Gangs of London
Season 3
Episode 3
The wages of sin
I feel bad for Billy Wallace.
None of the characters in Gangs of London have had what you would call an easy life, but for Billy in particular, suffering casts a shadow over him like a wasting disease.
A big part of that is due to his actor, Brian Vernel, whose consistently strong performance is augmented by the fact that he was very astutely cast. The Glasgow-born actor has a world-historic case of Resting Bitch Face; pursed lips with a default downward turn and a heavy brow combine to make him appear permanently hostile and suspicious. The dark bags under his eyes, and his dark hair contrasting with his translucent Scottish pallor give the impression that he’s unhealthy, or strung out. (I’m Scottish: I’m allowed to say that.) They give Vernel a charge that he brings to every scene where Billy appears; this attendant miasma of grief and guilt and aimless anger.
None of the characters in Gangs of London have had what you would call an easy life, but for Billy in particular, suffering casts a shadow over him like a wasting disease.
No-one in Gangs of London was ever as faithful to Sean as Billy was. (Correspondingly: Sean was never as faithful to anyone else as he was to Billy.) His dedication to his brother caused the elder Wallace sibling untold hardship; the trauma of being made into a murderer when he was barely a teeneager; the guilt of having given Elliot the address of the Reno; being violently dismembered, then taken as a hostage.
And in the end, it was all for nothing. After driving around all night looking for Sean, Cornelius takes a phone call. We don’t hear the other side of the conversation, but we can guess at the substance of it from the way his face twists in anguish. He turns to his remaining nephew, and tells him that Sean is dead. (I continue to love Richard Dormer as an addition to the core cast; his rich, gravelly Irish baritone works at sounding both warm and menacing, as the occasion demands.) At first, Billy doesn’t believe it; once the truth of it starts to penetrate, he punches the car’s door and window in impotent frustration. All the love he felt for his little brother; all the sins he took onto himself for his sake; in the end, this is all that they amounted to.
After the breakneck pace and the ending of the previous episode, S3 E3 necessarily feels like a bit of a refractory period. The shock of Sean’s death reverberates through the London underworld, its various players scrambling to figure out what it means, and how best to respond.
The chain reaction is set in motion in the episode’s prologue, in what I thought was a pretty clever manoeuvre by Danusia Samal’s script. We’re introduced in the opening scene to a pair of vagrants: Moe (George Somner), and Ali (Ali Azhar), holed up together in a dilapidated doss-house. Moe is excoriating Ali for coming back without any drugs to show for his last excursion, when they hear voices from elsewhere in the building that they’d supposed to be deserted.
After the breakneck pace and the ending of the previous episode, S3 E3 necessarily feels like a bit of a refractory period.
As they creep through the corridor towards the source of the disturbance, the words they overhear become increasingly audible: “I’m Sean fucking Wallace. I’m the proper FUCKING CUNT–!”
And then a hail of gunfire, and you know the rest.
They elude the masked killer’s attention as he exits the building. Ali wants to flee, but Moe has a bright idea; what if they turn over Sean’s body to Luan, and claim the £2 million bounty that the Albanian boss has made available to all and sundry? What could possibly go wrong???
Credit where it’s due to Luan: he’s a man of his word. Ali and Moe lay Sean’s body at his feet, and he unhesitatingly gives them a duffel bag full of £2 million in banknotes in exchange. He thanks them profusely, and they run off, whooping and hollering.
You can probably intuit what happens next: Ali and Moe effectively speedrun what happened to Darren and Ioan back in Season 1. The night is still young by the time they show up at their local, buying bottles of champagne and rounds of drinks for all their friends with bundles of £20 notes that they openly peel out from the duffel bag.
I know that we’re supposed to feel pity for these guys: both clearly drug addicts who’ve been left behind by society. Ali talks about his four-year-old daughter’s upcoming birthday, which lends him a bit of pathos. But when he gets drunk and publicly boasts about killing Sean Wallace himself, it gets hard to sympathise with characters quite this fucking stupid. When Billy and Cornelius inevitably show up, and Billy smashes Ali’s head with a pool ball, I’m rooting for the Wallaces, frankly.
When Billy and Cornelius inevitably show up, and Billy smashes Ali’s head with a pool ball, I’m rooting for the Wallaces, frankly.
Directing duties for this episode are taken over by English filmmaker Farren Blackburn; his previous credits include the 2013 Viking period actioner Hammer of the Gods (which I haven’t seen, but it reviewed poorly) and a handful of episodes of the Marvel Netflix shows between 2015 and 2017 (which is really quite a good reference to have for Gangs of London, even if one of those shows was Iron Fist).
The brawl that erupts in the pub is the episode’s one significant flare-up of action, and it’s pretty brief. Billy and Cornelius make short work of Ali and Moe’s friends; nothing particularly exciting in the choreography, except perhaps for one memorably gnarly image where Cornelius smashes some poor mook’s teeth against the edge of a pool table. It ends with Moe being drowned in a toilet bowl, and Ali pleading for his life.
(One detail that I find peculiar about Season 3 so far is how much it de-emphasises the fact that Billy is missing an arm. Vernel spends most of the episode wearing a heavy overcoat, with his hands deep in the pockets; I’m sure that this is, to some extent, a cost-saving measure. It’s got to be time-consuming and expensive to present an able-bodied actor as though he’s an amputee, so the show opts instead not to call attention to it. If you didn’t know Billy was meant to be lacking his left arm when you started watching S3 E3, it’s something you could quite easily not notice.
Still, it says something that Billy has been reframed as a physically capable badass in this season, easily manhandling opponents with 133.3% his number of limbs. Considering how he was originally characterised back in Season 1 – as the Wallace family’s dissolute failure of an heir – there’s something really quite sad and poignant about the fact that he’s pulled himself out of listless drug addiction by becoming an aggressive, violent brute instead, relentlessly seeking revenge for his brother. It was for Sean’s sake that he got his arm chopped off in the first place. I feel like this fight scene misses an opportunity for characterisation, by not incorporating his prosthetic limb into the choreography.)
In the background, subplots are ticking over. Tensions are brewing between Luan and Marian, as you’d expect they might when he delivers her Sean’s body. In Luan’s mind, his revenge is still incomplete: Billy and Cornelius are equally culpable in his daughter’s death, and he won’t rest until he has their heads on spikes, as well. But he still wants to preserve cordial relations with Marian as he hunts her brother and her surviving son, so… good luck with that, dude.
Meanwhile, Elliot wakes up in hospital, where he shrugs off his blunt-force-trauma injuries like they’re bee stings and walks right out, with Shannon’s help. He, Saba and Faz get the drop on Billy and Cornelius just as they’re preparing to torture Ali. Ali – who at this point is profoundly regretting his life choices – pledges that he didn’t actually kill Sean, but he can point them to who did. Elliot’s crew carry him off.
They might have been able to get answers from Ali about Sean’s murderer, and, by extension, the man responsible for the death of Elliot’s wife and son… except that the police intercept Elliot before they’re able to interrogate him. On orders from Mayor Simone Thearle, he’s arrested on a weapons charge, and in the confusion, Ali escapes, running for his life along the shore of the Thames.
In jail, Elliot is greeted by Simone; they make a deal together, where Elliot, the ex-cop, will be released for seven days to bring the people genuinely responsible for the fentanyl poisoning to justice.
While Elliot’s in custody, Sean’s killer tracks down Ali, and ruthlessly stabs him to death, while the camera focuses on the toy he bought for his daughter’s birthday. (I’ll refer to the killer henceforth as “Zeek,” BTW: that’s the name Andrew Koji is associated with in the credits, though it will still be a while before it’s used to refer to him in dialogue.)
So, to sum up: an episode of a lot of place-setting and manoeuvring. After the seismic shock of Sean’s abrupt death, S3 E3 spends its runtime rearranging the board.
Something worth noting about Season 3 as a whole: it’s quite short. Its eight episodes range between 42 and 48 minutes, with a total running time of 365 minutes – just a hair over six hours, including credits and “previously on” segments. For perspective, that’s an hour-and-a-half shorter than Season 2 (450 minutes), and three hours shorter than Season 1 (541 minutes). It’s less a TV season than it is a very long, very complicated movie.
I can’t help but think that, in the days of network TV shows with 22-episode seasons, it would have been perfectly acceptable to give the cast room to breathe for an episode or two, after an upheaval as monumental as the death of the most prominent character in the series. Sean’s death feels strangely diminished by the requirement that the conflicts between the surviving characters have to keep chugging along; the relentless pacing refused permission to slow down.
It’s a piece of a larger text, but it’s a weakness of the format that the larger text has to have these stretches of doldrums.
S3 E3 lives in a space where it’s neither fish nor fowl: it’s not an explosive, high-octane bonanza like S3 E2 was, but neither does it benefit from the contrast that an episode of Gangs of London might gain from being reflective and character-focused. The episode doesn’t do anything especially wrong, and it’s not the fault of anyone in front of the camera or behind it that S3 E3 feels interstitial. It’s a piece of a larger text, but it’s a weakness of the format that the larger text has to have these stretches of doldrums.
Nevertheless, I set up this paradigm where I give each episode of this show a score on its own merits, and I guess I have to lie in the bed I made for myself.
4? Yeah, I guess a 4 feels about correct.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
- Review Series: Gangs of London
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
More Gangs of London reviews
Andrew is a 2012 graduate of the University of Dundee, with an MA in English and Politics. He spent a lot of time at Uni watching decadently nerdy movies with his pals, and decided that would be his identity moving forward. He awards an extra point on The Goods ranking scale to any film featuring robots or martial arts. He also dabbles in writing fiction, which is assuredly lousy with robots and martial arts.