Why is Roxana Bolaños so different from Jed Marshall? Explore the psychological shift in The Night Manager Season 2 and the “Player vs. Victim” dynamic.
When the second season of The Night Manager debuted on Amazon Prime in January 2026, the internet literally exploded. The spotlight was stolen by the shocking twist at the end of Episode 3, revealing the resurrection of Richard Roper as Gilberto Hanson. This reveal completely overturned the premise established in the season’s opening flashback, where Angela Burr identified his corpse. While it stands as one of the most shocking moments in recent television, it is only the tip of the iceberg for a series that excels in character evolution and psychological depth.
As with the first season, The Night Manager Season 2 places a female character at the heart of its plot. In Season 1, it was Jed—Richard Roper’s companion—a multifaceted character who often appeared as his prisoner, yet occasionally seemed to harbor genuine feelings for him. In the second season, the focus shifts to Roxana Bolaños: a ‘collaborator’ trusted by Rex, who is later revealed as a double agent working for Teddy Dos Santos—a leverage point that Jonathan Pine (operating as Matthew Ellis) expertly exploits.
The two leading ladies of The Night Manager possess starkly different personalities and psychologies. The show’s return, a decade after the original season, marks a significant evolution of the primary female role: from the ‘victim of villains’ to a woman who holds the rules of the game in her own hands. And while fans continue to wonder about Jed’s ultimate fate, the most compelling aspect of the new season is how Roxana inherits and redefines her role within the narrative.
Jed vs. Roxana: From the “Damsel in Distress” to the Master of the Game
In a sense, in the first season of The Night Manager, Jed (played by Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki) was the fragile damsel in need of saving. She stayed with Richard Roper for the financial support required to keep her son at home. Her relationship with Roper was controversial; it wasn’t a mere ‘stage presence,’ and she didn’t just stay by his side for her beauty. Both saw in the other a life partner, with an emotional component that did exist—even if maintaining it required distracting the mind from the fact that they were both in the relationship because they needed something from the other (Jed needed the money for her secret son; Roper needed a companion and a surrogate mother figure for Danny).
For all these reasons, Jed was a woman trapped. She couldn’t easily pull herself out due to the necessities that pushed her there. She had little choice, often feeling like a ‘decorative object’ in Richard Roper’s life, kept informed only of the bare essentials. Jed existed only as ‘Roper’s woman,’ and only Pine’s attentive eye saw in her a victim to be saved, a life worth reclaiming.
In The Night Manager Season 2, the figure of Roxana Bolaños (brought to life by Argentine-American actress Camila Morrone) is made of entirely different stuff: she is the femme fatale of The Night Manager Season 2. The smartest person in the room, the one who moves the pieces. An operative with an agenda all her own, she stays with Teddy Dos Santos solely for the advantages it brings, showing no sentiment for him whatsoever.
Roxana moves through Medellín and Cartagena with confidence, maneuvering the pawns in the direction she desires. She offered valuable information to Rex only for money, and she doesn’t hesitate for a second to reveal everything to Teddy when she feels imprisoned in her role as an informant. As a woman in command of her own destiny, she plays the role of Teddy’s partner while flashing an autonomy that allows her to flirt with Matthew Ellis right in front of him. And as she tells Matthew in his hotel room, he better keeps this in mind: he is not the one in control.
Roxana’s motivation is never sentimental. Even when a tear falls from her eye at the memory of her father at the end of Episode 3, her actions are always calculated and goal-oriented. She only wants the money owed to her; then, she will disappear and take back her life, cutting ties with everyone. It is no coincidence that her relationship with Jonathan Pine has not immediately developed an emotional component, as happened in the past with Jed or with the first woman to die at the hands of Richard Roper, Sophie Alekan.
The evolution of the female protagonist in The Night Manager serves as a symbol of how much harsher the world has become in the ten years since the first season. There is no longer room for a ‘woman to be saved’ like Jed, a character pulled from John le Carré’s 1993 novel. Now it is 2026, and the second season was written to go ‘beyond’ the book that inspired it. The leading female figure is now a manipulator acting for profit, approaching others without regard for their moral standing, and pulling up anchor the moment she feels in danger.
Jed was the woman to be protected; Roxana is the woman to be feared. The events of The Night Manager are now sharply defined by this transformation.
Locations and Behavior as a Mirror of Character
The character transformation of the female lead in The Night Manager is also reflected in the show’s scenery and the way these two women interact with their surroundings. Jed lived in an ‘isolated fortress’—La Fortaleza in Mallorca. She practically never left the domestic perimeter, always surrounded by people watching her. She was a part of Richard Roper’s environment: an appendage of his gangster lifestyle.
In contrast, Roxana moves through an urban jungle. She is free to expand her field of action, circulating without an escort and interacting autonomously with the city’s criminals. There are no walls limiting her context. Roxana’s wild nature is comparable to that of a predator in the savanna: she observes everything around her, never lets her guard down, and constantly monitors her environment for new threats.
The way the two women behave is also fundamentally different. Jed indulges in the pleasures of the fortress she lives in, partly to distract her mind from the feeling of being a prisoner. Her lack of privacy is a burden she carries into every corner, leaving her to merely simulate freedom by swimming in the pool or walking through the gardens. She doesn’t feel the need to stay alert; on the contrary, her primary human need is to stage a necessary lightness to combat the anxiety of her situation.
In The Night Manager Season 2, Roxana never lets her guard down. She refuses a drink when offered, constantly observes everyone and everything, and remains vigilant. She acts as if she is always on a mission, never conceding a moment to personal pleasure. She doesn’t mix her private life with her role in Teddy Dos Santos’s world, she doesn’t easily reveal details about herself to Pine/Ellis, and she never succumbs to sentimentality.
It is the victim struggling for survival versus the wild animal at the top of the food chain. Everyone around them knows exactly who they are dealing with. Even Jonathan Pine, used to being the protector, must realize that this time, he might be the one who needs to watch his back.
Did Jed die in The Night Manager?
Given Jed’s heavy absence in the second season of The Night Manager, many fans have once again started wondering about her fate after the first season’s conclusion. Ten years later, what happened to Jed?
The second season adds no new information to the events that defined Jed’s destiny, so the most obvious answer remains: no, Jed did not die.
At the end of the first season, following the high-stakes operation at the Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo, Jed survives the collapse of Richard Roper’s empire. Unlike many characters in the John le Carré universe, Jed is granted a rare “happy ending.” Thanks to Jonathan Pine’s help, she is finally freed from her “golden cage” and given the necessary means to return home and reunite with her secret son.
Her absence in the second season is not due to a tragic fate, but rather a deliberate narrative choice. Jed represented a life that Jonathan Pine managed to save and extract from the world of international arms dealing. While Jed found her peace in the quiet of the English countryside, the second season transports us to the vibrant and dangerous streets of Cartagena and Medellín, where the stakes have evolved. Here, the new female lead, Roxana, must rely on calculation and power rather than the hope of being saved.
Is Roxana Bolaños the New Sophie Alekan?
In the first season, Sophie Alekan was like a ghost haunting Jonathan Pine throughout the evolution of his life. Her death marked him indelibly: Sophie had asked him for protection, and her death was felt as a personal failure, even though he did everything possible to extract her from the criminal world.
In the second season, the ghost becomes Richard Roper, and his reappearance in Episode 3 is, for Pine, like drowning in an obsession that never truly died. Meanwhile, many fans—witnessing the magnetism of Roxana Bolaños—have begun to wonder if she is, in reality, the spiritual heir of the woman who started it all.
Sophie was the spark: her death at the hands of Richard Roper is the reason Jonathan Pine decided to abandon his hotel uniforms to become a spy. If Jed was the ‘possible’ love and the life to be saved, Sophie was the obsession—the original sin.
Roxana shares with Sophie that sense of imminent danger and forbidden knowledge. Both are ‘insiders’ in the world of crime—women who know too much and use information as a bargaining chip. However, the psychological difference is crucial: Sophie Alekan was a martyr, a woman desperately seeking someone to protect her from the monster she had discovered. Roxana Bolaños is, on the contrary, a survivor who has learned not to need protection. If Sophie was the ‘sacrificial victim,’ Roxana is the woman who has decided never to be one again.
If this is true, for Pine (operating as Ellis), Roxana represents the possibility of correcting his past. Looking at her, Pine sees the strength that Sophie didn’t have time to develop—strength she might have acquired had she not died. The fact that Roxana refuses to be ‘saved’ and, instead, declares that she is in control, is a slap in the face to Jonathan’s hero syndrome in The Night Manager.
In this sense, Roxana isn’t simply the ‘new Sophie’; she is the evolved, cynical, and resilient version that the world of 2026 needs. It is no coincidence that their relationship is so electric: Pine is attracted to her because she reminds him of his original failure, but he is frightened by her because he understands that, this time, he could be the one being ‘used’.
