‘The Night Manager’ (BBC) Series 2, six episodes

The second season of The Night Manager draws unashamedly on the perennial Catholic sources of moral drama: good and evil, judgement and redemption, fathers and sons, sin and forgiveness. With Hugh Laurie reprising his role as Richard Roper, an arms dealer and the series’ very own ‘father of lies’, it reminds us that the Catholic vision of reality provides the most convincing stage on which such dramas can unfold.

The first series saw Jonathan Pine, the night manager of a luxury hotel, infiltrate Roper’s inner circle after finding out that he was responsible for the brutal death of his lover. Pine succeeds, delivering Roper into the hands of his Syrian paymasters. All evidence points to Roper’s execution. When season two picks up – and fair warning: there are plot spoilers ahead – Pine is leading a relatively quiet life operating a surveillance unit for MI6 under the alias ‘Alex Goodwin’. But he goes rogue upon discovering that Roper’s network is still active. Undercover as playboy banker ‘Matthew Ellis’, he follows the trail to Colombia, where we meet the putative villain of season two: the young Teddy Dos Santos. Pine ingratiates himself with Teddy with a view to sabotage. But Teddy, it transpires, is much more than ‘Richard Roper’s true disciple’. He is his son.

Worse for Pine: the father yet breathes, having promised his captors full repayment of the $300 million he owes them, and then some. Roper also blackmailed Pine’s colleague Angela Burr, having threatened to kill her young daughter if she failed to convince Pine of his death back in Syria. This is the first of many examples of Roper tainting everyone in his orbit with his lies: now Angela must deceive Pine, who, upon discovering Roper’s survival, sends her a text: ‘WHY DID YOU LIE TO ME?’

Collaborating with corrupt British intelligence, Roper plans regime change in Colombia by supplying weapons and soldiers to an exiled political leader. To do this, Roper needs Teddy as his man on the ground: laundering money, smuggling arms and recruiting child soldiers behind the front of a charity for orphans. The world will see the coup as a political event, a rebel army seizing control. But the chaos is all orchestrated, the violence manufactured, by a dark magician pulling the strings to meet his own ends. In a sense, Roper is the real ‘night manager’: ruling over the darkness, manipulating events so that they portray his version of the truth.

Teddy is the most deceived. Roper tells him they will build an empire together, ‘The new conquistadors. Kings of America.’ But once his debts are paid and the protection of the British government secured, he intends to return to England and his other son, Danny, leaving Teddy behind – perhaps even having him disposed of. Teddy has only ever been a useful asset. Roper does not see him as his son. ‘Danny is my family,’ he says. ‘My only son and heir.’

Pine learns that Roper had Teddy raised in a monastery, where one of the monks recalls that Roper visited once a year in a black car: ‘Eduardo looked forward to it so much. He practised his English all year. Just for that one day.’ In a strange inversion of the parable of the prodigal son, the boy runs out onto the road to meet his father. As Pine later puts it: ‘Every year you waited for him in the black car. You lived for that visit just as you have lived for him ever since.’

The monastery has left its mark on Teddy, who takes Pine to a yellow church in what proves to be his hometown. Inside, the priest distributes Communion. Pine hesitates, but Teddy motions him forward. As he approaches the altar, Teddy gazes at the crucified Christ. After receiving the Eucharist, he blesses Pine with the sign of the cross.

It’s not the first time Teddy has offered a kind of absolution. Earlier, he spikes Pine’s drink at his villa. What follows has the shape of a baptism: Pine falls into the swimming pool; Teddy pulls him out, cradles his head and questions him. Pine produces a convincing story: he has $25 million, but cannot spend it – it needs cleaning. ‘I can help you… if you trust me,’ says Teddy. ‘I can make you clean.’ ‘I trust you,’ Pine replies. ‘Make me clean.’

Both men have reasons to be penitent, but only Teddy sees himself as stained beyond redemption. He says he has spent his life ‘always in the dirt’ and is described, by himself and others, not least his own father, as a dog. ‘He has used you like a dog,’ says Pine, attempting to convince him that Roper has no intention of sharing his throne. It is clear that Teddy knows this deep down, but it falls to his sister, Clara, to bring him round. The siblings have been parted for years. Pine organises their reunion in the same yellow church, where Clara stands gazing at the crucifix above the altar. When Teddy enters, she embraces him. ‘I am sorry,’ he says, weeping. ‘Forgive me. Forgive me. You don’t know what I’ve done. Forgive me.’ Clara, as it were, absolves him – ‘Mi amor,’ she responds mercifully. The inversion of the prodigal son parable, with the young Teddy racing to meet his father once a year, is here corrected. Now he is met by God the Father, mediated by the Marian figure of his sister. It is the grace of this reconciliation and undeserved forgiveness that ultimately frees Teddy to pursue the good.

Meanwhile, Pine is led into the desert to be tempted. He meets Roper at a restaurant, where he is accused of slipping from alias to alias, identity to identity, leaving calamity in his wake. ‘We could have done so much together,’ Roper says. ‘I saw the fire in your eyes.’ ‘I was playing a role,’ says Pine. ‘Well, you are always doing that, aren’t you? Andrew Birch books the table, Thomas Quince eats the steak, Matthew Ellis downs the wine.’ The insinuation is clear: when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change. The devil changes you.

This is Roper in his true colours, fully the prince of this world. ‘If you came here to win my soul, you can forget it,’ says Pine. ‘I came here to offer you the world,’ Roper answers. ‘It is at your feet, just bend down and pick it up.’ He offers to wire $50 million to Pine’s false identity, Matthew Ellis, so he can be free to do anything. Their exchange covers both fatherhood and lies. ‘You can’t offer me the world,’ Pine says. ‘You are just a conman. Even when you are stretched out stone-cold dead on a slab of Syrian concrete, you are lying.’ Roper calls conscience and shame ‘the shackles of slaves’ and taunts Pine about his father’s ‘pointless death… blown to bits by his selfless commitment to service’. Pine grips his steak knife as though to stab Roper, who says: ‘That is it. There. That is the hot-blooded truth. Go on, Jonathan, do it… But before you do that, know this: your father’s values are dying. Mine are in the ascendant… You are at a fork in the road, my pilgrim. Choose carefully.’ The whole exchange is undoubtedly the theological high note of the series – the old ‘we are not so different, you and I’ trope, except charged with overt biblical language and imagery. Both men are deceivers of one stripe or another.

And bringing Roper down will involve deception. Pine coaches Teddy: ‘When you are with him, you have to make him believe that you still love him. He is the man in the black car, the father you have always adored. You show him nothing less than the devotion he deserves.’ ‘Like a dog,’ says Teddy grimly. ‘Like a dog,’ says Pine. Then: ‘Just have faith… Have faith.’

In the event, Teddy doesn’t need to pretend he still loves Roper: he really does. He can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Roper is contemptuous. Early in the season, Roper shoots his three beloved dogs simply for having discovered that a private detective (working for Pine) had bugged their collars. It is a chilling mask-slip and portends the season’s emotional denouement. ‘I forgive your immortal soul,’ says Roper, ‘but not your mortal one,’ and shoots Teddy as though it were nothing more than euthanising a useless mutt.

Technically speaking, the season ends on a cliffhanger; morally, on Good Friday. Teddy is dead and buried beneath his ‘Colombian sky’. Far away in England, the devil appears victorious as he beckons for his ‘real’ son to climb into the same black 4x4. Pine is distraught. His own web of lies was responsible not just for Teddy’s death but Angela Burr’s, who is assassinated in the closing scenes by Roper’s co-conspirators in British intelligence. In the end, because his love for his father was not pretence, it was Teddy alone who turned from the lies. Rejected by his earthly father, he turned to the One who knows rejection better than any of us. Although Roper cannot yet see it, Teddy’s was the ultimate triumph.

Like Job, Pine is laid low with sores, but these same sores were washed clean by Teddy shortly before his death in one final act of mercy, reminiscent of Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday. If this rich tapestry of biblical allusion is anything to go by, we can hope that season three brings us to Easter Sunday and Pine’s resurrection from his dung heap. As he says to Roper: ‘My father loved me. What about yours?’