I'm grouping the reviews for the second seasons of "The Night Manager" and "Fallout" together, because they're both short ones, albeit for different reasons. In the case of "The Night Manager," it's a good season with plenty to talk about, but the spoilers are unwieldy, and I feel that saying less is more. As for "Fallout," the new season is worth some acknowledgement, but I don't feel that I have that much to add that wasn't already covered in my review of the first season. So, here we go.
First, the second series of "The Night Manager" comes ten years after the first, and really should be treated as a self-contained sequel. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman) parted ways after the death of arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie), and Pine has been quietly working in intelligence under Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge) at the Foreign Office. Contact with a woman named Roxana (Camila Morone) brings Pine to Colombia, where a major arms deal appears to be in the works. The key figure is the mysterious Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), who turns out to be a protege of Roper's. We also get a new villain played by Indira Varma, and a new ally played by Hayley Squires.
We've swapped out directors, so Georgi Banks-Davies replaces Susanne Bier, but David Farr is back to script the whole series. I'm happy to report that the quality hasn't fallen off at all, and the second season of "The Night Manager" is every bit as good as the first. Thorny personal relationships and a very intense menage-a-trois are again at the center of the story, but the dynamics are different. Hiddleston and all the returning cast are great, as expected, but the actor who really grabbed my attention this time around was Diego Calva, who I last saw in "Babylon," channeling a young Javier Bardem here to very good effect. The new tropical setting is also very helpful in distinguishing this season as a different animal, with lots of excuses for everyone to get sweaty and disheveled. As I mentioned previously, I do want to steer clear of spoilers, but I want to give the last episode special kudos for being one of the very best season cappers I've seen in a while, with a lot of good surprises, and the best set-up for a possible third series that may never happen. And if it doesn't I won't even be mad.
On to the second season of "Fallout," which follows Lucy, Cooper, Maximus, and Norm on their various adventures. There's less of a piecemeal approach to exploring the "Fallout" world this year, and more of a commitment to sticking with the various storylines that are playing out. Hank (Kyle McLachlan) and Steph (Annabel O'Hagen) become more prominent characters who also get their own narratives, and there are some fun new recurring characters, including those played by Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin as prominent members of the Legion. As promised in the last episode of the prior season, there's a lot of time spent with Lucy and Cooper in and around New Vegas, who learn that there was a Vault specifically for management located there, and Hank may be restarting certain experiments.
Frankly, I wasn't too interested in the plottier parts of the season. It's clear from pretty early on that the showrunners aren't going to provide any major payoffs, and they spend a lot of time setting up bigger conflicts down the road. We have several factions preparing for war again, scuffles for leadership in both the Vaults and the Legion, and more revelations via flashback as to what Hank and his cohorts were up to in the past. Cooper and Lucy are briefly on the outs with each other when their priorities clash. Everybody makes some incremental progress - most notably Lucy, who becomes more comfortable with violence on her quest to bring her father to justice - but mostly it feels like we're playing the side quests.
Eight episodes is enough to build up some stakes, so that the big, violent, season finale feels kind of meaningful, and one of the major characters gets a pretty good exit. And that's not too bad for a show like this, which is still very dependent on the spectacle and the action. The shock value of the gore and black humor have worn off a bit though, so this season isn't as fun. However, it's still fun enough that I plan to keep watching.
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