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- [00:01]
A
Taxact can think of a million things more fun than filing taxes. TaxAct is going to name some now. Sitting in traffic, folding a fitted bedsheet, listening to your co worker talk about his fantasy team digging a hole. Digging an even larger hole next to that original hole. Unfortunately, TaxAct's filing software can't make taxes fun, but TaxAct can help you get them done. TaxAct, let's get them over with. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
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A
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
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B
And we are two political scientists who have just watched the second half of season two of the Night Manager, including the finale, which aired just, just a few hours ago. And we're here to give our instant reactions, our aesthetic appreciation, and our breakdown of some of the ideas and ideologies that might have been circulating and in that text. Jeff, what did you make of this kind of back half of season two?
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A
I thought it was fine aesthetically. I think it, again, continues to look really good on the screen. I do think you're working. They were working with really talented actors. And so we get some, I think, strong performances from Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. And when she's on screen, the few times she's on screen, Olivia Colman and some of the actors, I think, are effective with what they're given to work with. I do think. And we'll talk more about this. I think what was promising to me about the beginning of this season, which seemed like it was going to dig a lot deeper into Jonathan Pine's character development and try to kind of play out over the long term the ramifications of the experiences he had gone through earlier in his life. I do think that by the time that Richard Roper is reintroduced, all of that character development just stops. And I'm sort of left with the feeling that the things that could have been interesting, particularly interesting about this season were evacuated or dropped at the moment where they bring back the Pine Roper controversy. What did you think of the.
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B
Yeah, I had similar thoughts. I think it was a fairly catastrophic mistake to bring back Richard Roper. I thought he was functioning well in the background as sort of a looming ghost that has generated a lot of trauma for everyone, including Pine but Teddy as well. I felt literalizing him or bringing him back was a problem for the story in the long run. I think it painted them into a set of kind of cliches and plot corners that were difficult to see past. It threw me entirely out of the. Just his reappearance throws me out of the story, the way that it had to explain what Burr was doing when she lied about him being dead sort of threw me out of the story. I never found that convincing. And it painted Roper or put Roper in the position of being something close to like a Bond villain or the other sort of devastating comp I thought about by the end was Emperor Palpatine. Somehow Roper has returned and he's even making these kind of Palpatine esque offers to Jonathan Luke, you could rule the galaxy alongside me cast as your. But he makes the same offer. You know, he has the. And I just couldn't get that comparison sort of out of my head. And it really threw me out of the. Yeah, the flow of things, I'm afraid.
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A
It's so strange. I mean, Hugh Laurie is a terrific actor and the Roper character has a lot of, as I think we saw in season one, has a lot of interest and layers that can be sort of worked out of it. And it feels like, I think you're right, that they could have brought Hugh Laurie back in a way, maybe through flashbacks, through somehow maintaining him as this kind of, as you say, this haunting presence for the characters that would have still allowed them to tell a viable and interesting story and that would have avoided the nagging sense that I have that they brought him back to true scenery. And he does that effectively. As I say, Hugh Laurie is a terrific actor and he knows how to dig in to characters and he digs in, as you say, to the Blofeld like or Palpatine like elements that are developed here for Roper. But in so doing, you lose all of the layer and nuance that that character held in season one.
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B
Yeah, I think if, you know, I went back and I watched our discussion of the first three episodes of the Night Manager, and we were saying one of the interesting things is sort of intergenerational trauma and the degree to which Teddy, Roxana, Jonathan, you know, we're all carrying the weight and the burden of Roper's actions, both literally Roper's actions. But Roper is this kind of avatar of the imperialist British arms dealing, capitalist, immoral class that zooms around the world creating conflicts, and then zooms away to life of luxury. And that. That actually exploring that into its subsequent generations was. Was more interesting than the. The subtle literalization. You know, part of War Rope, it is. He becomes sort of unintentionally hilarious. Like he finds a listening device on. On the collar of one of his dogs and then shoots all three dogs Couldn't he just check the collars? I mean, wasn't. Wasn't that the problem? Bit of overkill, literally. He literally has a super weapon. Aha. Mr. Bond. I will parachute in the EMP, and the EMP will land in one hour, which gives you just enough time to come up with a Strat. You know, it's all these kind of cliches of the supervillain.
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A
And then it will, with apparently breakneck success, instigate the civil war just almost immediately because the lights go out. Yeah.
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B
And what got strangled were some really, really interesting things. Okay, so I think most of the highlights of this season were actually in the first three episodes. You know, the highlight by far for me, but that came far too early in the season, I think, was that kind of highly eroticized knight that Pine and Teddy Dos Sandos and Roxanna Belanios have together, and that I felt like you could have built towards something like that a little later in the season by deepening all of those characters. Roxanna, in the end, ends up. I can't really understand what role she's playing. A. I can't understand her. I can't put together a coherent series left motivations for her, but I don't know why she's in the show. She seems to have. She's obviously the Jed archetype.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But then some of Jed's relationship to Roper, and Roper's impact on Jed has kind of been split into Teddy, and the rest of it is kind of gone as a residual character to Roxanna, and I just couldn't quite figure out what was going.
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A
The only way to make sense of her, maybe not the only way, but one way to potentially make sense of her, which is probably giving the writers more credit than they deserve here, is that she is the kind of the third wheel or the third leg of this Teddy Pine kind of homoerotic relationship.
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B
But it's all about the third episode, isn't it? Or it's substantial.
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A
But I think we're supposed to think that that's the key to Pine's ability to turn Teddy later on. But even that is done so quickly and with such little apparent internal conflict on Teddy's part that it's kind of shocking.
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B
Right.
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A
So I. I found these. This arc, this episodes four through six, to be fine while they were on the screen, but to be fairly dissatisfying from a storytelling and character development perspective, and then to not be especially persuasive.
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B
Yeah.
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A
In the decisions that they're having. The characters Make.
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B
Yeah, I'll, I'll make one more complaint and then we'll, then we'll, we will switch Tanner, because I think we do want to say, you know, can we find some ideological themes that the show is, you know, maybe not entirely unsuccessfully, kind of, kind of forwarding. So last complaint where I'm just like something on the screen is throwing me out of an appreciation of the drama. So in episode four, a switch is flipped and Pine, it seems to me, becomes like the Terminator and he starts riding on a motorbike and then he has this, you know, it's very sort of action movie cliche. He has a pistol that seems to be like 100% accurate, you know, from about three miles away.
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A
Incredible shots, amazing.
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B
You know, and he's just nailing these bad guys and just incredible sort of action scene and zooms out. Having saved everyone on them. I'm like, where did this come from? In the Night Manager, which, which had been, you know, a story of a group of middle aged and older in terms of the rope around middle aged and older men, you know, on yachts and in luxury hotels, sort of slowly slip it sipping champagne where, where these dark undertale and then pine as this, you know, very solicitous, well mannered, but ultimately quite sort of weedy physically sort of individual who, who insinuates and seduces.
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A
Well, season one, it's notable that the, the most important fe. Physicality that he shows is when he gets beaten within a half inch of his life.
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B
Right.
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A
You know, for, for performance purposes. It's not doing the kinds of James Bond like super agent kinds of things that he starts to, to do in the middle of season two.
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B
Yeah. And so it's, look, you know, you, you, you can take a sauce text and a sauce idea and develop it beyond what the author thought. But, but a lot of these things, the kind of the, the, the obvious supervillain who deals in super weapons, the action hero, the very clear delineations between the goody and the goodies and the, and the baddies. These are not especially Le Carrier esque devices. They were, he was always cutting against that. It is very odd to, to, to make a James Bond.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Type, you know, product from that, that source text.
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A
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I mean there's nothing really in Lucari's filmography or I guess, you know, oeuvre that would suggest that he was particularly interested in that kind of Ian Fleming vision of the British Secret Service. And it feels, particularly as season two goes on, I Think that that's correct. You're right. It feels more and more like a kind of, I don't know, B grade James Bond movie.
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B
There's plenty of them around already.
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A
Exactly.
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B
So if we were to shift sort of tone a little bit and talk about, you know, what are some ideological themes that it seems that the writers are trying to establish, which I think they're not entirely unsuccessful. But again, it is to me lacking some of the subtlety and depth that would really make me invested in it. So it seems to me one overarching theme is sort of the. Roper is an avatar of kind of British imperialism. And he's sort of a fairly on the nose proponentals. Not only getting involved in other. In other places, in other countries kind of politics, but also holding a series of, like, racial or civilizational attitudes that are redolent of the worst characteristics of the imperialist. The imperialist elite. So he's sort of disdainful of being in, you know, in a Spanish speaking. You speak English. At one point, he says he clearly has a racialized preference between his children for Danny, the white boy over Teddy calls Teddy or likens into a dog not fit for civilized company. And there's. You could tie that to a harmful paternalism of all colonialism and maybe particularly British colonialism and say that therefore the drama's doing something quite effective, you know, and that it's taking a historical theme and it's literalizing or staging its stakes through those individual characters. Do you buy that at all?
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A
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, and I think it. That it borders on nostalgia for Roper and for Sandy Langborne. And there's that scene when they get back together in Columbia and they burst out into song. Right. You know, it was a very prideful British. British ballad. And so. And there's, you know, there's tons of references that he makes to boarding schools. He's. For example, in this final episode, Roper talks about how his mother had managed to like, maintain the. The performance of aristocratic Britishness even when the family had fallen into hard times. So this is all, I think, highly consistent with what you're suggesting, that this is a kind of. We're meant to see Roper as this throwback British imperialist who is doing the kinds of things that, I mean, actually are more consistent in a certain way, both regionally and historically with sort of American United States versions of South American colonialism in the early 20th, late 19th and early 20th century. So in the sense that you've got this small cabal of elite figures who are pulling the strings, who are the puppet masters for politics, who are capable of exerting their influence and just managing things, cooking up civil wars here and there, working with rogue elements who are outside of the political process to engineer coups and the like. And so I, I mean, that's clearly there to the extent that there is a story here about politics, cultural story about politics, or as you say, an ideological story about politics, I think it's clearly that. But, but it is a little odd even then. It feels a little time out of mind. And maybe this is a, you know, it feels like more of a. If you were going to offer up a British text from. It feels like it would. This is a, A story that would have been more evocative of British anxieties. And you tell me if I'm wrong about this, like if it appeared in the 1960s or 19.
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B
Well, I am the arbiter of all British anxiety, so I could definitely tell you that, yes, I think that's true. Or even maybe earlier than that. Yeah. And it's all. They make a big show of the. They keep saying when the EMP is going to be kind of dropped, that, you know, a British weapon in Colombia, a British. The British have returned. Yeah. There's a slight problem in that, though, in that Colombia was not a British colony. Does that, does that matter? I understand they're getting it a broader colonial, but if you're really going to hit that British theme, why not choose.
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A
But I guess I would ask, you know, is that an anxiety or a fantasy that is consistent with contemporary British culture? I mean, my sense from the outside with the sort of the Brexit, reactionary Brexit stuff would suggest a closing up cloistering. Right. In a way that feels like 28 years later feels a lot more consistent with my sense from the outside. But is there, is there a parallel to that? Right. The flip side to the sort of the British desire to be, to, to turn inwards, does that also reflect on the other side of the coin this, you know, increased fan fantasy or nostalgia towards exerting British influence on people of color abroad?
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B
Yeah. So that is an interesting point. And Brexit would be an interesting analog to bring up, real world analog to bring up or kind of thing to dive into. Because Brexit was motivated by two actually very different impulses. From one standpoint, there's the closure and the return to the homeland and the idealized version of Britain passed in which you closed down to immigrants and so on and so forth. And maybe that was in the minds more of working class people who would vote for this. On the other hand, there was the other view of Brexit, which I think was very much like Boris Johnson and the TARI elite's view of Brexit, which was this will free a kind of globe trotting British elite to be away from the moral, economic and legal strictures of the European Union. We can go out and stride once more across the seas to cut these great sort of deals. And there was a lot of what is like Singapore on sea metaphors, that Britain would just become this great open global trading nation in which of course, like global elites could, could sort of take huge advantage of and you wouldn't be tied to this, this more closed structure of, of Europe. And those two things are of course absolutely diametrically opposed. And this was the problem Johnson ran into, right, which is when he tried to implement Brexit. He won an election victory with the backing of huge numbers of people who wanted to return Britain to a, quote, purer racial and historically nostalgic past to close Britain. And that was his coalition. But his actual policies were he was much more interested in the globetrotting, international finance, international trade type of stuff. And immigration to Britain actually surged massively, which was the opposite of what many of the people who voted for it wanted, which led to him being, you know, booted out in his end, being sort of muck. Now, the Boris surge of immigration is a.
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A
But in the, in the realm of historical memory, right, those two things are actually, they are two sides of the same coin. Yeah, Right. They, they point to British desire to, to rule abroad and to maintain a kind of racial purity at home. Yeah, racial and ethnic purity at home, but to exert massive influence abroad. Right. And so I think you're, you're convincing that practically these things are in conflict with one another. But you can imagine how in the historical memory, right, and in the realm of God, mythological history and thinking, the two are connected to one another. And so that might be a way of seeing this text. It's potentially fruitful.
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B
Right.
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A
Is that this season of the Night Manager, and particularly the degree to which Roper just becomes this kind of cartoon like villain, Bond villain actually, you know, maybe, maybe points to something interesting in the contemporary British character.
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B
Sure, yeah. But not exactly novel and not exactly consistent with the, you know, the line of thought from which it, from which it came. We had. Maybe this is the last point we'll make that we talked when we reviewed the first half of the season, how the continuation of The Night Manager was in some senses, quite a nice sort of meta nod to Le Carre's philosophy that things never end and that season one had perhaps ended in a slightly too pat way, and that it was quite interesting to see the story continue. And I think especially when the story was focused on Teddy and Roxanna and Pine and that triangle, that was an interesting way, potentially. It was a way of promise for the story to continue. The sense I got by the finale, in which it's totally obvious there's going to be a third season. You know, Burr, who. I think they had the actress for precisely one day. She did all her job, all her. You know, you're going to hit these plot beats and just say these things, and she says this like, you know, very sort of pregnant line of, there's a. There's a wider conspiracy and I have a name. Not going to say the name, which would actually be a useful thing to do in this. This memo for the record. But. But, hey, keep watching because there's definitely going to be a season three. And, hey, Rick Roper's back in Britain now and he has a new. So we've definitely got a season three. The sense I had when. When that became clear was just of exhaustion and frustration. It is, for me, a text that does not need to continue into a. A third season.
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A
It makes you wonder if. If you needed the second season, even. And I. I do think I was more positive as you were after the first three episodes, or at least up until the big reveal at the end of the third episode, because it did seem to me like there was a real possibility, as you say, to explore the wreckage that season one had left behind and that they could have, you know, wrenched an interesting story out of that. That would have been worth the investment. And they didn't, I don't think. And so, yeah, season three, I don't know. You know, if there's nothing else on.
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B
You might watch it.
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A
I might watch it.
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B
You might.
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A
All right, give it a shot.
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B
So if I. If I put on the thumbnail something like a disaster, is that. Is that too strong?
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A
I would say for me, that's too strong.
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B
Okay.
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A
I don't think it's a disaster. I just think it's maybe right. A disappointment.
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B
A disappointment. Okay. All right, well, we'll see. We'll see how the thumbnail. We'll see what it decides to do and how that thumbnail performs. Look, if you have some thoughts on this, we'd love to hear them. We respond to every comment that comes well, for the most part, it sort of depends on what it is, but for the most part, we'd love to have some discourse around this text. Maybe we've completely missed it and it was really. It was really exceptional. If you really enjoyed it, then that's great. That's what these things are here for. But I think we'll leave it there. On that bombshell.