Hugh Laurie's Shocking Return: The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4 Spoilers

Warning: contains spoilers for episode 4 So, did you guess? Richard Roper isn’t dead after all. You may have suspected this in the opening moments of the series, when Jonathan Pine was denied the opportunity to identify Roper’s body. And if you saw pictures of Hugh Laurie at the red carpet premiere in December, you would definitely have realised something was up, because there is no contractual requirement to attend these things if you’re only making a 30-second cameo as a corpse. How did they do it? Well, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) was key to the deception. Roper had convinced his Syrian captors to let him go so that he could reclaim the £300m owed to them after it was stolen by Pine in series one. He turned up in Burr’s hotel room and threatened to kill her, along with Pine and her young daughter, if she didn’t go along with the plan to declare him dead. For all these years, he has been living secretly in the Colombian hills and plotting his comeback. Is this an ingenious twist or a bit of a swizz for the viewer? Whatever your opinion, it’s undeniably a good thing that Laurie is back because the series was becoming a damp squib without him. Who would have thought all those years ago, when Laurie was known for his comedy chops in Blackadder or Jeeves and Wooster, that he would be so brilliant at projecting menace? His return is rocket fuel for the plot. Alas, the shenanigans also mean that Colman and her generic northern accent are back. Sandy Langbourne (Alistair Petrie), Roper’s finance man, also makes an appearance. He has spent time in jail and, even worse, his ex-wife took the house in Eaton Square. In Colombia, Roper has been biding his time and becoming extremely bored, leaving his bolthole only to visit the local steakhouse: “Some overcooked meat, and then back like a thief in the night.” But the British intelligence service is apparently offering him safe passage home, complete with a passport and a 16-bed Oxfordshire pile, in return for facilitating regime change in Colombia by arming a local militia. Roper muses to Langbourne about the decline of empire: “Once upon a time when Britannia ruled the waves, some fellow would fetch up on a distant shore, locate the wealth… he’d bring in the military, shoot a few natives, secure the trade routes out. Easy as shepherd’s pie. But now it’s all self-determination and pan pipes. The servant is slipping from the master’s grip.” That the two of them followed this up by singing He is an Englishman from HMS Pinafore was, like much of the dialogue in this non-Le Carré Le Carré (it is written by David Farr, and not based on a Le Carré plot), less than subtle. The episode was also packed with action that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bond adventure. We knew the morally upstanding prosecutor wouldn’t last the episode, but it was still a good set piece. Fans of Tom Hiddleston will have been delighted to see him in action hero mode, pelting through the streets then giving chase on a motorbike. As Roxana Bolaños, Camila Morrone smoulders as well as any Bond girl but she isn’t just here for decorative purposes – Bolaños is the one decent female character in the entire drama. The Night Manager episode four is on BBC iPlayer now