‘The Night Manager’ Season 2 Episode 4 Review

The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4 is where the series fully settles into its most devastating preoccupations: power and inheritance, violence and loyalty, nationalism and loneliness. It is an episode shaped by the return of ghosts, of fathers and sons, and of the profoundly human need to belong to something.

The episode opens by immediately answering the cliffhanger left behind by episode 3. Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) — long thought dead and buried — is not only alive but continuing exactly where he left off. Only now does he have more help. Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), the man Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) believed to be running the whole operation, is doing so not just for himself, but for his father.

Just as important, however, is the return of yet another long-missed figure: Angela Burr (Olivia Colman). We were told Burr had retired quietly to France, insulated from the consequences of Pine’s continued mission. That illusion shatters quickly. In Pau, Burr receives a message that sends her racing back into the heart of it all, panic etched across her face. “WHY DID YOU LIE TO ME? PINE,” it reads, attached to a photograph of a very much alive Richard Roper.

The question is unavoidable. Burr was the one who checked Roper’s pulse. Burr was the one who confirmed his death in Syria. So why lie?

Roper knows how to use those around him.

Smartly, the episode delays the answer, allowing the implications of betrayal to ripple outward first.

From there, The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4 ventures into entirely new emotional territory: Roper and Teddy, father and son. We’ve seen Teddy as many things this season — ruthless, impulsive, intelligent — but never simply as someone trying to be loved. Diego Calva plays him with remarkable restraint here. His voice softens. His eyes drop. He cooks breakfast for Roper with a nervous attentiveness that screams of someone trying desperately not to disappoint.

Roper, for his part, watches with something like pride — though pride isn’t quite the right word. There’s an assessment in his watchful gaze.

Their conversation is, at first, deceptively casual. Roper admonishes Teddy for smoking. Complains about being trapped in a luxury prison. Teddy reassures him that everything is in motion: the Hong Kong investor, the prosecutor, the plan. But Teddy wants more than another conversation about operational updates. He wants to know what comes after. After Colombia. After the deals. After all of this. What he’s really asking is whether there’s a place for him.

“You’re my boy,” Roper tells him with a small smile. And that’s all it takes.

Teddy finally voices what he’s been circling all season, truly. He wants to be Roper’s son in name and in public. He wants to belong. He reminds Roper that they’ve always come back for each other — that he came for Roper when Roper had nothing, that Roper came for him every year at the monastery. Calva makes this confession ache with vulnerability. Teddy, so we learn, doesn’t want power. He wants permanence.  Roper’s failure to answer honestly becomes the episode’s most poisonous omission.

A dangerous game between Teddy and Pine continues to unravel.

Meanwhile, in London, the walls begin to close in. Mayra Cavendish (Indira Varma) digs deeper into the emails linking the mysterious “Andrew Birch” to an account holding $300 million, and uncovers a man who looks suspiciously like Alexander Goodwin, long presumed dead in Spain. Basil (Paul Chahidi), reviewing security footage, spots another familiar face: Sandy Langbourne (Alistair Petrie). One of Richard Roper’s closest confidants, Langbourne, is not only alive, but active — and meeting with Mayra herself. The corruption runs deeper in both institutions and history than anyone realized.

Elsewhere, Teddy’s plans continue to move forward with chilling control. He orders round-the-clock surveillance on the prosecutor’s home, authorizing his men to wait for the signal to eliminate him.

Pine, for his part, races against time. He enlists Martín, the private investigator, to keep an eye on Roper and narrowly makes it back to his hotel room in time for Teddy’s arrival, staging just enough evidence to make it look like he never left. Teddy, ever suspicious, checks anyway. Then, he drives Pine to the airport.

What begins as a simple follow-through of a plan becomes intimate and dangerous when Teddy parks the car, locks the doors, and draws his gun. But instead of a threat, the weapon rests between them like a thought Teddy can’t quite voice. Quietly, he admits he said too much the night before. Pine doesn’t flinch. “I’m not a threat, Teddy,” he says gently. “I’m your friend.”

When they part inside the terminal minutes later, something shifts. Alone together, armor drops. Posturing disappears. Teddy tells Pine to go to France and forget him — not as an order, but as a request that carries far more than command. Pine, truthfully, says he won’t find that easy.

Inescapable emotional fallout.

Their handshake lingers, then softens into something else entirely. Pine pulls Teddy closer, close enough to speak only to him, and whispers, “I’ll pray for your soul, Eduardo.” The kiss that follows is barely there, a brush of lips against Teddy’s cheekbone, tender and soft, as if Pine doesn’t want to shatter the fragile thing between them.

They stay that way for a beat too long, eyes locked and breath held. And, for a moment, it feels like a different story might still be possible. That feeling makes what follows unbearable.  Instead of boarding his flight, Pine waits until Teddy is gone, then turns toward arrivals, walking straight into Angela Burr.

The confrontation is raw and long overdue. Burr finally tells him the truth: the night before identifying Roper’s body, Roper came to her hotel room. He had already bought his freedom and promised his captors their $300 million. But to disappear completely, he needed Burr and Pine removed from the equation. Burr was threatened. Not just her life, but her child’s as well.

Pine’s hurt isn’t loud, but it is personal. “You made me who I am, and then you lied to me,” he tells her. Olivia Colman plays Burr as furious, ashamed, and still burning with rage at having been outmaneuvered yet again. The betrayal cuts both ways. Pine didn’t just lose the truth, but also the person who helped him survive it in the first place.

There is, admittedly, one major stumble in this otherwise wonderful episode. The explanation of how Roper escaped death feels uncharacteristically convenient. For a series that prides itself on methodical sequences and consequences, the steps of his survival are thin, almost too easy. It’s the season’s most far-fetched leap. That said, the emotional fallout more than earns the suspension of disbelief.

The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4 exposes Roper’s classist cruelty.

What The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4 does brilliantly is expose Richard Roper for who he truly is. Yes, we saw him in the first season, and we saw him plenty, but it’s here that his nationalism in particular is laid bare. His racism surfaces through casual dismissals and microaggressions that reduce Colombia to a temporary inconvenience. His classicism strikes with utter cruelty. When he compares Teddy’s loyalty to that of a dog, scoffs at the idea of bringing him back to England, and declares him unfit for “civilized company,” the truth is evident: Teddy was never meant to belong.

To Roper, blood without breeding is expendable.  What that will mean for Teddy, once it reaches him, remains to be seen.

When the prosecutor escapes, Teddy scrambles, desperate not to disappoint his father. Roxana, sensing the quick-approaching violence, puts herself directly in harm’s way, warning Pine through coded conversation that nowhere is safe. Her courage is extraordinary. Camila Morrone continues to play Roxana not as a pawn, but as a woman making active, dangerous choices.

The episode culminates in a brutal shootout. Teddy executes the prosecutor in a display of sheer ruthlessness — and Pine witnesses it. And because of that, Pine has to do something that will change the trajectory of his and Teddy’s relationship: he has to shed Matthew Ellis and become himself, taking out Teddy’s other man with a precise headshot. The realization, once it strikes, hits hard. There is no pretending, for either Pine or Teddy, that Matthew was ever Matthew. The betrayal shatters Teddy in real time. Calva allows just a flicker before the violence resumes.

An effective, unexpectedly human decision haunts the end.

What makes this particular moment so effective is the score. Rather than leaning into the familiar rhythms of a shootout, all urgency and momentum, the music turns inward and somber, as though it belongs in a fight of words rather than bullets.  Teddy doesn’t react like a seasoned criminal; he reacts like someone whose already-fragile trust has been violated at the deepest level. The shots are messy. The stakes are painfully personal. Pine, for all his efficiency, looks anything but victorious.

As Pine continues his getaway, rescuing Roxana along the way, Roper receives the call that changes everything. “The Hong Kong investor,” Teddy tells him, defeated. “It was him.” Roper already knows what comes next. “I want his picture. Now.” Moments later, the fax machine spits out the image inch by inch: Jonathan Pine, that “blue-eyed boy,” staring back at him. Another ghost returned in flesh.

The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4 is its most emotionally ambitious episode yet. Diego Calva delivers a performance of astonishing depth, making Teddy both monstrous and heartbreakingly human. Tom Hiddleston and Camila Morrone remain the moral anchors.

Though things seem too broken to fix, this episode actually plants a dangerous, tantalizing possibility: once Teddy learns the full depth of how Roper sees him, the door may open for a different alliance entirely. Teddy still wants to belong. And Pine — against all reason — may be the only person willing to offer him something real.

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.