Jonathan Pine isn't your average spy. Tom Hiddleston's character on The Night Manager is taking the method-actor approach to infiltration and fully committing to becoming a criminal, allowing himself to hurt and to hurt all to take down weapons dealer Richard Roper. The biggest hole in Jonathan Pine's plan is that it has to go perfectly. One mistake and his entire operation could fall apart. Pine making a fatal mistake may actually be how The Night Manager ends considering the fact that series is only six episodes and at the end of the second episode the very organization Pine is attempting to infiltrate is already suspicious of him and his intentions.
As Jonathan Pine lies in bed, healing from a brutal beating he faced after he went too far to make himself look noble, Richard Roper's right-hand man Major Corcoran tells Pine that they're going to find the out who the real Pine is. The only question, then, is which real Jonathan Pine are they going to find? Are they going to find the Jonathan Pine with a criminal background that the British government created to make him seem like a professional law-breaker, or will they find the helpful night manager whose primary interest is in getting keys to his houseguests?
It seems that as long as the intelligence agents who were tasked with giving Pine a false background do their job, Pine is more than ready to continue remaining undercover. By mixing his own truth with the fiction he needs to gain trust from criminals, Pine has blurred the lines between where the real Pine starts and the fake Pine ends. Roper is surely surprised at the sight of a Night Manager in Zermatt, Switzerland suddenly appearing as a heroic sous chef in Majorca, Spain – but the Pine he meets in the hotel and the Pine he finds in his kitchen could not be farther apart.
Major Corcoran, however, seems to be the most critical character of Pine. "I’m not sure at all about you, Pine. I think you might be stringing us along,” Corcoran says to a bed-ridden Pine feigning unconsciousness. Corcoran's attempt at finding Pine's history online seems to have inspired not just suspicion, but admiration. Pine's background is as muddy as the rest of Pine's identity and poses a fascinating challenge for Corcoran who informs Pine, "I will hood you and hang you up by those lovely ankles until the truth falls out of you by gravity." Corcoran isn't messing around, which means Pine is going to need to hold on to his identity, as confusing as it is, tighter than ever.
Image: Des Willie (2) /AMC
