The Night Manager returns for season 2 on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026, almost exactly 10 years after the series premiered on BBC One.
Now, the series is back on the BBC, but The Night Manager season 2 is also airing on Prime Video globally.
Jonathan Pine is now Alex Goodwin, and Richard Roper is dead
The season 2 premiere begins with a flashback all the way to the end of season 1. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) must confirm the identity of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). His dead body is on a gurney covered in a sheet. When the sheet is pulled back, we see Roper is, indeed, dead.
Then, Jonathan wakes up, but he’s not Jonathan Pine anymore. He has a new identity these days. He’s Alex Goodwin, a small scale MI6 operative living in London and working with the Night Owls under Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge). He’s dating his neighbor and just getting by, doing his thing, and trying to keep the nightmares from his first job at bay.
He’s also in work-mandated therapy, but he’s having trouble opening up to Dr. Kim Saunders, played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste. Dr. Saunders is worried about Alex because he’s not sharing much about what’s actually going on with him. She’s trying to make sure he doesn’t just explode, like others have in the past.
Alex recognizes an associate of Roper's named Jaco
While on the night shift doing surveillance, there’s some action in the White Room, a secret poker game in a fancy hotel suite. As Alex watches on the cameras, he spots someone from his past, Jaco Brouwer (Gijs Naber), who worked for Roper.
Alex starts to spiral after seeing Jaco for the first time in nine years. That’s how long it’s been since the events of the first season. He goes to Rex’s house on this birthday to talk to him, and he sees Rex having a conversation with a woman, Roxana Bolaños, played by Camila Morrone. Later, Alex asks to speak to Angela about this man, but Rex won’t let him. You see, Rex made him promise that he would leave Jonathan Pine and his past behind him. But, he’s having a hard time doing just that, as his therapist worried.
At Rex’s birthday party, Mayra (Indira Varma), who works with Alex at the agency, talks to Alex about Rex. While saying she’s grateful to him for getting her the job and recruiting her for the security position, she also mentions that she’s worried about him and implies that he might be hiding something.
There’s no doubt that Alex is still haunted by Roper. He’s having flashbacks or memories invading his thoughts.
Alex can’t let this Jaco person go. Instead, he willfully rejects Rex’s orders to let Jaco go. He gets his team to surveil and follow Jaco as he moves through London. Jaco meets a man at a cafe to talk about a shipment coming through customs and alludes to it being guns. Jaco also claims that his boss is “Richard Roper’s true disciple,” which gives Alex more nightmares.
Later, Alex’s team finds out the identity of the man who met with Jaco. His name is Adam Holywell, played by Kerr Logan. Alex tails Adam to a house owned by MI6. There, he sees Mayra leaving the property. Alex immediately calls Rex and tells him he’s coming to meet the following day. Rex mentions that he has something that he needs to show Alex.
Alex's boss, Rex Mayhew, is murdered
On his way to Rex’s house, Alex is passed by a trail of police. Immediately after, he receives a call from Celia, Rex’s wife, and she tells him that Rex has died by suicide, but it's actually a highly skilled murder.
There’s clearly something going on. After the investigators leave, Alex sticks around to get the full story from Celia. She tells him that Rex was agitated about something involving Alex, and she left to take a call. When she returned, she knew what he’d done. She knows that Rex got caught up in something, but she doesn’t know what. With investigators arriving in the morning to sweep the place, Alex jumps into action. He rings Rex’s phone, which is stashed on a bookshelf next to a book, where Rex has used clues to give Alex his password. Alex unlocks Rex’s phone, which should help get to the bottom of this mystery.
After unlocking Rex’s phone, Alex finds some files related to “The Chief,” which reveals several images of what appears to be brutal killings. There’s also a message that reads, “Why is Mayra in business with this man?” with an arrow pointing to Teddy Dos Santos, played by Diego Calva. Teddy is another arms dealer, just like Roper, as it turns out.
Alex connects with Roxana, who was informing on Teddy Dos Santos
Just then, someone called “Broker” calls Rex’s phone. A woman answers and asks why Rex isn’t calling her. Alex’s team traces the number to Roxana, the woman who was meeting with Rex at his home.
Alex’s team is obviously concerned about what’s going on. He informs them that Rex was actually murdered, and that River House, their sister agency, is actively involved in the murder.
Later, he meets with Roxana and convinces her to meet him at a shady hotel while his team keeps watch. This guy loves hotels, doesn’t he?
She explains what she does. She was in charge of shipping supplies to Colombia for a company for to make machinery and pipelines. Roxana also reveals that she feels that she’s been left out of the loop lately about what’s actually being shipped.
Alex’s team figures out what shipment is leaving the UK for Colombia. They also discover that the man in the photos is Teddy Dos Santos, as I mentioned, and he’s the front for a Colombian business and charity organization in the country.
In the investigation into Teddy, Alex meets with Roper’s son, Danny, who doesn’t want to help. In fact, he doesn’t want anything to do with Alex. Then, Alex tells him that his father was killed by his captors six years ago, but nobody told the family.
After he leaves, Alex gets a call that Jaco received a briefcase at his hotel.
At the airport, Alex’s team gets a plant into the briefcase, where they track it all the way to the Hotel Rusinol in Spain. Alex tails Jaco to the hotel.
Back in London, Roxana pretends to be sick and uses another phone to call for backup to get her out of the hotel room.
Jaco meets with Teddy, but he's tipped off
After pulling a fast one at the hotel, Alex get saccess to a master key to search Jaco’s room. But, Jaco isn’t the only person at the hotel to catches Alex’s attention. Jaco is actually meeting Teddy in the hotel lobby. Alex overhears their conversation about signing some documents.
On the way to the room, Teddy pulls a gun on Jaco and finds the tracking device that Alex's team planted. He destroys the tracking device. Teddy takes Jaco to a different room.
Seconds later, gunmen enter the room they were supposed to go into and shoot Waleed and their other colleague. A similar event takes place in London. Another gunman enters the hotel room where they were holding Roxana and kills the man on Alex’s team left protecting Roxana.
Alex runs back down to the reception to find out Teddy’s room number. When Alex enters the room, he finds Jaco, dead, and rigged to explosives. Alex flees as the bombs go off in the hotel room. Did he live? Did he die?
In the distance, we see Teddy leaving the scene, satisfied.
I mean, we know Alex lives because this show is about him, but that call is about as close as it gets in the season premiere.
Overall, things got off to a slow-ish start in The Night Manager season 2. I was really interested to see how they would throw Jonathan back into another mystery, and unlike some spy shows, we do get a fair bit of percolation before things really speed up at the end of the episode.
I think we all know where the story is going to go from here! And, the good news is that episode 2 of The Night Manager season 2 is already available to stream on Prime Video.