The Night Manager: episode by episodeTelevisionThe Night Manager recap: episode five – 'nothing quite as pretty as napalm at night'
This week’s penultimate episode had it all: murder, a napalm fireworks show and a surprise weaponry switcheroo. Let’s hope the finale proves as explosive as this unsettling and unlikely – but very sexy – story deserves
Spoiler alert: this recap assumes you’ve seen episode five of The Night Manager. Don’t read on if you haven’t.
Every episode of The Night Manager has had its moments of admirable tension, but in this one you realise: tension is not the same thing as fear. Or cruelty. Or horror. And finally, we’re face to face with them all.
Until now, the balmy climate and glamour has masked the evil of what Richard Roper’s doing: we’ve been shielded from its full ugliness, so we’ve been seduced in the same way Pine has been, enjoying the spoils of war without having to look at any of what war spoils. Lists of weaponry are intriguing when you’re sat by the pool, but you can always just go for another dip. Now we’re near the Turkish border with Syria, surrounded by refugees; Susanne Bier has replaced the pastel postcard tones of Mallorca with a grimier palette. And at long last Hugh Laurie, whose charm seemed to be bottomless, has lost interest in making us like him. Roper is showing his teeth.
The real Roper
He comes out in increments. First on the private jet, letting Pine know that he thinks there’s a mole, assessing his new confidant with the practised skepticism he might apply to a fresh batch of cluster bombs: not predisposed to ditch them, but certainly not sentimental enough to do anything else if he finds a flaw. “Anyone can betray anyone, Jonathan,” he says. “You should know that.” At this point I’d just take my chances and jump out at 30,000ft, but Pine is made of sterner stuff. On we go, then, to the Haven, Roper’s military “kingdom”, as Sandy puts it, where he explains away his philanthropic cover without the slightest hint of self-deception or humanity, and states his radical capitalist worldview in the bluntest possible terms: “When a continent enters into chaos, that’s when opportunities open up.”
Then it’s the fireworks show, a display of military might so improbable and overdone that it ought to be absurd – a fleet of remote control warplanes would surely be more sellable than the munitions he uses to destroy them – except that Roper’s face, lit up by the explosions, takes on a kind of messianic peace. “Nothing quite as pretty as napalm at night,” he says – but because this pseudo-affable tone is filtered through the poolside bonhomie we’re accustomed to, you find yourself wondering if this isn’t an ironic mode at all – if he really means it. As the villages burn below, it all looked quite plausibly like hell, the ringmaster puffing away on a cigar up above.
Worse remains. His assault on Jed, and the suffocating embrace that follows, remind us that his love will never snuff out the possibility of ruthless violence. As he holds her close in the moonlight, something in the way it’s shot makes it seem as if he’s resting his gaunt face on the shoulder of a skeleton: not for the first time, I thought of Dorian Grey, or Faustus, the bon vivant, the cost of whose misdeeds can be hidden but not erased. And, as ever with Roper, the worst of all was enacted under his command but never in his presence – the murder of a bereaved father and son. “Some local issue had to be dealt with,” Frisky tells Pine. “Chief’s orders. He doesn’t like to leave traces.” There is a trace, though, on Pine, who tried to stop it, and Jed, who had to hear it. Roper seems entirely unsullied, playing golf in his dressing gown and desert boots under the Turkish night sky.
Moron seeks a mole
There is, still, one glitch in our vision of Roper as the worst man in the world, which is this: put him in a kitchen with a puppy and a ravaged steak and I suspect that he would blame the chef. I KNOW WE HAVE TO GO WITH IT and this is said from a place of affection, but come on! He knows he has a mole, and he knows the mole started to do its work since he hired a man he knew only from a hotel lobby and an incident in which his son was apparently being abducted. Faced with this man, two long-standing confidantes steeped in blood and his wide-eyed girlfriend, and he decides they are all equally suspicious. When the new guy bludgeons the man who had until recently been his closest lieutenant to death (so long, Corky, you will be much missed), he takes the survivor’s uncorroborated word about how the fight went down. For a man who is only sentimental about his darling son, he appears oddly unalive to the idea that the dashing young buck might be more appealing to his girlfriend than his old bones are; and when the surprise armament switcheroo transpires, he sees nothing amiss in this young buck’s blatant show of dismay.
Two possibilities remain. Roper, for all his wickedness, is also incredibly stupid, at risk of losing his steak to a puppy because he doesn’t have the stomach to drown it; or he is smarter than everyone, playing a long game that will only become clear in the finale, and knowingly using Limpet’s investigations to his own advantage. I hope it’s the latter. If not, my recollection of his most fantastically sinister lines will always come in the voice of Bertie Wooster.
Back to Cairo
Slow-witted though he may have been in this regard, you have to hand it to him: in every other respect, Roper’s victory in this penultimate episode has been complete. For a moment, had you not known there was an episode more to come, you might have thought that Pine would prevail and spirit Jed away, that Burr would emerge victorious over Roper and watch from afar as American soldiers exposed his convoy of weaponry for what it was.
But those prospects were simply dangled before us so that they might be more agonisingly snatched away. And it only appears to be getting worse. With satisfying circularity, Pine is being taken back to Cairo and to the Nefertiti hotel; as he stood in the lobby and wondered whether he might bump into any old friends, I felt a sympathetic vein in my forehead throb at the stress of it. At long last Samira’s ghost haunted him again, raising troubling questions about Jed’s prospects for survival. (They remain disappointingly interchangeable figures, never really more than pawns in the violent games of the men who lust after them.)
Before long we will be back in the company of Freddie Hamid. Will Pine be able to gain absolution without another traumatic loss? Will Burr succeed in tearing the British establishment down? Will Roper turn out to be quite as dense as he currently appears? The questions that the Night Manager has been painstakingly teeing up for weeks are finally on the verge of being answered, and I have faith that the conclusions will be as explosive as this unsettling, unlikely, sexy and endlessly riveting story deserves.
Notes and observations
The Burr household was a nicely withheld location: I don’t think we’ve visited an ordinary domestic environment before. And if her dozing husband did ruin my fairly implausible theory that she and Roper were Le Carre’s answer to the Macbeths, it was a nice touch that he was reading Robert Harris’s Fatherland: not a bad thriller writer, sure, but he’s got nothing on the master.
You don’t hear the word “ontology” enough in primetime drama. It took me a minute to work out what on earth Dromgoole was talking about, but I’m glad his no-doubt-grand education didn’t go to waste.
I have nagging questions about Jed. A bit like the way Roper’s blindness makes you hope for a grand twisty justification in the finale, I wonder if she’s going to turn out to be a proper spy herself, maybe for David Harewood’s Steadman. The question of why she was snooping in Roper’s office herself, after all, has never been satisfactorily answered.
Nice to see that the Duchess of York has found work as a Limpet agent!
One of my favourite lines belonged to Sandy, when he was congratulating Roper on the decoy run at the Syrian border: “You are a very bad man!” It was said like a joke, accompanied by a feeble high five – one public school boy to another, deploying a tone of camp distance to make their mundane exploits seem more exciting. Except – Roper is a very bad man, and Sandy knows it; this tone is the way he can tell the truth without really stopping to think about it. I really like how the show repurposes the ironies of ordinary life as a straightforward account of something much worse.
Recap of the recaps
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