and to stay with him. The order is framed as concern, but it lands unmistakably as surveillance. An ominous phone call follows, Teddy speaking to someone he refers to as “Chief.” The shape of any real power above him remains indistinct, but as this episode progresses, it grows far more concrete.

At the hotel, Pine and Roxana perform the appearance of compliance with what is expected. They share a bed, but not closeness, leaving deliberate space between their bodies. It’s a visual shorthand for their relationship, intimate by necessity and strained by coercion. Pine tells her to inform Teddy that he agrees to hand over the $20 million, but that he still needs something to make it worth his while. He needs the shipment list and Roxana’s help to get it.

Jonathan Pine has much less control than he’d like.

Their relationship, already tense, hardens into outright antagonism. Roxana bristles at Pine’s demands and his insistence that he’ll decide when she’s “done” with all of this. She makes one thing painfully clear: he is not the one in control here. Who, however, remains unanswered. The plan requires access to Barquero’s offices, which Roxana confirms are under heavy security. When they arrive to initiate the money transfer, Pine reiterates what he needs from her — codes, passkeys, serial numbers — and Roxana listens with barely concealed fury.

Teddy greets them as immaculate as ever, and Sally, coordinating with Basil from afar, prepares the initial step in their transaction. In a private room, Pine signs away his money under Teddy’s watchful gaze. Teddy is gentle, unhurried, reassuring him that there’s no rush, that he trusts “Matthew Ellis” completely. When Pine calls his “bank” on speakerphone, Sally plays the role flawlessly, buying them precious time with fabricated security checks. Juan grows visibly tense at the delay, but Teddy maintains his performance of trust. It is merely a performance, given that he suggests that Pine stay close for the evening, just until everything clears.

The cracks surface quickly. The prosecutor has been compromised, and Sally warns Pine that Teddy’s men are watching him. Back at the hotel, Pine finds his room has been searched by Viktor, one of Teddy’s enforcers, who is now stationed there to babysit. A message from Sally raises the stakes further: they have 24 hours to get the shipment list, or everything collapses.

Pine learns more about Teddy.

Pine wastes no time. He pulls Roxana from her room and takes her for a walk along the beach, Viktor trailing them closely. As usual, their dynamic oscillates between flirtation and hostility. “If this is Teddy trusting, I’d love to see him suspicious,” Pine murmurs. Roxana laughs, brittle, and replies, “Trust me, you wouldn’t.”

She gives him the codes. Demands immunity again. This time, Pine answers honestly, promising not only protection, but erasure. He’ll make it so she was never here. They lean hard into the sexual pretense, close enough to convince Viktor to give them space once back at the hotel. Inside the hotel room once more, the conversation briefly softens. Roxana asks about Pine’s love life. He deflects. Neither of them offers anything resembling the truth.

With time slipping away, Pine leaves Roxana behind and heads back to Barquero’s offices. The codes work. The security footage is scrubbed with Basil’s help. Pine slips into the darkened office and retrieves a briefcase…only to find it empty. He barely has time to register the failure before Teddy, too, arrives. Pine hides underneath the desk as Teddy enters, makes a call, and asks to be connected to a man named Gilberto Hanson. Though he doesn’t appear to get this Mr. Hanson directly, he leaves a message for him about meeting for dinner at the hilltop restaurant to discuss replacing the prosecutor.

Then something unexpected happens. Teddy takes a paperclip, rolls up his sleeve, and presses the sharp point of one end deep into his wrist. His face shudders, then schools itself back into a mask of control. Self-inflicted pain, private and ritualistic. Pine watches, disturbed, before refocusing on survival and on the mission. He tells Sally to find out who Hanson is.

A different kind of game of cat and mouse.

Back at the hotel, he does what he can to find out who Hanson is as well. He confronts Roxana. She denies knowing Hanson, but Pine calls her out on her lie. The argument escalates, raw and physical. Pine grabs her. She shoves him back. For the first time this season, Pine really breaks. He admits with rage that people he loved died because of this — because of her, because of all the lies and secrets. Roxana responds in kind,  informing him she’ll shower to make it look like they had a wonderful time together. His money better clear. After that, she’s done.

The episode then pivots toward its most electrifying sequence.

At dinner later that night, Juan needles Pine about his afternoon with Roxana. “Jealous?” Pine counters. Juan corrects him, saying that he’s protective. He tells Pine plainly that Roxana is more than a pretty face. That she is Colombian to her core and that on a battlefield of life, sides must be chosen. Roxana has chosen theirs.

Then Juan slides an envelope across the table: plane tickets to Paris. Once the money clears tonight, Pine is to leave the continent. It’s not personal. Just business. Before Pine can really respond, Roxana arrives in a backless blue dress, Teddy close behind her in a sheer black top. They take to the dance floor almost immediately. What follows isn’t merely flirtation.

The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 3 highlights a heated exchange.

Roxana and Teddy move together with practiced ease, sensual and synchronized. Pine watches from the table, transfixed. Juan notices. “Jealous?” he asks — a refrain now. Pine cuts in politely, asking Roxana to dance. Teddy steps aside, but not away As Pine and Roxana move together, their ever-present whispered argument continues, tension coiling beneath the performance. Roxana warns him not to threaten her. Then she turns, and Teddy is there.

Unlike Pine, he doesn’t interrupt the dance. No. Teddy joins. What makes the scene extraordinary isn’t just its eroticism, but its geometry. Roxana isn’t the center of the triangle. Pine is. She, instead, guides the men toward each other, physically and emotionally, stepping in and out of frame as if testing how close they’ll go without her. Teddy yields that control willingly. Pine does not.

There are moments where Roxana disappears entirely, leaving Teddy and Pine forehead to forehead, bodies swaying. Pine’s touch is tentative, exploratory. Teddy’s is assured, guiding Pine’s hand where he wants it. When Roxana reenters, it’s to redirect, to tease, to interrupt a kiss just as it’s about to happen. The scene is fluid, unguarded, and unmistakably queer.

What’s most striking is Pine’s body language. Where Teddy and Roxana move with ease, Pine is processing, caught somewhere between want, calculation, and something akin to longing. The dance cuts away, unresolved, to Pine and Teddy seated across from each other, smoking cigars and holding each other’s gaze. The imagery is overtly charged, the power exchange unsettled.

An overplayed hand leads to danger.

But indulgence never lasts long. Pine grows careless — or perhaps intentionally provocative — at the table, loudly declaring that people are natural liars, citing his “relationship” with Roxana as evidence. He escalates further, claiming knowledge of Teddy’s shipment and making it clear he himself is no fool. Teddy responds by applauding mockingly before leaving. Roxana furiously demands to know what game Pine is playing. Viktor returns — not to escort Pine to his room, but somewhere far worse.

Nervous after Pine’s outburst, Juan brings Roxana to Barquero’s office to double-check the shipment list, the list which we learn was hidden just beyond Pine’s reach. Though Juan seizes Roxana’s phone due to his suspicions, he also leaves her alone. And Roxana uses that moment to secure the shipment details.

In London, Basil manipulates Mayra into granting access to an old account tied to Andrew Birch, the very account holding Pine’s stolen-from-Richard-Roper-$300-million.

Viktor escorts Pine to a boat, a boat where Teddy interrogates Pine violently, holding him over the edge and demanding the truth. Pine tells him everything is true, everything except the full extent of his military past. But when the money doesn’t arrive on schedule, Teddy, uncaring about the extent of truth anymore, orders Pine drowned. In that moment, bound and helpless, Pine’s fear feels real. Then the transfer hits.

A shocking development rattles Pine (and the series) to his core.

And, just as quickly as he demanded it happen, Teddy calls off the threat on Pine’s life. Teddy’s rage seems to evaporate almost instantly, replaced by something more contemplative, something colder. There is no apology. No explanation.

What follows is one of the quietest, most disquieting stretches of the hour. Teddy drives them, the two men sealed inside a car with nothing but the echo of what nearly happened. Teddy talks calmly while Pine still seems to struggle to steady his breath. They stop at a church, something Teddy says he has to do. The imagery is striking: Teddy dressed in black, Pine in white, the two side by side as if equals while everything in the narrative insists otherwise. They take communion together, Teddy’s gestures familiar, Pine’s mechanical.

Over lunch, Teddy opens up about his father. “He was an Englishman. Just like you.” The line hangs between them. What follows is worse. Teddy reveals his true ambition: building an army for hire out of orphaned Colombian children — an inheritance shaped directly by the man who raised him.

Afterward, they part with an embrace that feels eerily sincere, as though an attempted murder was nothing but another step toward intimacy. By the time Pine sneaks out to reach the hilltop restaurant where Teddy is having his meeting, it’s almost as if he already knows. When Teddy greets the man at the table, recognition hits before confirmation ever could.

Richard Roper is alive.

Episode 3 lands a masterful reveal in the best of Season 2 yet.

The reveal lands like a punch. Hugh Laurie’s reappearance is brief but horrific, the familiar cadence of Roper’s voice enough to collapse time entirely. Pine’s face tells the story the script doesn’t need to explain: that every compromise, every death, every lie he told himself to justify the last decade and this mission has been pulling him back here all along.

What makes this moment so effective is its restraint. There is no dramatic confrontation, no dialogue exchanged. All that is there is distance, observation, and inevitability. The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 3 ends not with a resolution, but with the sickening realization that Pine’s past was never truly behind him. Teddy, Roxana, the agents, the intermediaries — none of them are the endgame. Roper is.

And Pine, once again, is exactly where he never wanted to be.

The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 3 is the best one of the season yet. It’s intimate, disturbing, and exquisitely controlled. Tom Hiddleston and Diego Calva are electric together, their performances locked in a slow-burn exchange of desire, suspicion, and dominance that makes even their quietest scenes feel charged. There is a tenderness to their dynamic that makes it all the more dangerous, a reminder that intimacy can be as effective a weapon as violence. Camila Morrone’s Roxana steps fully into focus this episode, no longer positioned as a piece on the board but as a player with her own calculations, capable of destabilizing everyone around her.

Hugh Laurie’s return reframes everything. Jonathan Pine is no longer chasing ghosts. They’re standing right in front of him.

The Night Manager airs on BBC One and is available to stream on BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.