After a decade away, the show returns without an ounce of fat.
was one of the better miniseries of its era. Made with the production values of a prestige film and a cast to match that budget in Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Laurie, it nabbed awards and landed on some top-10 lists that year.
Perhaps best of all, it felt refreshingly complete, with a story that reached a satisfying endpoint. And yetThe good news is that this is no mere cash grab. As surprising as it is to see another chapter in the life of Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine a decade on, the second season ofis nearly as good as the first. This is suave, sexy, scintillating, and adult spy stuff. And the promise of an already-greenlit third round only makes answering the call of this one that much more enticing. In the years since he destroyed the illegal arms empire of the truly evil Richard Roper , Jonathan Pine has been living a relatively simple life. He works under the name Alex Goodwin, running a low-level surveillance unit for MI6 known as the Night Owls, which is basically just a tier abovein the pecking order. He knows what he’s doing, stays to himself, and has a good loyal team of collaborators, including Sally Price-Jones and his old ally Rex Mayhew . On an assignment, Pine sees a familiar face: one of Roper’s mercenaries from a decade ago. He knows that the people around Roper were as dangerous as they come and suspects something that shifts the power landscape in the world may be going on if someone Roper-adjacent is involved. A shocking death in his inner circle and the ensuing investigation into the assignment leads him into the world of Teddy Dos Santos , a Colombian arms dealer with a shady past connected to both Pine and Roper. Calva threads a needle with Teddy, playing him as the kind of guy who knows his good looks and charismatic personality can get him in any room but allowing just enough vulnerability to sneak into the performance to convey a tiny lack of confidence. Can Pine exploit that to stop an arms shipment that could help overthrow a government? While Pine works his way into Dos Santos’ camp with the help of a possible femme fatale/businesswoman Roxana Bolaños , MI6 officer Basil Karapetian faces off against the suspicious Mayra Cavendish , Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, the sort of shady figure who might want to protect certain assets over her own people. A few other familiar faces return who can’t be spoiled, and a certain episode ends with a whoa moment that viewers really should go into blind. In an age when “unpredictability” in streaming original series has led to writing that values ludicrous twists and illogical character choices to keep the machines of a plot moving, the scripts forfeel like a gift. This show hums with intelligent plotting and sharp dialogue from one scene to the next, never slowing down for six straight hours. How many other streamers would have stretched this out for 10 hours and forced viewers into sagging mid-seasons that doom so many promising shows? There’s not an ounce of fat on. If anything, the pace almost feels like it could have slowed down enough to fill out another episode or two, but then the series ends in a flurry of scenes that make it clear that this is really the first half of a two-season story. The show’s first season won an Emmy for direction for Susanne Bier, and the second should warrant similar consideration for Georgi Banks-Davies and William Oldroyd. They bring such a strong visual language to the series, contrasting the cold MI6 offices where deals are being cut with the sweaty color palette of Colombia where the impact of those agreements is felt. They also allow Hiddleston, Calva, and Morrone to add a bit of simmering sexual tension to the underlying danger of Pine’s mission. All of the performers are effective, but the show still belongs to Hiddleston, who imbues Pine with the trauma of the first season in this outing, which emotionally grounds his character as more than just another superspy., streamers have been glutted with spy shows going for a bit of that Le Carré Thing. David Farr understood how to translate the writer’s intelligent plotting to the small screen in 2016—and now he returns to show the imitators how to do it again.
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