Something I’ve not really delved into so far in this series of reviews is Gangs of London’s politics. It’s not a show that makes a point of hammering home a message, but I’m of the persuasion that all art is political, whether it wants to be or not. Any story – any piece of media that wants to communicate meaning – has to start from a basis of shared assumptions. If you want to make an epic crime drama set in modern-day London, then you necessarily have to make your assumptions available to your audience, about what is “London”; what is “crime”; what is “modern-day.”

To wit: S3 E8 begins with Cornelius beating Ed Dumani like a rented mule after his treachery was exposed last episode, while Billy, Marian, and Luan watch dispassionately. Ed’s resilient under torture – he’s had practice – but he breaks when Marian gives Luan the go-ahead to hunt down Shannon and Danny, and kill them. As Elliot arrives, Ed tells them the identity of the people behind the fentanyl spiking; the proprietors of the corporate logo on the documents Naomi was killed for, the one that looks like a hybrid of a “V” and a “W.”

“Isobel Vaughn,” Ed grudgingly confesses, in return for the safety of his daughter and grandchild.

“Who?” Elliot asks (echoing my own sentiments).

“A businesswoman,” Ed says, doing the bare minimum to clarify.

“An Investor,” Elliot replies, picking up on Ed’s subtext.

Yep: Isobel Vaughn (played by Janet McTeer) is the ultimate villain behind the fentanyl poisonings. She has farms in Myanmar, Peru, Pakistan and Türkiye, where she’s spent the last decade developing high-yield cultivars of poppies and coca, even as her underling, Henry, groomed Simone for her political career, laying the groundwork for drug legalisation in the UK which her company will be uniquely suited to profit from. The cancer of the Investors’ influence in London – in remission ever since the purges Sean and Koba set in motion in S2 E6 – has recurred with a vengeance.

In the words of another TV show with long-term plotting almost as wonky as Gangs of London’s: “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” Lives in London were destroyed and cycles of violence inflamed by profiteering ghouls thousands of miles distant, for whom 600 deaths by overdose are just a rounding error on a spreadsheet.

Gangs of London’s politics in a nutshell, then: it’s pro-multiculturalism, but opposed to economic globalisation.

It’s a worldview that’s peculiarly consistent throughout all three seasons: honestly, more consistent than the characterisations of the main cast. The show’s underlying assumption is that it’s possible for communities from different national and ethnic backgrounds to peacefully coexist. Prior to Finn’s assassination in S1 E1, it’s implied that the various gangs from Pakistan, Kurdistan, Albania, Algeria and Ireland are essentially able to get along; that their interrelationships are stable, even if they’re not necessarily friendly. None of the conflict in Gangs of London proceeds from sectarian tensions. Even Lale, a character who’s committed to an explicitly political cause – Kurdish autonomy – hasn’t spent any of her screentime directly prosecuting that cause. Most of the action she takes throughout the series is motivated by her grievances with Asif, which are entirely personal, not ideological.

(It’s worth noting that Pulse Films CEO Thomas Benski is himself a French-Brazilian immigrant who moved to the UK as a teenager in 1998. For that matter, lest we forget, the series was created by Gareth Evans, who grew up in Wales, and is multilingual, married to an Indonesian-Japanese partner, and spent the better part of a decade living, working, and raising a family in southeast Asia, over 9,000 miles from where he was born.)

In Ed’s eulogy for Finn, way back in the show’s first episode, he characterises the generational partnership between the Wallace and Dumani households as a bastion of solidarity between minorities. “No blacks; no Irish” was the refrain that summed up the barriers that he and Finn faced while growing up as immigrants in the 60s, and which they fought to overcome together. It’s a hoary old trope, and the abiding explanation for organised crime as a sociological phenomenon; enclaves of minorities disenfranchised by the mainstream, coming together in their shared disenfranchisement to create a sort of parallel, illicit economy where they can flourish together.

Of course, Ed was being disingenuous when he delivered that eulogy back in S1 E1, just as he was being disingenuous when he feigned shock at finding the Belgian beer kegs in Elliot’s house. He was already in bed with the powers that had Finn assassinated, and he was in bed with the same powers again when he ordered for Sean to be killed.

The illicit, parallel economy of organised crime is vulnerable to the same perverse incentives of international capitalism as the mainstream economy. It can be coaxed and prodded by bad actors; communities torn apart and set at each other’s throats in the scramble to be part of the in-group.

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Ed when Marian finally blows his brains out in this episode. The confirmation that he ordered Sean’s death on his own initiative is the final nail in his coffin: he’s exhausted all of his second chances, and the Wallace dynasty is quite within its rights to be done with him. But there’s something that feels uncomfortably plausible, here in 2025, about his willingness to sell out his oldest friends and allies. The people at the top, the ones calling the shots, are all a bunch of grifters and hucksters. That being the case, isn’t it in a guy’s best interests to be a grifter and huckster himself, and be allowed a seat at the table?

Don’t get me wrong: the introduction of Isobel Vaughn as an antagonist at this late juncture is pretty lame. Not that it was badly foreshadowed; the recurring motif of the Vaughn Alliance logo throughout the season made it clear there was a common thread linking Ed, Asif and Henry, one more still-deeper stratum to the conspiracy. And Janet McTeer does a fine job with the part, in her limited screentime: aristocratic and businesslike, able to rationalise her misdeeds when interrogated with such cool intelligence that she almost makes it sound persuasive.

But during her scenes, I was thinking back to what I wrote about the Investors as villains when discussing S2 E5. The Investors derived their potency in Seasons 1 and 2 from their vague, numinous quality; the way that their members were never represented on screen; not identified by name; not identified by face; not even identified by individual agendas; always treated as a kind of aggregate force of will, effected through intermediaries. The introduction of Isobel Vaughn immediately collapses all of the mystique that made the Investors compelling. By giving her a face and a name and a history and a physical presence in the show’s universe, the Investors become just people, vulnerable to involvement in fistfights and shootouts.

I might have been willing to forgive the decision to make one of the Investors corporeal, if the mission to unseat her felt suitably epic. I can imagine a version of this season finale where Elliot, Marian, Cornelius and Luan launch a combined assault on Vaughn’s country estate shareholder meeting, and drag the truth out of her, inch by bloody inch. A British version of the finale of A Better Tomorrow II.

But, unfortunately, nothing happens that’s anywhere near that awesome. Instead, Elliot and Billy go together to the meeting, in what might be the easiest infiltration mission ever depicted on TV. At the gates to the estate, Elliot hands the guard the invitation he got from Ed, and identifies himself as Ed Dumani. He’s waved through. (Apparently, the security at this event doesn’t extend to photo ID. And for that matter, Billy is just allowed to come along with him, no questions asked, so I guess this congress of ultra-rich criminals operates on an RSVP basis, like your cousin Vera’s wedding.)

I think, overall, I like Gangs of London’s third season better than its second. This is mainly because – as I’ve said before – it has an internal consistency that Season 2 lacks. It has throughlines; plot points established in episode 1 that pay off in episode 8, in ways that bespeak rigorous planning and foresight.

Where Season 3 trails Season 2, though, is as spectacle and as action. (Let alone the first five episodes of Season 1, which feel like an unattainable ideal by this point.) Elliot and Billy step into the boardroom where Vaughn is buttering up her shareholders; they both look very tired and pissed-off and are dressed wildly out of step with the occasion’s sartorial standards.

Vaughn has the bright idea to forestall her shareholder meeting and invite Elliot (who is obviously not Ed Dumani) and Billy up to her office for a private conference. (Some of the decisions she makes in this episode, frankly, make me wonder if she’s qualified to operate a deep fryer, let alone a hundred-billion-pound market manipulation gambit.) Predictably, her explanations for why she murdered their loved ones (and hundreds of others besides) don’t go over very well. Billy and Elliot fight and kill all four of her bodyguards, the sounds of gunshots seemingly alerting no-one downstairs.

It’s not a terrible fight scene, by any means – the choreography is solid, and the editing is mostly clear. I like the detail where Billy uses his prosthetic arm to intercept the swing of an incoming cleaver. But, c’mon. For all the shit I gave Season 2’s finale, the construction site battle between Elliot and Sean at least had some operatic gravitas to it. Here, in the Season 3 finale… Elliot and Billy brawl with a handful of randos for a couple of minutes, and that’s the episode’s big centrepiece??? It feels like a fight scene included by mandate; because Gangs of London has to have action beats, even if the writers and directors and producers resent them.

(I suppose it behooves me to mention that, in the course of the melee, Billy stabs Henry to death. Good riddance to that unctuous wanker.)

The sense of showmanship and spectacle that once characterised Gangs of London feels like it’s fallen by the wayside. What I do appreciate about this season finale is how it retrenches and reframes the events of its story as a tragedy.

Elliot has Vaughn at his mercy, already bleeding from a gunshot wound inflicted by Billy. However, when he namedrops his wife and son, Vaughn’s eyes light up with recognition, and she launches the last, big, bombshell plot twist of the season. Naomi wasn’t working to bring down Vaughn’s operation; rather, Elliot’s wife was working for Vaughn, a true believer and passionate advocate for drug policy reform. Far from being killed for trying to expose Vaughn Alliance’s operations, she was killed by the Wallaces, for threatening their profits from the illegal drug trade.

Billy, of course, vehemently denies this. Elliot backs out of the room, swearing to kill whichever of the two parties who is lying to him.

The viewer might justifiably be as confused as Elliot at this point, but the truth of the matter swiftly becomes clear. Billy confronts Marian after she kills Ed, and presses her about the lawyer they killed seven years earlier. Vaughn was telling the truth, and Billy knew it, and he was consciously lying to Elliot. In fact, not only were the Wallaces responsible for killing Elliot’s family; Billy was personally present at the scene. In a remarkable bit of narrative sleight of hand, it turns out that Billy – not Zeek – was the hooded figure who retrieved the folder from the overturned car, leaving Naomi and Samuel to burn on Finn’s orders.

(I went back and reviewed the prologue sequence in S3 E1 shot by shot, and it is extremely cleverly edited. Zeek definitely drove the truck that T-boned Naomi’s car, but he never got out of the cab. The cutting makes it look like he and Billy were the same person so convincingly that it even sort of fooled me on a rewatch, knowing the plot twist. The Treachery of Images is surprisingly powerful.)

I have serious plausibility concerns about this plot twist. For one thing: it’s an astonishing coincidence that the Wallace family could have killed Elliot’s wife, and that Elliot, five years later, through completely independent mechanisms, could have ingratiated himself into the Wallace organisation as an undercover detective. For a second thing: that spectacular coincidence graduates to a straight-up plothole, in view of the fact that the Wallaces surely must have been aware of Elliot’s existence prior to the events of S1 E1. If they had enough intelligence on Naomi Keegan to assassinate her, they surely must have been aware of her husband and the father of her child, to the extent that they’d recognise him when he showed up in their organisation under the half-assed alias of “Elliot Finch”?

Season 3 treats the events of Seasons 1 and 2 as a kind of rough sketch. It cherry-picks the details that suit it, and discards those that don’t. It’s disorienting and unpleasant for anyone who’s actually paying attention, and a show that lasts as long as three seasons tends to do so because it has viewers who pay attention.

But, anyway: I was talking about how this season works as a self-contained tragedy, even if it emphatically doesn’t work as a continuation of what came before. Billy is cut up about what his family did to Elliot; he’s done the moral arithmetic in his mind, and he recognises that the loss of his left arm is small potatoes compared to the murder of a wife and child.

Amongst Gangs of London’s cast, Billy has always been the most cursed with self-awareness; exquisitely sensitive to the ways that his actions impact other people. It’s because of that sensitivity that he’s content to be drawn into other people’s causes; whether it’s his father, or his mother, or Sean, or Cornelius, he’s able to feel just a little less guilty and miserable if he’s hitched his wagon to someone else’s crusade.

For as violent and aggressive as he can get, particularly in this season, Billy always occurs as a stunted, scared boy. One particularly apt flashback in this episode is to the moment when he shot the bucket in S1 E2, killing the man cuckolding Finn so that Sean didn’t have to. That’s been Billy’s role his whole life: a sin-eater, taking his family’s iniquities upon himself to insulate them from their guilt. In his confrontation with Marian, Billy questions her in ways he’s never questioned any of his family before: when does it end? How many more lives, before he can be happy?

Marian, of course, doesn’t have a satisfactory answer. There is no number of lives.

Elliot is kind of Billy’s antithesis, in this regard. Elliot doesn’t march to the beat of anyone else’s drum. He’s fiercely, defiantly independent; relentlessly goal-oriented. Whether working to take down the Wallace organisation in Season 1, or getting his revenge on Sean in Season 2, or tracking down his family’s killer in Season 3, he’s always defined his own values and priorities, and pursued them single-mindedly.

Correspondingly, what he lacks is self-awareness. Elliot is focused on his objectives with such tunnel-vision that he blinds himself to the harm he leaves in his wake. It’s in Season 3’s denouement, rocked by Vaughn’s revelations, that he’s finally compelled to reflect upon his own actions, and reckon with the fact that he participated in exactly the system that got his wife killed, simply so that he might spite Sean. He turns Naomi’s files making the case for legalisation over to Simone, and tells her to keep following her conscience. Henry might have been corrupt, but she isn’t, and her push for drug reform comes from a legitimately noble impulse, even if Vaughn attempted to co-opt and corrupt it. For once, Elliot’s been given cause to step outside of himself, and it feels like a moment of authentic, personal growth.

For a hot moment, it looks like Season 3 will end on a positive beat. There are notes of sweet added to all the bitter with the resolution of Luan’s subplot; he takes Shannon and Danny hostage, preparing to execute them in reprisal for Elira’s death, as proxies for Ed. Mirlinda’s rebukes don’t dissuade him, but when he’s confronted by Shannon, pleading and crying and shielding Danny with her own body, he can’t bring himself to do it. (The moment wouldn’t be complete, of course, without Orli Shuka’s tormented, vein-popping reaction shots. Please never change, you great, big, Albanian ham.) We’re given cause to hope: maybe the cycle of reprisals really can end.

But then it all comes crashing down. While Simone is delivering her address declaring war on the criminal gangs, Billy invites Elliot to a rendezvous in an out-of-the-way warehouse. Billy spends the time waiting for Elliot to arrive drinking copiously from a bottle of tequila, interspersed with bumps of coke.

When Elliot arrives, he sits down opposite Billy at a steel table. Billy’s promised him information on who really killed his family, but seems oddly reticent to give it up. He keeps taking sips from his tin cup, with an increasingly shaky right hand.

“Look at my Dad.”

*Sip*

“Look at Sean. Look at the Dumanis. Even Luan’s family. All of them, fucked. Nobody wins. Nobody ever fucking wins.”

Billy places a loaded handgun on the table, and slides it across to Elliot. He confesses his complicity in the murder of his wife and child, and he begs Elliot to kill him.

As story themes go, “crime doesn’t pay” is one of the tritest and most basic and most reducible. But it’s a theme that acquires a certain elemental potency in this confrontation between two sympathetic characters. Ultimately, Billy isn’t able to escape his past sins; nor is Elliot able to divest himself of the need for revenge. The final shot of Season 3 is an exterior crane shot of the warehouse, where we hear two gunshots, punctuated by two muzzle flashes. The camera rises indifferently to view a sunrise over the London skyline, unchanged by all this tragedy. A title card intersects the horizon, and we cut to credits.

If this was the last episode that Gangs of London ever broadcast – if there was never another episode after this one – I would have a lot of respect for this as an ending. For the full-throated bleakness and futility of it; the insistence that all of these characters are fundamentally damned.

Of course, the thing about a tragedy is that it requires an ending as a fulcrum point. And I don’t think that Pulse Films are remotely ready to let Gangs of London end, for as long as they can feasibly keep it going. And I don’t remotely believe that Billy is dead: after a season full of major, named characters shown erupting with exit wounds, and Zeek still at large, this allusive exterior shot is far too obviously the showrunners leaving the door open for a Season 4.

(For what it’s worth, in the process of researching this season I stumbled across Executive Producer Vikki Tennant’s Linkedin profile, where she registers her job title as “Executive Producer – Gangs of London S3 & S4.” So, it definitely seems like the creative staff have a fourth season in mind.)

Something on the model of True Detective, or The White Lotus, resetting with a new conflict and a new cast of characters each season.

All three seasons up to this point have had different showrunners, and you can definitely tell, even if you’re not someone who’s taken it upon himself to write essay-length breakdowns of every episode. The game of telephone starting with Gareth Evans, leading through Corin Hardy to Kim Hong-Sun, has resulted in a series with a very erratic long-term narrative. It’s forever doubling back and disagreeing with itself; abandoning plot elements that seemed like they were going somewhere (where exactly is Jacqueline Robinson née Wallace these days, anyway?), or else relitigating plot points that were already satisfactorily resolved (i.e. the death of Elliot’s family, never remotely positioned as something suspicious in prior seasons).

The kicker is, Season 3 isn’t anywhere close to being the sloppy plie-up of plotlines that Season 2 was. For as much as it has going on, it’s honestly kind of impressive how tightly plotted it is. All of its characters have clearly established, comprehensible motivations, which they act upon in decisive ways. The answers to its whodunnit mysteries recontextualise prior events in ways that internally make sense.

My frustration with Season 3 comes from a different place than my frustration with Season 2. Season 2 was a mess on its own terms. Season 3 makes a mess of characters and plotlines it inherited. From the big details (Sean’s abrupt demise; the dissolution of Elliot and Shannon’s relationship) to the small ones (Faz’s sudden death; Marian has a brother??), it’s hard to escape the feeling that this story is not an organic extension of the story that preceded it. With a few judicious, minimally invasive rewrites, Season 3 could probably have worked as a self-contained plot, involving characters we’d never met before, and would have been a more satisfying viewing experience for it.

To wit: Ed Dumani. Relegated to the background for most of the season thus far, S3 E7 hones in on his perspective, as he tries to track down Zeek, and, by extension, Elliot. Zeek going off-script and letting Elliot go has left Ed in a precarious position; the highly capable, highly motivated man he tried to frame for the fentanyl poisonings is out there somewhere, and it’s Ed’s arse on the line if he can’t silence Elliot before he blows open the truth of the conspiracy with Henry and Asif. Lucian Msamati plays Ed with the same world-weary stoicism as always, but there’s a note of tension, even desperation, in his body-language. The scene where he interrogates Ray (Mat Fraser), an old associate who originally vouched for Zeek, is excellent, progressing slowly from the back-slapping bonhomie of two middle-aged male friends, towards terror and bloodshed, inflicted joylessly. (As an aside, it was cool to see Msamati in an Oscar-winning movie earlier this year. It’s not more than he deserves.)

I just can’t help but be disappointed with Ed, though. Let’s actually try to track his character arc, shall we? In Season 1, he collaborated with the Investors, selling out Sean and Marian to keep the Wallace organisation running smoothly. In Season 2, he finally rebelled against the Investors when their yoke became intolerable, after they drove Alex to suicide. And in Season 3, he’s… back on the same bullshit as Season 1 Ed; collaborating with Asif and his cronies in the UK government, throwing Sean under the bus so that he can prosper in the Brave New World of legalised drugs. He’s arrived right back where he started, and that’s just so unfulfilling. There’s a reason they’re called character arcs, not character loop-de-loops.

As for Elliot, he’s holed up with Lale, after she rescued him from Shannon’s clutches. She sheepishly admits that she was the one to frame him for the fentanyl spiking, having been coerced by Asif holding her baby hostage. Elliot, understandably, doesn’t take this well, and the two of them briefly exchange blows before they come to an understanding. They team up to infiltrate Asif’s mansion; Lale, looking to steal back her infant son; Elliot, looking to interrogate Asif and find out the truth behind his family’s murder.

This temporary alliance goes remarkably smoothly, at first. Lale and Elliot slip past Asif’s guards, and overhear a conversation between him and Henry. Henry’s side of the conspiracy is starting to unravel as well; Simone, in putting together her proposal for drug legalisation, has noticed that a company owned by Asif is prioritised in the list of potential suppliers. She’s begun to realise that, rather than cutting off the gangs’ funding, she’s being made party to legitimising them.

(Of all the characters at play in Season 3, Simone’s might just be the arc I appreciate the most. As a politician, she considers herself a firebrand and a radical reformer; she’s determined to make a positive change to society, after her brother Jermaine’s death to gang violence. But, in her legitimately idealistic zeal to change the world, she’s inadvertently made herself a patsy for the kind of people who killed her brother. Her own guilty, covert drug habit makes her that much easier for bad actors like Henry to manipulate. T’Nia Miller plays all of these conflicting impulses beautifully, and Simone emerges as a genuinely well-conceived, well-rounded character for it.)

After snapping a couple of guards’ necks, Lale and Elliot make their way into Asif’s inner sanctum. Lale retrieves her son from Ayesha at gunpoint, pistol-whipping her in the stomach. Elliot holds Asif to account.

Asif offers Elliot a bargain: he’ll tell him the truth about what happened to his wife and son, if he’ll just kill Lale for him. Lale pulls a gun, and Elliot smoothly disarms her. She urges him to kill Asif, just as emphatically as Asif urges him in the opposite direction.

It’s a juicy, tense dilemma; one that’s short-circuited when Ayesha (who Lale left alive) hits a panic button, and all the compound’s surviving guards are alerted. Elliot glances around, and while he’s momentarily distracted, Lale draws a concealed knife and slits Asif’s throat with a single stroke. “Fuck you,” she whispers, simply, as his neck gasps out the dregs of his lifeblood.

The most deeply felt enmity and most profoundly earned revenge in the entire show culminates here, and it’s weirdly sudden and brusque. Unlike Sean’s, Asif’s end doesn’t feel inappropriate – Lale deserved this moment – but it does feel unceremonious.

Elliot and Lale shoot their way out through the mansion with her baby in hand, in the episode’s one significant action beat. It’s an OK shootout (Kim Hong-Sun returns to direct the final two episodes), albeit pretty short and perfunctory as set-pieces go. They escape, and make for the Kurds’ hideout.

Unbeknownst to the erstwhile partners, however, Billy and Cornelius have been on the warpath all over London, squeezing low-level gang members as they hunt for someone who’ll point them towards Sean’s killer. And, in the course of their rampage, they find just such a lead: Merwan, Lale’s second-in-command who was already suspicious of her movements. Upon arriving at the Kurds’ base of operations, Elliot is ambushed by Billy and knocked out by Cornelius (I think that’s, like, the fourth time Elliot’s been knocked out in the last three days? To say nothing of being shot by Shannon and beaten to a pulp by Zeek. He’s holding up remarkably well, all things considered.)

While Elliot is taken away as the Wallaces’ prisoner, Merwan confronts Lale with an ultimatum; her baby represents a liability that their enemies can exploit, and she should step down from her position of command. The clear implication is that he intends to take her place, and that it would be very inconvenient for her relationship with her son if the Wallaces should find out that Sean’s child is alive after all. Lale listens to his proposal. Her counter-proposal is to mash his head to a pulp with a car door.

This is a bit of a clumsy story beat, if you ask me. Merwan’s motives are framed as sinister by the acting and the blocking; Murat Erkek circles Narges Rashidi with a wolfish smile and a cruel glint in his eye, while she bows her head and worriedly clutches her baby to her breast. The situation is presented as blackmail; Merwan exploiting his boss’s weakness to grab for power. This might make more sense in the context of one of the other gangs, but the script seems to have forgotten that the Kurdish Liberation Movement isn’t a for-profit endeavour; to be the commander of its London operations isn’t really a position one covets for its own sake. (Again, Season 3 seems indifferent to the context earlier seasons established.) With that in mind, Merwan’s objections to Lale staying on as leader actually seem pretty germane; cold and ruthless, sure, but the truth is, yes, her efficacy within the PKK is compromised by the presence of her child. And there’s been nothing to indicate that Merwan’s commitment to the cause of Kurdish liberation is insincere or corrupt.

The narrative’s framing is misaligned with the plot’s logic. Merwan comes off as unnecessarily creepy when making a cogent point, and Lale comes off as a psychopath for killing him in a really unnecessarily brutal way.

Meanwhile, it really looks like Elliot’s screwed. He’s hauled in chains before a meeting of all the gangs of London to await judgement. Ed anxiously presses for him to be killed on the spot, even while Luan insists that they need answers first.

Chairing the meeting is Marian Wallace, perched on her stool like it’s the Iron Throne, flanked by her brother and her eldest son. And, with a flourish, she presents the damning evidence that will resolve this rough tribunal: a smartphone that was left on her bedroom windowsill with a note, in the middle of the night. “The order to kill Sean, my son, was sent to this phone,” she tells the room. “And this is the number it came from.”

She presses redial. Ed’s pocket vibrates.

On the one hand, this is genuinely a pretty great plot twist, and a pretty great dramatic flourish. There have been incidental scenes seeded throughout Season 3 that Zeek has a kind of reverence and respect for Marian; for him to hand her the rope that Ed’s used to hang himself is a pretty ingenious plot manoeuvre.

On the other hand – and I admit, this is nitpicking – the moment doesn’t make a lot of sense, in context. From the perspective of the onlookers, all Marian did was dial Ed’s phone; they only have her word for the provenance of the handset. It’s not quite the instant, conclusive indictment it’s framed as in the moment.

Still; a cool moment, and one that’s contextualised by the episode’s main revelation. After severing ties with Ed, Zeek goes to visit his mother (Akiko Hitomi) in her care home. She’s confined to a wheelchair, her face badly burned, yet she seems to have nothing but love for her son. He tells her that he might not be back for a while: he has things he needs to do.

“No matter what happens now,” she tells him, “your father would be proud of you.”

In a brief aside, we get a glimpse of the apartment Zeek abandoned, and which Ed found after interrogating Ray. On the bedside table is a framed photograph of Zeek as a baby, with his mother on his left, and on his right side, his father… a young, smiling Finn Wallace.

Which, uh… that’s certainly a revelation, but I still have questions!

The answers to most – not quite all! – of Season 3’s mysteries are laid bare in this episode, and my reaction to its revelations on this viewing was a resounding “Huh. Yeah, I guess it all fits together.”

Following S3 E5’s parenthetical flashback episode, we rejoin the main cast in the present tense. Elliot has been taken captive by Zeek following his ambushing at the end of S3 E4. He wakes up with a sack-cloth secured over his head, his wrists duct-taped to a section of guardrail, and presumably incredibly cramped legs, in what looks to be a disused school building. (There apparently exists no shortage of derelict, abandoned structures in London that characters can use at a moment’s notice to hide, take hostages, or fight to the death. Seems unlikely to me, but then, I live in a village with a population of ~700, about as far from London as it’s possible to get on mainland Britain. I can’t really talk to this detail’s veracity.)

Meanwhile, Ed, Shannon, Faz and Saba break into Elliot’s Dad’s flat, where Elliot told Shannon he was headed when they last parted. Inside, they discover the cache of Belgian beer kegs that Zeek planted; on its face, a pretty damning indictment that Elliot was complicit in the fentanyl spiking. Ed doesn’t waste any time arriving at a judgement. “We never should have trusted him,” declares the Dumani patriarch. “I want him found, and I want him killed.” Harsh, but for a crime boss dealing with a new associate known to have once been an undercover cop, not unreasonable.

Or, so one might think, until the following scene, which finds Asif arriving at a secluded rendezvous under a bridge, with none other than… Ed Dumani (shown shaking hands with Asif in a sinister, low, canted-angle shot, no less). Meanwhile, Shannon shows up where Elliot is being held hostage, and meets Zeek as though he’s an old business associate. “I’ve been trying to call you,” he says to her.

“Where is he?” she replies.

Skipping ahead a little: later in the episode, Asif has another rendezvous; this time on the bank of the Thames in broad daylight, with Henry, aide-de-camp to the Mayor of London. They shake hands like old buddies. “You were always a loyal friend to Nasir,” Asif tells him, “and now to me, too.”

For anyone who’s following along with these recaps, and who might be (understandably) lost at this point, I’ll try to break it down:

1: Henry is manipulating Simone into enacting drug legalisation in London.

2: Supposedly, drug legalisation will win public and political support off the back of the fentanyl poisonings from the product moved into the city by the gangs.

3: The fentanyl spiking was facilitated by a covert partnership between Ed and Asif, both of whom stand to profit if drugs are legalised. Shannon is in on it, and, by extension, so is Zeek.

4: The poisonings were achieved by Lale’s coercement, Asif holding her baby hostage.

5: Ed and Asif initially redirected suspicion towards Sean, Billy and Cornelius as the perpetrators. Now that Sean’s out of the picture, they’re framing Elliot in the same way. It’s a two-tier framing.

All of this is, honestly, quite clever, for a certain value of “clever.” A set of secondary characters who appeared to be separately pursuing their own agendas and objectives are revealed to be collaborating on a larger mission; it makes you reinterpret the season up to this point, feeling like your brain’s been rewired to see things in this new light. That’s not not an aesthetic pleasure.

As twisty and ingenious as the plot mechanics might be, however, they’re not particularly satisfying at the level of character and theme. In particular, for Shannon and Elliot’s relationship to have terminated at this betrayal just falls flat. I’ve said multiple times over that I’m not particularly invested in Shannon and Elliot’s relationship, but it’s disappointing that the writers apparently agree with me; she colludes with Ed in his machinations to frame and murder Elliot, and aside from Pippa Bennett-Warner giving the camera a couple of pained expressions, she doesn’t meaningfully experience any self-doubt or inner-conflict about it. In this episode, she enthusiastically presses Zeek to kill Elliot; at one point shoots Elliot in the shoulder herself; and the episode ends with him fleeing from her together with Lale, while she takes potshots at their car with a shotgun (in the middle of a suburban street, in the middle of the day). The notion that she ever felt any authentic affection for Elliot is effectively discarded, and that just feels like leaving opportunities for juicy drama on the table.

I feel similarly about the scene later in the episode, in which Billy spitefully shoots and kills Faz, after trying to torture Elliot’s location out of him. Here, yet again, is a sympathetic character introduced in a previous season, whose arc the writers couldn’t figure out how to integrate into the larger story, so he’s just killed off for shock value, his whole onscreen existence a non-starter. (I guess Saba will want – sigh – revenge next season, or something.)

I’m also dubious about the idea that the mass deaths caused by a fentanyl spiking are likely to galvanise support for drug legalisation. I understand the rationale of it, from a policymaking perspective. The public harms involved with drugs often have more to do with the illicit channels of distribution and consumption than with the risks inherent to the substances themselves; legal, regulated, taxable channels for drug use have the potential to choke the supply chains of illicit channels and offer a net improvement to public health.

But I don’t think the emotional logic of it tracks. By Simone’s accounting in S3 E3, over 600 people died in in one night, with many more survivors surviving debilitating brain damage. That’s a tragedy on the sort of scale that traumatises a nation; if it happened in real life, the UK would commemorate it the way the US does 9/11. There’s never really been a big groundswell of support in the UK for drug legalisation, or decriminalisation (as in the Netherlands, or Portugal) – even cannabis remains wholly illegal. The idea that, just days after the country was scarred by drug-related deaths, the Mayor of London would publically call for all drugs to be made legal seems epochally tone-deaf; political career suicide of an order that would make Liz Truss’s head spin.

All of which is to say; the scenes where Simone and Henry dig into the specifics of their proposal to Downing Street play like first-draft ideas for a story about drug legalisation, rather than the finished product. I realise that Gangs of London takes place in a heightened, comic-book space, somewhere resemblant but adjacent to our world, and that addressing the nuances of real UK politics probably isn’t a fruitful avenue for criticism. But the simplistic, A-to-B logic of Henry’s plan doesn’t suggest stylisation, so much as writers who just haven’t thought about this plotline very hard.

Elliot manages to break free from his bonds, and, while still blinded by the sack over his head, stabs Shannon through the foot after she shoots him. She flees (remarkably spryly, it must be said), and leaves Elliot to grapple with Zeek.

The Elliot/Zeek brawl is the highlight of the episode; a dirty, scrappy, one-on-one, no-holds-barred fight of the sort that Gangs of London hasn’t done in a while. I criticised Tessa Hoffe’s handling of the action scenes in the last episode, but this one lands: I imagine having Andrew Koji on set probably facilitated the execution of a fight scene that doesn’t rely on jittery, disorienting jump-cuts. (If you’re not familiar with his work: Andrew Koji is the star of Cinemax’s period action-drama Warrior, and probably the most experienced martial-artist and TV screenfighter ever to work on Gangs of London.)

It’s a brutal, ugly duel, with one particularly harrowing beat when Elliot wrenches a wooden plank out of the wall and gouges a chunk out of Zeek’s calf with its embedded nails. Eventually, though, Elliot hesitates too much – he tries to interrogate Zeek for the reason he killed his family, which gives Zeek the opening he needs to regain the advantage. He bullrushes Elliot through a wall, and then, in a beat that got a shout out of me, throws him to the ground with such force that Elliot crashes through the floor to the storey beneath.

Elliot crawls out to the overgrown playground outside the building on hands and knees; Zeek starts to choke the life out of him with the chain of a children’s swing. Just when it looks like Elliot’s number is up, Zeek relents. “I didn’t know your boy was going to be in the car,” he mutters, his beaten opponent gasping and wheezing on the ground. “I just did what I was paid to do. They were both still alive when I left.”

The killer, it appears, has something resembling a conscience. Koji’s dark fringe of hair flutters across the dour expression beneath his hood, his voice low and husky. Serious emo bad-boy vibes. “I’m supposed to kill you, but I’m not going to. Make sure you remember that.”

Zeek is still an intriguing wild-card; what he’s after, and why, remain compelling questions as we head towards the season finale.

For S3 E6, I stand by what I said in S3 E5 about the blandness of Tessa Hoffe’s direction; most of this episode takes place in eye-level medium shots, flatly lit and with a colour scheme of beige and eggshell-white. It’s an episode that makes me reflect on previous Gangs of London episodes, and wonder if it always looked quite so drab. Excepting the jolt provided by Elliot’s fight with Zeek, it feels like such a perfunctory episode of TV, indifferently staged, dumping the season’s revelations out for the viewer to rummage through without fanfare or panache.

No film has an easy path from blank page to finished, distributed product, but even by the standard of most films, Gareth Evans’s sixth feature weathered an unusually tortuous road to release. Havoc was in pre-production as far back as the winter of 2020, even before the first season of Gangs of London dropped. In his interview with YouTuber Ross “Rossatron” Peacock, Evans describes what he did on Gangs of London as “dipping my toes back into action on a slightly smaller budget; a slightly smaller schedule.”

We action fans were given cause to wonder: if Gangs of London S1 E1 and S1 E5 are what Evans is able to achieve with DP Matt Flannery and stunt choreographer Jude Poyer in tow, with a limited budget and shooting schedule, what marvels could they accomplish in the absence of those limitations?

Following the release of Apostle, in 2021, Evans signed an exclusive deal with Netflix to create content for the streaming service. Havoc was to be the first of these agreed-upon projects, with Evans to direct his own original screenplay. The pitch at the time was: “a bruised detective must fight his way through a criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son, while unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.”

Principal photography commenced in July of 2021, and wrapped in October of the same year after a 79-day shoot. Something to note about that date range is that Havoc was a COVID production (mask mandates and social distancing measures were legally enforced in Wales as late as August of 2021). Put a pin in that; we’ll be coming back to it later.

I assumed (naïvely) back in 2022 that Havoc would land in our lap any day now. Instead, we were met with month after month of radio silence, interspersed with the occasional cagey update on Evans’s Instagram feed. For the better part of 4 years, the film only ever seemed to be delayed further and further. Evans’s return to full-bore action filmmaking, already overdue when he started, began to feel frustratingly like vaporware.

The story, as it finally emerged, was that Havoc needed reshoots to iron out story details (a requirement, Evans notes in his conversation with the Empire podcast (beginning at around 47:50 in the previous link) that’s not rare in films at this level of budget). These necessary reshoots formed a bottleneck in the film’s post-production; first, because the performers had obligations that called them thousands of miles away from Wales in the wake of COVID; then exacerbated by the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. It actually wasn’t until July of 2024 that the film had all of its live-action photography locked down. It was straightforwardly a case of bad luck and bad timing that kept it from audiences for so long.

And so, it was on April 25th, 2025 that Havoc, with all of its post-production elements complete, finally dropped for the edification of 300 million global subscribers. And… it’s pretty damn good! An exuberant, brutal, fiery slab of stylised crime fiction; a nitro-charged neo-noir, blending influences from American 70’s thrillers by the likes of William Friedkin and Sam Peckinpah with the Heroic Bloodshed pictures of 80’s and 90’s Hong Kong, from directors such as John Woo, Ringo Lam, John Woo, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, John Woo, Yuen Woo-Ping, John Woo, and John Woo. (Possibly also John Woo.)

The premise: Tom Hardy plays Walker, a homicide detective called away from his sad attempts to buy a gift for his estranged six-year-old daughter on Christmas Eve to investigate a mass murder. Nine bodies have been found riddled with bullets in Chinatown, their spilled blood coagulating amidst the heaped mounds of cocaine from a drug deal gone awry. Among the corpses is Tsui Fong (Jeremy Ang Jones), a local Triad big-shot. The CCTV footage from the shooting has glimpsed the faces of a young couple fleeing the scene; these are Charlie Beaumont (Justin Cornwell) and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda).

Walker recognises Charlie’s face, though he initially denies it: he’s the son of the city’s incumbent mayor, the corrupt Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker). Walker has been handling Beaumont Sr.’s dirty laundry together with his cadre of crooked cop buddies, which includes Vincent (a deliciously slimy Timothy Olyphant); Jake (Gangs of London alumnus Richard Harrington); and Cortez (Serhat Metin – not giving much of a performance, because his character spends most of the movie in a coma).

It’s in the movie’s first big setpiece that we see how Cortez landed in just such a condition. Immediately after the film’s blood-red title card, the viewer is swept into a low-angle shot following a high-speed car chase. Multiple police cruisers hare through the night-lit city streets after a semi-truck, crashing through fences and jackknifing around corners. Charlie, Mia, and their friends are trying to escape in the truck with a shipment of washing machines full of cocaine – cocaine they hope to use to square their debt to Tsui. In a fit of desperation at the pursuit by Vincent and his crew, they open the back of the trailer and throw one of the coke-filled washing machines out at the pursuing cop car. The gambit works a little too well; the washing machine crashes straight through the windshield and into the driver’s seat, crushing Cortez under the weight of an industrial laundry unit. They get away… but they might have just made themselves into cop-killers.

The first thing that any viewer is apt to notice about this car chase, coming to it off of Evans’s previous works, is how it looks. Havoc’s cinematography was handled, as usual, by Matt Flannery, and it has all the tells I associate with his collaborations with Evans; there’s a moment in this opening chase scene when a character is hanging off the back of the truck as its door swings open, and he’s framed from a bird’s-eye angle, the camera tilting in concert with the door’s angle against its hinge. The kind of sinuous, dynamic, fastidiously storyboarded camera movement that can trace its lineage all the way back to Merantau is present and accounted for.

What’s different – immediately, profoundly different – is the texture of the spaces the cars move through. That is to say: they were largely built in a computer (using Unreal Engine, no less). The whole environment has a slick, digitally-sweetened gloss about it. The police cruisers’ lights bathe the scene alternately in neon bursts of cherry red and azure blue. Particle-effect snowflakes smear across the screen as the camera charges through them. The surrounding highway and skyline have a laminated, pre-baked sheen to them that’s unmistakeable in its artificiality.

Havoc notionally takes place in the USA. The architecture, cars, police conduct, etc. indicate as much, and the cast all affect east-coast accents, with variously persuasive results (pour one out for German-Iranian actress Narges Rashidi, in her minuscule role as Walker’s long-suffering wife). Don’t be fooled, though: under the hood, this is quite a British movie, and more specifically a Welsh one. The move was shot in its entirety in Wales, on a combination of studio sets and locations such as Cardiff, Swansea, Bridgend and Port Talbot. Extensive CGI was used to camouflage them as a bustling metropolis on the other side of the Atlantic.

Ever since returning to his birthplace from Indonesia in 2015, Evans seems to have made it a personal project to build a viable film industry in his homeland, almost from the ground up. His business partner, LA-based producer and XYZ Films co-founder Aram Tertzakian, describes the enthusiasm to film in Wales as being motivated somewhat by patriotic fervour. For what it’s worth, the project seems to be working: Jack Sargeant, the Welsh Minister for Culture, Skills and Social Partnership has spoken about the economic and reputational benefits of the Havoc shoot in glowing terms.

As to what this love of hearth and home means for the finished product: Havoc takes place in a space that feels curiously abstract. The city where it’s set is unnamed, and by the filmmaker’s own account, is meant to be a sort of composite of east-coast hubs; New York; Boston; Philadelphia; Detroit. It’s America, re-conceived as a dystopian fantasy from 3,000 miles distant; a playground built from the aggregated details of decades of crime fiction. There are elements of mise-en-scène that almost feel cyberpunk; the glowing highlights on the masks Charlie’s crew wear during their flight from the law; the neon-orange lighting in the club basement where Tsui is shot, with mounted TV screens displaying montages of 80’s anime. For all that Evans pays lip-service in interviews to Point Blank and The French Connection and Michael Mann’s Thief, the end result looks closer to something that David Ayer might have made, or even (whisper it) Zack Snyder.

I was ambivalent about this aesthetic at first. Havoc’s opening chase scene, as slick and kinetic as it is, doesn’t have the oomph and the crunch of The Raid 2’s Bruce Law-coordinated car chase, filmed on actual roads in Jakarta, with actual vehicles getting the shit smashed out of them. In time, though, I came to see Havoc’s strident artificiality as more of a feature than a bug. Evans, as I’ve written in the past, is a pastiche artist; a poet of archetypes, twisting and contorting and remixing the movies he watched with his Dad growing up. There’s never a point when Havoc’s aesthetics feel careless. The hyperreality of the city underscores the melodrama taking place within it.

(If anything, Havoc makes me want to see what Evans could do with an actual cyberpunk movie. If you’re going to make a synthetic, surreal facsimile of America, then lean into it and give your characters futuristic gadgets and weapons!)

And what melodrama! The story is complicated by the arrival of Tsui’s mother, Clarice Fong (Yeo Yann Yann), an imperious Triad boss who responds to her son’s death with all the mercy and equivocation of a thermonuclear bomb. After identifying her boy’s corpse, she confronts his second-in-command, Ching (Sunny Pang) at the crime scene. Without flinching, she grabs a pistol from the belt of one of Ching’s bodyguards, and shoots all three members of his protection detail dead on the spot.

Unblinking, she presses the gun against Ching’s trembling, deferential forehead. He swears that Charlie Beaumont and his girlfriend were responsible for Tsui’s murder, and Clarice buys his story. Which is bad news, because of course, Ching was the one who actually ordered the hit on Tsui… in partnership with Vincent and his crew, who carried it out.

This is Heroic Bloodshed, baby; as pure an expression of the genre as there’s been since Hard Boiled came out in 1992. The theatre of grand gestures of loyalty, and equally grand betrayals; where the act of pointing a gun, and the decision to fire or not fire, are assigned incalculable dramatic weight.

Walker, then, has to find Charlie and Mia before either Clarice’s men or Ching’s men or Vincent’s crew get to them first, and if he fails, Lawrence has enough dirt on him to land him in prison for the rest of his days. No pressure, then.

It’s a film of two halves; roughly the first fifty-five minutes are spent on build-up and place-setting, the various interested parties scrambling around and past one another to track down Charlie Beaumont, the Magnificent Human MacGuffin. I’ve seen criticism from some early reviews of the movie that it’s overly convoluted; an attempt to squash the gangland skulduggery of The Raid 2 down into two-thirds of that movie’s runtime. Here, I have to admit my perspective is biased. I was following this movie’s production so closely that by the time it came out, I already had a pretty good handle on who the central characters were and their various dynamics, so I didn’t find the plot particularly hard to follow.

Mostly, I was impressed by just how economically Havoc introduces something like two-dozen characters and, like, nine separate agendas, and juggles them so effectively in the scene-to-scene editing. What each character wants is clear, and they all consistently take decisive, concrete action to accomplish their goals. Each scene builds on the last and feeds organically into the next, steadily but consistently rising to a boil. The rhythm is actually quite similar to the plottier episodes of Gangs of London. (But one of the good ones, like S1 E4, or S2 E7.) There’s a consistent atmosphere of tension and dread, anticipating how all these different interests will inevitably converge and come into conflict. (The atmosphere is reinforced by Aria Prayogi’s score. Credited solely here as composer in the absence of his longtime collaborator Fajar Yuskemal, the music in Havoc sounds a lot like the duo’s work on Gangs of London; ominous, droning cello and double-bass, spiced up in this case with some free-jazz saxophone for that added noir flavour.)

Brief flare-ups of violence, like Walker brutally interrogating a survivor of the Chinatown massacre, or Clarice’s attack on Lawrence’s convoy, make it clear just how bloody the eventual conflagration will be. And at the 55-minute mark, the film delivers on that promise. Most of the major players converge on the Medusa nightclub, where Charlie and Mia expect to receive counterfeit passports. Inside, All Hell breaks loose.

Not only does All Hell break loose; after it’s broken loose, All Hell gushes forth, pretty much continuously, until the credits roll. I’ve heard people complain that Havoc doesn’t have enough action. I find this a peculiar complaint, largely because it’s demonstrably wrong. Its body-count stands at a whopping 89, and by my best estimation, it spends 24 minutes and 59 seconds engaged in action scenes. The credits start to play at 96 minutes and 37 seconds, so that’s roughly 25.85% of runtime consisting of characters committing violence against one another. For comparison, that’s actually a substantially higher proportion of its runtime than The Raid 2’s 22.32%. (I realise that what constitutes an “action scene” from second to second is somewhat subjective, so I’m happy to share, upon request, the timestamp data I used to arrive at these numbers. That said, I think I’ve been fair with my methodology.)

It’s true that there are “only” two major, showcase action sequences, both in the back half of the movie, but that makes Havoc sound a lot more parsimonious than it actually is. I don’t mind the fact that the film is backloaded; it’s brief enough as a whole that having it structured as half wind-up, half-payoff proves a fruitful strategy. The accumulating torque of the first fifty minutes makes the eventual release land all the harder.

Of course, it wouldn’t work as a structure if the two big showcase sequences weren’t both absolute fucking barnburners. If these aren’t the first- and second-best action scenes of 2025, respectively, it will only be in the case that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning completely blows the roof off.

The first is the virtuosic fight through the Medusa nightclub, where Walker, Charlie and Mia are simultaneously ambushed by both Vincent’s crew and Clarice’s footsoldiers. What follows is a three-way melee, beginning as a brawl on the club’s mezzanine floor, where Walker and Mia batter, bludgeon, stab, hack, smash and dropkick their way through the fray (serenaded the whole while by the pulsating synths of Gesaffelstein). Action designer Jude Poyer (a regular Evans collaborator since Apostle, and one of this movie’s key creative voices) finally has the opportunity to give his style of choreography its fullest, most unconstrained expression. These aren’t the practiced, technical martial arts of The Raid; these are the guttural, frantic survival instincts of cornered animals, rendered artful by the precision of the storyboarding and the pre-viz.

It’s in this club fight that Evans is best able to make use of the film’s budget. (I’ve not been able to find reliable information on how much Havoc cost, but we can infer that it was the highest he’s ever had to work with. My guess would be somewhere at the high end of eight figures.) The Medusa isn’t a real nightclub, but was a custom-made set, built by the art department to Evans’s self-admittedly indulgent specifications. Details like the reinforced glass floor-tiles on the mezzanine allow for shots like the one where we look upward towards combatants who’ve just collided with the ground.

The melee transitions to a gunfight on the ground floor, through which Walker escorts Mia and Charlie through a deafening miasma of gunfire. Another way Havoc distances itself from The Raid movies, while emphasising the lineage of Heroic Bloodshed; the action is much more focused on gunplay than fisticuffs. Characters duck and weave and find cover in ways that evoke the back-and-forth exchanges of kung-fu movies, only expressed through the medium of bullets. Fixtures and furniture explode into splinters; bodies caught in fusillades of gunfire dance in slow-motion as they fall.

The Medusa setpiece is almost nine minutes of uninterrupted carnage, and would be worth the price of a month’s Netflix subscription all on its own: but Havoc has yet to top itself. For its final act, all of the plot’s forces converge on a remote fishing cabin where Walker takes Charlie and Mia to hide out. What comes next is a sequence that gets closer to the “desperate last stand” energy of the climactic scenes of The Wild Bunch or The Killer than anything else I’ve seen from the 21st century. What begins as a siege – with our heroes taking potshots at attackers from the cabin’s windows – quickly devolves into a free-for-all, Clarice’s forces bursting into the flimsy shack from all directions like a zombie horde.

In close-quarters, the protagonists use fish-hooks and filleting knives and harpoons to push back the assault. It’s a frenzy of bloodletting so intense that I simultaneously wanted to gasp, laugh, and cheer. It climaxes with Walker’s struggle with Clarice’s head enforcer, a nameless assassin played by Michelle Waterson (an in-real-life UFC fighter, and the subject of the documentary Fight Mom), the final beat of which almost made me jump out of my chair.

I was surprised to read that Evans didn’t write Havoc with Tom Hardy in mind for the part of Walker. If that really was the case, then he was a coup of casting; Hardy brings life to Walker that isn’t evident in the script. The English actor’s idiosyncrasies have only grown more pronounced as he’s moved into middle-age; at times, he seems to be flirting with the same mysterious energy that animates Nicolas Cage. The boyish good looks that were evident as recently as Inception have since hardened and weathered; his profile is increasingly distinctive by virtue of his prominent jug-ears, his thick lips, and his bulbous potato of a nose. He’s not ugly, but he’s persuasive as a character from whom life and experience have extracted a toll. He’s the kind of cop I imagine his Max Rockatansky would have been, if the world hadn’t fallen quite so thoroughly.

It’s easy to imagine how another actor might have played Walker much more woodenly; as a glowering, stoic bore. Hardy’s Walker is a lot more interesting to watch than that; expressive in his line deliveries and his body language. He moves around with a stooped posture, shoulders defensively hunched forwards, walking with a bow-legged gait. (In an interview with Letterboxd, Hardy talks about taking influence from the behaviours of gorillas and orang-utans.) He talks quickly, his voice husky, his words under-articulated, his accent from somewhere in the Uncanny Valley. There isn’t a single interaction in the movie where he looks at ease, either with himself or with his interlocutor. He vacillates between too much eye-contact and not enough, constantly gesturing and fidgeting, anxiously courting challenges or threats. (I don’t know if this was the intended reading, but it occurred to me that Walker might be somewhere on the spectrum.) There are points when the performance got to be a bit much, honestly; a few line-readings veer closer to the vaudeville routine from the Venom movies than I would have expected or preferred. On the whole, though, it’s a novel variant on the “maverick cop” archetype; one that gives the movie a bracing, nervous charge throughout.

(It probably also bears mentioning that Hardy is the real deal as far as physicality is concerned. He holds a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and has taken home gold medals from regional tournaments in his mid-40s. This didn’t necessarily inform the choreography – Walker isn’t a jiu-jitsu practitioner, even if Hardy is – but the burly, hefty forcefulness he brings to the action scenes emerges from something authentic.)

It’s a good thing Hardy was present for the role, because on the page, Walker is a complete cipher. He’s a rough sketch of a maverick cop character, drawn from the memory of a hundred other maverick cop characters. From scene to scene, it’s almost impossible to get a steady bead on his psychology. In some scenes he’ll be utterly ruthless, like the one where he interrogates a suspect who’s in the middle of surgery from a back-alley doctor, by pushing his thumb into the poor sod’s open entry wounds. In others, he’ll betray disarming sensitivity, like when he comforts Cortez’s wife, offering cryptic assurances that her comatose husband wasn’t involved in the terrible thing his crew did. It’s not so much that the character is multifaceted, but that these scenes feel like they belong in two different movies.

As for that terrible thing that Walker can’t speak openly about: they killed an undercover cop. While in the course of blackmailing the DA prosecuting Lawrence Beaumont, a UC stumbled upon their operation, and they took the appropriately drastic measures. (Something that softens this character beat considerably: it was Vincent who killed the witness, not Walker. Indeed, Vincent did so over Walker’s express objections.)

This is the line that Walker feels he’s crossed; that’s made his relationship with his family and his profession untenable. It’s the reason why he has to beg his wife over the phone to be allowed to bring his daughter a hastily-bagged gift on Christmas Eve; it’s the reason Beaumont can coerce him into doing his bidding with the threat of “one phone call.”

There’s a phantom of a character arc, here; in the film’s last scene, Walker kills Vincent, and in so doing, symbolically divests himself of the guilty secret he’s held from the world ever since the death of that UC. The final shot of the movie has the camera slowly zooming in on Walker’s exhausted eyes, reflecting alternately flickering blue and red lights. It’s implicit that if Walker survives his gunshot wounds, he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison. But, by virtue of the Herculean effort he made to save Charlie and Mia, he’s been cleansed of his moral contamination.

Cool, in theory! It’s the kind of melancholy, turbo-operatic gesture that closed out John Woo classics like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head. It doesn’t quite land in Havoc, though, because the viewer doesn’t have the requisite context for the demons Walker is exorcising.

In the film’s very first scene – a prologue before the opening title card – Walker soliloquises in voiceover about the choices one makes in life; about the justifications we tell ourselves for transgressive deeds; that they’re for our family, and our kids. (This prologue is, BTW, easily the worst scene in the whole film. It’s the only part of the film that features voiceover, and Hardy’s mush-mouthed line readings are uniquely ill-equipped to deliver overwrought narration about man’s moral condition.) For all the vagaries and self-recrimination in this monologue, though, I’m left wondering: what exactly were Walker’s family’s circumstances that he needed to make such unjustifiable choices? What were the details of the Faustian bargain he made with Beaumont? Why, sir, are you a dirty cop in the first place, if you apparently have such a conscience about it?

Something that stood out to me, while scrubbing through this film for review purposes, is that we never see where Walker lives. We have no idea what this guy’s life looks like when he’s off the clock. Gareth Evans has repeatedly cited The French Connection as an influence for Havoc. Now, it’s been years since I last watched The French Connection, but there’s a scene in it that’s always stuck with me, long after the details of its plot have faded. Popeye Doyle’s partner has to effectively break into the detective’s pigsty of a bachelor pad. The hungover, nude Popeye groggily peels the bedsheets off his face, and directs his partner to unlock his ankle where it’s been cuffed to the foot of his bed by his most recent one-night stand. It’s a potent, darkly funny moment; one that paints a vivid portrait with its mise-en-scène of what an antisocial catastrophe the movie’s protagonist is.

By comparison, Havoc can’t spare the time for portraiture. Most of the cast’s motivations are expressed in little more than a couple of lines of dialogue; enough that their actions from scene to scene are intelligible, but with only the barest whispers of interiority. Vincent and Ching are both utterly one-dimensional villains, grasping for power for its own sake. The story mostly forgets about Walker’s wife and daughter after their first phone conversation, and they don’t even really seem to factor into his putative redemption. There are glimmers of pathos in the margins – I felt sympathetic towards Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), Walker’s idealistic young partner struggling to trust him, and Raul (an avuncular Luis Guzmán), Mia’s protective uncle who helps his niece out of a jam – though, again, that may be due more to the actors’ likeable performances than any nuance of how they’re written.

The film genuflects in the direction of an overriding theme about the relationships between parents and children. At one point, Clarice commiserates with Lawrence while holding him captive, about the infinite lengths they’re willing to go to on behalf of their respective sons. This thread finds its full, melodramatic expression at the film’s climax, when she attempts to force him to shoot Mia in front of Charlie – taking from Charlie the most important person in his life, just as (she believes) Charlie took Tsui from her. It’s a dilemma that’s short circuited when the final gunfight breaks out, and in grandiose slow-motion, Lawrence takes a bullet meant for Charlie, saving his son’s life at the cost of his own.

Again, there’s the outline of something dramatic here, reminiscent of John Woo’s golden age. Again, it doesn’t really land, because Lawrence and Charlie are too thinly defined; the viewer has almost no context for their relationship. There’s a line of dialogue to the effect that they’ve been estranged since Charlie’s mother died, but any notion of who his mother was to him, or what happened after her passing that prompted Charlie to start associating with the kind of street rats who get in debt to the Triads, is an exercise left entirely up to the viewer’s conjecture.

So, yeah: as a character-driven story, there’s really nothing here, or so little as to make no difference. And I’m not persuaded that it matters. As with all of Evans’s previous movies, the point isn’t to create characters with rich inner lives and elegant arcs. Even if such a character showed up in one of his films (as I’d argue was the case with Uco in The Raid 2), they’re a by-product, and probably an accident. No, the point is the energy; the pageantry. The point is to see a primordial stew of genre tropes reach its ultraviolent boiling point.

For all that Havoc outwardly presents itself as a grim, bloody tale of morally compromised people losing the things most important to them, at its heart is a spirit of revelry and fun. The hyperbolic nature of the action is all in the spirit of play; the viewer is invited to indulge in the grown-up version of schoolyard cops-and-robbers games, vicariously living out the fantasy of being tough, dangerous people in extreme situations. It has a healthy relationship to its own essential frivolity, and it delivers its frivolous pleasures more effectively than ~90% of its contemporaries.

Havoc is not Evans’s masterpiece. It’s not the perfect, relentless, survival-horror gauntlet of The Raid; nor is it the massive, sprawling gesamtkunstwerk of action cinema that The Raid 2 was. It’s more of a median between the two, which isn’t quite as compelling. But I still got the buzz I was looking for; the hairs standing up on my forearms; the gasps and shouts and laughs of incredulity at the gory punchlines.

I can sort of understand why its reception at time of writing (67% on Rotten Tomatoes; 2.7/5 on Letterboxd; 5.8/10 on IMDb) has been relatively tepid. For viewers less chronically action-pilled than myself, it doesn’t do much to defend itself against accusations of being “generic” or “cliched.” Even among recent Netflix Original action movies, it doesn’t match the superficial virtuosity of Sam Hargrave’s Extraction 2, or the gut-rupturing excess of Timo Tjahjanto’s The Shadow Strays. (Though I think it’s better than both of those movies at the level of pacing, structure, and rhythm.)

It seems like a film that would be received more warmly as part of a larger body of work, if Evans was cranking out a new movie once every year or two. It doesn’t quite feel up to the task of being his grand comeback to feature-length action cinema after eleven years away.

It probably doesn’t help its reputation that it was released as an exclusive for Netflix (the sloppiest of the home-subscription slop-vendors). A streaming-only release that deprives audiences of the immersive qualities of its presentation, combined with a brusque, two-syllable title and an incredibly boring poster that’s just a front-facing mugshot of Tom Hardy: this is the poisoned chalice of Netflix. On the one hand, they’re happy to front a lot money for an auteur-led project that traditional studios might not; on the other hand, they bury it in their dragon’s-hoard of content, absent the curation that would differentiate it from mediocrities like The Gray Man, or sub-mediocrities like Heart of Stone.

In the good news column, though, it seems to have been a big hit for the streamer. In its opening week, it handily topped Netflix’s charts with 29.8 million views. (Gratifyingly, it surpassed the Russo Brothers’ megabudget turd The Electric State’s debut by quite a wide margin.) Even if he’s confined to streaming for the moment by his multi-film deal, Havoc’s success leaves Evans in a strong position, potentially with the latitude and the financing for more ambitious projects to come. Hopefully ones with smoother productions.

After seeing her at the end of S2 E6, betrayed by Sean and dragged screaming by her hair back into Asif’s torture dungeon, we didn’t see her for most of two episodes. It was implied that she’d met some unutterable fate offscreen, until in the final minutes of S2 E8, we found her alive and (apparently) well, listening impassively while Asif proposed a partnership between them. The scene’s clear implication was that these two arch enemies were preparing to join forces against Sean; Asif, for the expediency of business; Lale, for the spite of a woman scorned.

I hated that scene, and with the release of Season 3, I feel vindicated: there were creative staff behind the scenes who also hated it. Specifically, executive producer Vikki Tennant, who the linked Radio Times article notes was “opposed to including the scene, feeling that reconciliation between Lale and Asif would not be “truthful” to either character.”

The article continues, noting that Tennant and lead writer Peter McKenna made it their “top priority” to “write [themselves] out of this corner.” Season 3’s authors looked at the dreadful way Lale had been flattened and undermined as a character by Season 2’s ending, and treated it as a kind of writers-workshop prompt. How best could they join these dots, in a way that made sense?

After half a season of buildup, S3 E5 finally attends to that question head on. Following the cliffhanger that closed out S3 E4 – Elliot held at gunpoint by Zeek – we flash back to eight weeks earlier. An empty, nondescript office building in the outskirts of London flares to life; abandoned Christmas decorations start blasting Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” as Lale stumbles past the cubicles into the stairwell. Clutching a pistol, she climbs one flight before she has to rest, panting, leaning against the railing. She turns, and slowly reveals to the camera: a heavy, pregnant belly.

We flash back seven months further still, to the immediate aftermath of S2 E6. Asif’s minions hold her down on a sheet of plastic wrap, saving the expensive rug from the bloodletting to follow.

“I’m pregnant!” she cries, playing her trump card.

“I don’t give a fuck!” Asif snarls, holding a knife to her lips, preparing to cut out her tongue the way she did to Nasir.

“It’s Sean’s!”

Now, that gives Asif pause. With the Investors in retreat, his business concerns in London have become tenuous. Lale’s child could be a very handy little hostage in negotiations with Marian – provided she survives long enough to deliver it. She’s managed to win an eight-month stay of execution.

She waits out the prenatal period as a prisoner in Pakistan, cared for in Asif’s Lahore mansion by Ayesha (Rina Mahoney), a kindly nurse. Ayesha admonishes Lale for smoking during her third trimester, which she responds to disdainfully. She openly doesn’t give a shit about the baby’s prospective welfare; she regards the new life growing inside her in terms just as ruthless and mercenary as Asif does.

Marian arrives in Lahore to inspect the merchandise, as it were; if she’s going to enter into a business relationship with Asif in exchange for her grandson’s life, she wants assurances that it definitely has Wallace blood, and that it’s being well looked-after. Lale tries a gambit to get Marian to take her back with her to London; using her room’s furnishings, she surreptitiously cuts and bruises her own arms. She presents her ligature marks to Marian as evidence that she’s being mistreated in Pakistan.

Not a bad plan, honestly, and it almost works. Marian informs Asif that the deal’s off if Lale doesn’t return with her for the baby’s birth, and in this instance, she’s the one holding all the cards. For all of Asif’s rage and anguish at letting his chance at revenge slip through his fingers, he’s a businessman at heart. After a little nudging from Ayesha, he grudgingly accedes.

BUT THEN.

Just as Lale’s preparing to get on the plane with Marian, Asif takes a phone call. We don’t hear the voice on the other end of the conversation, but whatever it’s saying, it puts Asif’s smug, cat-digesting-a-canary grin right back on his face. He has Lale confined to her room once again, and lies to Marian that her grandson died from complications with the pregnancy.

Some mysterious client has made him a better offer than he was getting from Marian. Now, Lale’s baby has become valuable in a new way. With her connections in London, Lale has ways to circumvent the border controls that are hampering Asif’s operations in the British capital, and he has a very precious piece of cargo that he wants moved, in exchange for her child’s safety. (It’s not made explicit, but it’s obvious from context that this very important cargo is the fentanyl-tainted cocaine.)

Lale scoffs. “You can take this baby and drown it in the fucking river.”

“You say that,” Asif answers, “but you cannot control the love you have for your child. Believe me. It controls you. When you will hold it for the first time in your arms, you will feel that power. And I’m confident you will do anything to keep him alive.”

“You’re wrong.”

“We’ll see.”

Yes: indeed we will. Because when they return together to London, at her first opportunity, Lale stabs Asif’s driver in the face with a broken bottle and flees into the city, just as her water breaks. She holes up in an abandoned office building while Asif’s henchmen give chase, and here, at last, 23 minutes into a 46-minute episode, we catch up to the framing device.

At this point, I think Sky Atlantic and Pulse Films are well aware of the long shadow that S1 E5 casts over everything Gangs of London has done since. It is, by a wide margin, the show’s most beloved and most talked-about episode. At time of writing, it has a score of 9.2 on IMDb. (For comparison, the second-highest rated episode is S1 E1, with an 8.5.) I’ve seen countless comment sections on YouTube and Reddit where Gangs of London will be recommended with the sentiment: “bro, just wait till you see the episode with the farmhouse siege.”

S3 E5 seems like a very conscious attempt to replicate the magic that Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery summoned with their TV magnum opus back in 2020. Much like S1 E5, it’s a parenthetical story, set chronologically before the episodes either side of it, taking time out from the broader drama to focus on an isolated subset of the core cast. Much like S1 E5, its conflict is tangential to the rest of the show and largely self-contained, while also shedding light on some of the season’s larger mysteries. Much like S1 E5, it begins with half an episode of considered buildup, followed by half an episode of explosive, cathartic action, with a scrappy, resourceful protagonist mounting an astonishingly heroic defense against overwhelming odds.

And yet, at time of writing (April 21st, 2025), S3 E5 is actually the lowest rated episode of Gangs of London on IMDb, with a score of 6.4. (Poetically, the second-lowest is S2 E8 with a 7.1, so S3 E5 is at the bottom by exactly the same 0.7-point margin that S1 E5 is at the top.)

I think that’s a bit harsh – this isn’t Gang’s of London’s worst episode, not by a long shot. But throughout its runtime, I had a nagging sense that I should have been more excited than I actually was. On paper, I ought to be loving this. It focuses on my favourite character in the series. It causes a bunch of Season 3’s lingering questions to click into place. It’s structurally ambitious, and conceptually audacious, with a killer USP: a woman has to fend off multiple armed attackers while she’s actively in the process of giving birth. In all the thousands and thousands of hours of action movies and TV I’ve seen, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever encountered that before.

So, what gives? What isn’t working here, exactly? Unfortunately, I think the answer to that question is a boring one: from moment to moment and shot to shot, S3 E5 isn’t directed very well.

This is the first of two episodes helmed by Tessa Hoffe, a veteran of British television who’s spent decades at the coal-face of UK soap operas. (She’s credited with over 50 episodes of Coronation Street, and over 100 episodes of Hollyoaks. A run of Hollyoaks episodes she directed starting in 2012 also have – drum roll, please – Vikki Tennant credited as “storyliner.”)

Now, far be it from me to disparage her skills as a director: anyone who’s directed a hundred episodes of anything clearly knows their way around a set, and can wrangle an hour of presentable footage out of a cast and crew working to daily deadlines. I couldn’t do that, and you, reading this, probably couldn’t do that either. Hell, there are Oscar-winning filmmakers I doubt could do that.

But I’m not convinced that the skills involved in making Hollyoaks necessarily transfer to making something like Gangs of London, a prestige show with an emphasis on action and visual showmanship.

There’s a cynical part of me that wonders if Pulse Films assigned this episode to Hoffe, with its themes of motherhood and childbirth, specifically because she’s the lone woman in this season’s stable of directors. (It’s not lost on me that, where S3 E4 was focused on Sean Wallace’s death, S3 E5 is focused on the birth of his child; here in the middle of the season, they form a kind of thematic diptych.) In case anyone’s interested, I checked, and yes: Tessa Hoffe is herself a mother. And, indeed, the most successful elements of S3 E5 are the ones that unflinchingly present pregnancy as a visceral, corporeal experience. Most notably, there’s a sequence where Lale, after having given birth, bites through her umbilical cord, and then uses it as a weapon to strangle one of her assailants to death, the placenta still swinging from the end like a pendulum.

Again: on paper, that’s fucking amazing, the strength of the bonds associated with motherhood being literalised and instrumentalised in the most gruesome way imaginable. Lale, the ruthless, unhesitant soldier becomes aligned with Lale, the caring, principled woman, by virtue of the bloody, messy, painful process of giving birth. The emerging emotional connection to her newborn is reified by the physical connection; here’s a being with whom she shares tissue and sinew and plasma.

Someone smarter than me could write a thesis about the imagery in this episode. So, it’s a shame that as action, it’s kind of crap. The choreography is ponderous and clunky, lacking the intuition for the rhythms of anticipation and release animating good action design. Beats that ought to be building tension feel more like waiting for something to happen, and when the flare-ups of violence do arrive, they’re edited with the kind of choppy, disorienting, late-2000’s cutting that doesn’t belong anywhere near a project with Gareth Evans’s name attached to it.

The umbilical cord set-piece is a good case study: after temporarily giving her pursuers the slip, Lale finds an empty room; sits down; shushes her child; methodically ties off the umbilical cord; severs it; extracts the placenta and places it to one side; quiets her baby when it starts crying by suckling it. All in, this takes more than 3 minutes of unbroken screentime (roughly from the 33- to 36-minute mark in this 46-minute episode). The score is subdued; Narges Rashidi’s body language is unhurried, weirdly lacking in urgency. Right when it ought to be reaching a crescendo, it’s like the episode forgot its heroine is being actively pursued by armed gunmen for three solid minutes.

When Asif’s henchmen finally are alerted to her location by the baby’s cries, the peculiarly low energy persists. A single gunman slowly steps into the wide open conference room, and advances towards Lale’s hiding place. (We’re now at minute 38.) He moves at a brisk-ish walk, holding his pistol at waist level. He doesn’t call for backup. His expression is impassive, and he doesn’t make much of an effort to check blind corners or angles for a potential ambush. He seems oddly unwary, considering that Lale shot one of his colleagues to death just minutes earlier. Frankly, when Lale lunges at him from out of a cubicle and smashes a laptop over his head, he has no-one to blame but himself. The umbilical cord strangulation, when it happens, lasts only a few indifferently-framed seconds, and doesn’t even look like it takes Lale much effort.

S3 E5 is like that; a terrific concept, but badly fumbled in the specifics. The scenes in the first half of the episode suffer from this, too. One of Gangs of London’s great strengths, even at its lowest ebb, has always been its locations. It presents its titular city as a vibrant, dynamic ecosystem. In any given episode, we might find ourselves in a seedy pub, or a high-rise boardroom, or a doss-house, or a riverside fishmarket, and they all occur as parts of a single, great, seething, multifaceted, urban organism. Regardless of what contrived drama the show attends to, the setting for that drama always feels vibrant and specific.

So, it’s dispiriting to spend the first half of S3 E5 in Lahore, when it’s obvious that the production never once got within four-thousand miles of Pakistan. The dynamics between Marian, Lale and Asif feel uncommonly stagebound – and, frankly, drab – for this show.

The same is true of the anonymous office building where Lale makes her last stand. It’s such an anodyne, flatly-lit space, lacking any of the kind of atmosphere of the last location where we saw Lale go on a rampage. (Remember all those dramatic shadows and primary-coloured light sources in S2 E6?) If I could change just one thing about this episode, I think it would be immeasurably improved if the action in the back half was set at night, rather than the bland, overcast English daytime that could be morning, afternoon or evening.

I get the impression that Pulse Films wanted to pay tribute to Die Hard, with the ironic detail of jolly Christmas decorations, juxtaposed against the ultraviolence committed around them. I mean, it’s always ill-advised to set yourself up to be compared to Die Hard, a perfect film, but S3 E5 is just asking for it with the sequence where Lale crawls through some kind of ambiguous, liminal space above the ceiling tiles to evade her captors.

You know what Die Hard has a lot of? Dialogue. There’s a walkie-talkie
repartee throughout between John McClane and Hans Gruber that imbues the action with personality and flair. Pretty much the whole back-half of S3 E5 is dialogue-free, save for grunts of exertion. The henchmen dispatched to retrieve Lale are all anonymous nobodies. Asif effectively disappears for twenty minutes; was there really no scope to have some kind of conversation between Lale and her worst enemy during her last stand, rather than have her just be a screaming, stabbing automaton?

The episode’s resolution actually works very well, and even flirts with poignancy. In the midst of a fight that sees Lale kill several men, one of them manages to grab her baby and escape down to the building’s lobby while she’s still busy with his associates. She gives chase, but is greeted in the lobby by Asif, Ayesha, and several more bodyguards holding her at gunpoint. Ayesha clutches her baby protectively to her breast.

Lale aims her gun at her own child, visibly anguished. “What life is this going to be for my child, huh? A hostage forever?” She sneers at Ayesha, but it’s obvious that she’s trying to talk herself into doing something she’s not prepared to do. Shots ring out, and Ayesha flinches away, but she and the baby are unharmed. Lale emptied her pistol’s clip into the ceiling; Asif called her bluff, and she blinked. As it turns out, he was right: you really can’t control the love you feel for your child.

They leave Lale alone in the lobby, sobbing, exhausted, caked in sweat and blood, and defeated. She’ll be their catspaw; Asif, and whatever mysterious client is also pulling Zeek’s strings.

It’s a forceful, dramatic image to see Lale reduced to this, and I wish that the episode leading up to it had been a more effective genre exercise. The brutal truth is that I come to Gangs of London for its spectacle first, and I think that’s true of most of the show’s viewership – certainly the people casting votes on IMDb, at any rate. That’s what it promises to its audience, and why we keep coming back to it, despite seeing the plot and characters subjected to one risible decision after another. If the spectacle doesn’t land, then the whole mechanism shudders to a halt, regardless of what else it might be doing well.

S3 E4 (directed, again, by Farren Blackburn) begins with a portentous montage that I quite enjoyed. We cross-cut back and forth between Luan and Marian, both of whom are in their homes, both carefully dressing themselves in black. In Marian’s case, it’s mourning garb; in Luan’s case, it’s tactical combat gear. It’s the bluntest, most on-the-nose sort of dramatic juxtaposition, and it feels completely at home in Gangs of London’s cod-operatic register.

The sequence is overlaid with Luan’s voiceover; he’s confessing to his priest in advance, for all the sins he will imminently commit. (I’m not Catholic, but I don’t think it works like that?) Orli Shuka’s performance impresses me this season, as it has before; he’s exactly the right kind of not subtle this show needs. We can tell from Luan’s thousand-yard stare that he takes no pleasure in the prospect of killing the Wallaces (at a funeral service, no less); he isn’t hoping for justice, or even for satisfaction. He’s pursuing revenge knowing full well that it’s an unhealthy, destructive coping strategy; one that’s driving a wedge between him and Mirlinda.

But, in the throes of his grief, it’s a compulsion he can’t resist. In the previous episode, Elliot confided his doubts to Luan that Billy, Sean and Cornelius were behind the poisoning; Luan was angrily unwilling to listen. If he doesn’t have a target, someone he can make pay for Elira’s death, he’s liable to drown in his sorrow, his pain bursting its banks in the absence of a sluice to direct it. It’s good character stuff, elemental but well-expressed, and yet another example of how this show’s secondary cast shine when given the opportunity. (As long as you’re willing to forget about that innocent Albanian family Luan murdered prior to the events of Season 1. Honestly, at this point, it seems like the writers have.)

While the incipient gang war is rising to a boil, Elliot’s collaboration with Simone has borne fruit. Having tipped off the Mayor about the Belgian beer kegs being used to transport the coke, the police identified a van carrying a stack of just such beer kegs that was waved through a routine traffic stop. They identified the van’s license plates, but not its driver.

(The viewer, of course, knows just who the driver is, after S3 E3’s cliffhanger ending: it’s none other than Lale. The plot thickens!)

Elliot tracks the van to a seedy garage where its license plates were swapped out; he rendezvouses with Shannon, who, over his protests, tags along when he tortures the new plate number out of the garage proprietor.

Something I find curious about Elliot and Shannon’s dynamic in this episode is that there’s absolutely no romantic frisson between them whatsoever. OK, granted: he’s crushing a man’s forearm in an industrial vice while she watches. It’s not exactly a candlelit dinner. But, we’re now halfway through the Season, and they’ve only shared two scenes together; this, and the drug deal with the Koreans in S3 E1. In both scenes, Shannon comports herself as Elliot’s business associate; the dialogue they exchange is terse and guarded. (Elliot unhesitatingly lies to her when she asks where he got the information about the garage. He talks to Saba with more candour and intimacy than he does to Shannon.)

If a hypothetical viewer started watching this show in Season 3, without knowledge of Seasons 1 or 2, they would never glean that Elliot and Shannon were supposed to be lovers; not from the dialogue, nor from Dìrísù and Bennett-Warner’s performances. That seems like a pretty telling creative choice, even if – especially if – it was an unconscious one. When Simone interrogated Elliot in hospital in S3 E3, she asked him what it must have taken for a driven, idealistic detective to have enthroned himself as a drug kingpin. On paper, the answer to that question is: Shannon Dumani. In the previous two seasons, she was his Lady MacBeth; she was the one who rolled out the red carpet upon the dark path he was to walk.

Dìrísù and Bennett-Warner never had great chemistry, and Shannon was always a character that the writers struggled to integrate into the plot, but Season 3 seems uninterested in even trying. All of Elliot’s emotional energy is focused on solving the murder of his wife and son. Rather than developing and deepening his complicated relationship with the woman who beckoned him into the underworld, the writers opt instead to focus on his relationship with his dead family, whom the audience have no prior connection to or stake in. This is frustrating, because it makes Elliot feel closed-off; decontextualised from the conflicts that have shaped him for the last 16-odd hours.

I greatly prefer the half of S3 E4’s plot involving Luan and Marian to the half that involves Elliot; it’s in the former that we find big, strident, tragic emotions, articulated clearly and with artful symmetry. Luan and Marian each have deeply felt reasons to want the other dead. He blames her for colluding with her brother and nephew, whom he holds responsible for the death of his daughter. She holds him responsible for the death of her son, as a direct result of the bounty he placed on his head. They’re both equally mistaken, but the fuse has already been lit, despite Ed Dumani’s best efforts at mediation.

A squad of black-clad Albanians converge on the church where the funeral service is being held and storm into the nave, brandishing automatic weapons. Inside, they find… no-one. The pews, the pulpit… all empty.

The doors behind them slam shut.

Marian really did love Sean, in the end, after it would have counted. She’s just as furious as Luan – and, as it turns out, smarter.

Kim Hong-Sun and Farren Blackburn perhaps realised that Gangs of London fans were overdue for a major, extravagant showcase sequence. The action scenes in Season 3 so far have been fine, but sparse; we were owed a big, blowout gun battle, and here it is. The fusillade from assault rifles and shotguns tears the church to splinters, the Albanians scrambling for cover as the Wallaces flank them from the balconies, turning the nave into a killing floor.

It’s a pretty spectacular, satisfying action scene, well-storyboarded in pre-viz by Adam Hoton and his team, with clear, legible geography, and full of gnarly, satisfying kills (special mention has to go to the one unfortunate soul who has his arm impaled on a spiked fence post before Liam shoots him in the head). If I have one criticism, it would be that a lot of the effects – blood splatter; bullet holes; flying debris, etc. – are quite conspicuously digitally composited. This is to be expected in modern TV, and Gangs of London has always made use of digital compositing to an extent, but I feel like it’s not usually as obvious as it is here. (S1 E2 and S1 E5 both feature a lot of real explosions and props being thrown into disarray in-camera; again, I have to wonder if Season 3 was working with a reduced budget.)

Luan’s men put up a valiant fight, but being outmanoeuvred, they’re slaughtered almost to a man by the Wallaces. Luan just manages to escape by taking Marian hostage, and even then, Billy wings him. He and his driver, Artan (Nikolaos Brahimllari) escape back to Luan’s estate, where he gathers Mirlinda and Bukuroshe and flees into the woods before Billy, Marian and Cornelius catch up. Artan – loyal to a fault – stays behind to bargain for clemency on Luan’s behalf, which goes about as well for him as you’d probably expect. No promises of business concessions are going to make this war go away.

Meanwhile, Elliot traces the switched out license plates to a warehouse, and almost catches Lale in the process of transferring the barrels to a new vehicle. Lale, her face covered, keeps him at bay with a few shots of suppressing fire. She destroys any forensic evidence in the old van with a grenade tossed through the rear door, and speeds away in the new van with the coke. Despite Elliot’s heroic, Jackie Chan-esque attempt to cling on to the vehicle’s rear door, she throws him off, escaping without either him or Shannon identifying her.

Lale’s a skilful operator, and she’s pretty successfully thrown Elliot off her trail; the one lead he is able to extract from the scene is one he’d never have known to look for. His eyes alight on an old fire escape, where a faded logo is emblazoned with peeling, rust-red spraypaint. He recognises it, and so does the viewer; it’s the same logo that was printed on the paperwork his wife had on her the night that she and Samuel died.

Oh yes: it’s all quite a twisted web. I have to give this to Season 3: for as much as it disregards the dynamics and relationships between characters established in previous seasons, and for as much as it freely throws the baby out with the bathwater, it’s meticulous as a self-contained mystery story. Season 1, for all its strengths, wasn’t really much of a whodunnit: by the middle of that season, it was pretty easy to figure out who ordered Finn’s murder, and why. Here at the middle of Season 3, the intrigue is more tantalising and more obscure than ever. Why is Lale doing this? Who is Zeek, and what’s his agenda? And how does it tie in with what Naomi was doing before she was killed? We’re only just starting to grasp the threads that connect these questions.

A couple more twists close out the episode. The first concerns Simone, conferring in her office with her oleaginous aide, Henry (Sebastian Armesto). He suggests that this might be the appropriate time to start pushing for a radical policy reform that she’s been hesitant to advocate for: complete drug legalisation in London. It would mean cutting the gangs’ source of revenue off at the knees, while ensuring that users have access to a quality-assured, taxable product. After the six-hundred mortalities caused by the contaminated coke, Henry supposes that the electorate is willing to listen to solutions that will move the drug trade into legal, regulated channels.

Second, and more dramatically: Elliot returns to his father’s old flat, in the hope that he might find some documents that might shed some light on the mysterious logo. What he finds instead when he arrives is the whole shipment of Belgian beer cans, stacked ceiling high in his childhood bedroom. Stunned, he moves to leave… but before he can, Zeek walks into the room, holding him at gunpoint.

I criticised S3 E3 for feeling like a clunky gear-shift of an episode; no such criticism here. S3 E4 is an explosive 45 minutes of TV, materially moving the plot forward in dynamic, exciting ways.

(Something I don’t think I’ve made explicit in this series of reviews, and I probably should: I’ve already seen the whole season. I binged it on NOW TV within 48 hours of its release, before I wrote the first word about S3 E1, so I do know the answers to the various mysteries it sets up, and which characters are ultimately behind it all. Rewatching the season’s first half, it’s honestly rather impressive how well the intrigue is seeded; how scenes play differently when you know which characters know more than they’re letting on.

I bring this up, because even on a rewatch, there’s a detail that still confuses me. I don’t understand how Sean figures into the poisoning plot. By now, it’s clear that Sean was telling the truth when he said he was framed for the fentanyl spiking; the way he was eliminated by the actual conspirators confirms that. But we’re given to understand that the original shipment of “clean” cocaine was swapped out for a duplicate consignment of tainted cocaine, during the 30 minutes when the haulier stopped at Cornelius’s funfair.

So… what was actually going on during those 30 minutes, and why would Cornelius have denied seeing a truck? Was the SatNav history a deliberate misdirection by the real poisoners, with the expectation that Elliot would find it? Because that seems incredibly baroque, and also implies they knew about Sean’s communication with Cornelius. And are we to understand that the plot to break Sean out of prison was completely unrelated to the fentanyl spiking, and by an amazing coincidence, just happened to be planned for the same weekend?? Aaaaaargh.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LOL.

Even – dare I say it? – LMAO.

Fair play: I absolutely did not expect S3 E2 to end the way that it did. I don’t know what I did expect, but it certainly wasn’t this.

The best episodes of Gangs of London tend to be the ones that are the most self-contained. The show is most comfortable with itself in the short- and medium-term aspects of its storytelling, whether in the keyed-up pageantry of its ultraviolence, or in the jolts provided by its soap-operatic character deaths; betrayals; revelations; reversals of fortune. The episodes that most emphasise the present-tense, and keep the narrative filigree in the background – I’m thinking, for example, of S1 E5, or S2 E7 – are the ones that tend to be the most impactful.

For roughly its first 43 minutes, S3 E2 is an excellent example of that kind of episode. As for its last three minutes… well, we’ll get there.

The episode starts with a fabulously tense, dialogue-free sequence that sees Sean being transported to his court hearing. He sits inside an armoured van, wrists and ankles shackled, attended to by two flak-jacketed prison guards. His eyes alight on the watch on one of his jailer’s wrists; he smirks, and surreptitiously braces himself against the steel bench.

An explosion knocks the van onto its side, and a quick, brutal fight follows (clearly taking notes from the prisoner-transport escape scene in The Night Comes for Us). Sean wrestles away a gun from his captors and shoots them both dead, just in time to see the van’s door forced open. Billy and Cornelius welcome him, grinning, into the landscape of scorched concrete and burning bodies left behind by the bomb that broke him loose.

Sean, Billy, and Cornelius have grand ambitions for their side of the family; they just have to get to a helicopter in Greenwich, which will spirit them away to Ireland. There, they can consolidate their resources and influence, before coming back to storm London and put Sean back where he belongs, at the top of London’s criminal pecking order.

That’s the plan, anyway, for about forty-five seconds of screentime, before their retrieval operation is itself ambushed. Their car crashes, and a gun battle erupts on the streets of central London in broad daylight. Luan is in full-blown rampage mode, and blames Sean personally for Elira’s death by overdose. During the gunfight, Sean is separated from his brother and his uncle. Alone and unarmed, still wearing a prison jumpsuit, he flees on foot into London’s sprawl, pursued by furious Albanian gunmen.

S3 E2 plays out as a single, elaborate, extended set-piece, following Sean’s quest for safe harbour, hounded on all sides by all his many enemies. It recalls genre touchstones like Walter Hill’s The Warriors or Yann Demange’s ’71; stories of men trapped behind enemy lines and having to survive by their grit and their guile, while political power-plays swirl above their heads. Luan is hunting Sean, to extract retribution for his daughter (Sean insists, at various points, that he was framed for the fentanyl poisoning and he had nothing to do with it, but it dissuades no-one). The impoverished youth of London are hunting Sean, for the £2 million bounty Luan has placed on his head. And Elliot is hunting Sean, for the answer to who killed his family.

The episode’s momentum is relentless, its intensity gruelling. Kim Hong-Sun again directs, and I know I criticised his direction on S3 E1 for being kind of slack, but I’m happy to reverse that criticism here. Perhaps the script’s cat-and-mouse structure activated something in him that the previous episode didn’t; or, perhaps creatives just have their on-days and their off-days. I wasn’t on set: who’s to say? For whatever reason, the visual language here is so much more engaged and exciting and subjective, making dynamic use of close-ups and low angles and handheld tracking shots throughout. With each scene, the walls close in on Sean incrementally more tightly.

At one point, he tries to turn to Lale for safe harbour. He shows up in his ex’s office, wearing a ratty hoodie, his face bruised, holding a gun on her. He says he regrets the way they parted, and politely asks for cash and the use of her car. This, as you can probably imagine, goes over catastrophically badly.

At this point in Season 3, Lale has a question mark hanging over her. No-one’s quite sure how she got away from Asif, or what she was up to for the past seven months. Her aide-de-camp Merwan (Murat Erkek) is getting suspicious when she evades his questions. What’s not ambiguous is how she feels toward Sean after what he did to her in S2 E6. She pretends to retrieve cash from a safe, only to grab a concealed pistol instead, and shoot her treacherous boy-toy in the gut.

Sean survives, and manages to limp away while Lale calls for backup. By happenstance, he stumbles into The Horseshoe (a real-life pub in Clerkenwell, and itself a charming callback; it’s the same pub that Elliot fought his way through in S1 E1. There’s even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from David Bradley, still rooted at the same fruit machine where was sitting five years ago.)

He passes out from blood loss, but wakes up to find himself being nursed back to health by the pub’s proprietors, Deborah and Ronnie Devereux (Ruth Sheen and Phil Daniels, respectively), a cheerfully grumpy married couple who owe a decades-old debt of gratitude to Finn Wallace. Their Cockney-flavoured bickering gives the episode a welcome beat of light comic relief. Ronnie, after some nagging from his wife, agrees to guide Sean through the sewer access tunnels to Greenwich, where the waiting helicopter pilot is growing increasingly anxious to take off.

Down in the sewers, Sean has to rest for a moment, the pain from his gunshot wound too much to bear. Ronnie offers him some advice: “When you do get to Ireland, just stay there. Your father made it look easy, with all the charm and patter. But to do what he did, you have to be a right proper cunt, too.”

“You think I can’t be a right proper cunt?” Sean fires back.

“I know what my gut’s telling me.”

The episode’s action converges at the Greenwich pier. Still doggedly pursued by Luan, Sean staggers into the daylight, the helicopter in sight, with only five minutes left until it’s obligated to take off. Elliot intercepts him, and holds him at gunpoint; he’ll let Sean get on the helicopter, if he first tells Elliot where to find the driver hired to kill his family.

As it turns out, Elliot doesn’t have to look very far to find him; the standoff is interrupted by that very driver when he crashes his car into Elliot, climbs out, and stomps on his head. The anonymous, balaclava’d hitman bundles Sean into the boot, fending off Luan, Saba and Billy simultaneously for long enough to make his escape. The out-of-nowhere, hit-and-run kidnapping makes a thrilling capstone to a pretty faultlessly thrilling 43 minutes of TV.

And then, the episode has 3 minutes remaining. I told you we’d get there.

While an ambulance carries Elliot off to hospital, Sean wakes up to find himself zip-tied to a chair in a condemned flat; he’s illuminated by horizontal shafts of pale sunset, peering through the gaps in the papered-over windows. His captor, still wearing his mask, sneers at him. “The great Sean Wallace,” he says, voice hoarse. “I thought it’d be difficult getting you here. Piece of piss. You’re not so special, are you?”

The masked man checks the text history on his smartphone. The most recent message, from an anonymous sender, simply says “DO IT.”

Sean offers him money. £5 million. £10 million. He offers him anything he wants. When promises fail to sway his captor, he resorts to bald-faced defiance. “I’m a Wallace,” he says, as though after everything he’s been through, he somehow still believes his parentage has the power to warp reality in his favour. “I’m Sean fucking Wallace. I’m the proper FUCKING CUNT–!”

The masked man loudly disagrees, by emptying an Uzi clip into Sean where he sits, the compounded impact of the bullets enough to tip over the chair. Sean lies on the floor, his lifeblood pooling about him, and he emits a faint gurgle from his flooding throat. The masked man shoots him a few more times, just to be certain.

To reiterate, in case you think you might have misread that last part: two episodes into this new season, Sean Wallace is dead, again. Permanently, this time. The scion of the Wallace dynasty, the one who set all this chaos in motion when he declared war on the Investors, and originally the protagonist of the show, is gone for good. His end is abrupt and ignominious; perfunctorily shot to death in a random, dilapidated building, by a new character with whom the audience has no prior relationship and whose motives are inscrutable. His final words are a barely-coherent string of screamed expletives. He failed, in the end, to emerge from his father’s shadow. He was not, in the final reckoning, the Proper Fucking Cunt.

I can’t really bring myself to be mad about this. To be honest, after the initial “wait, they’re really doing it??” shock of the moment, my primary emotional response was schadenfreude. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t find Sean Wallace an appealing character. His first shocking death at Elliot’s hand in S1 E9 was a beautifully executed narrative switcheroo, one that seemed at the time like it would move the story in new directions, in the company of characters who I better liked spending time with. His Father McGrath-esque resurrection in Season 2 was a regressive, dunderheaded writing choice, and in a weird way, killing him off so soon and so brusquely in Season 3 feels like Gangs of London’s universe ontologically correcting itself.

Still, having said that… what an odd, misshapen, and ultimately unsatisfying character journey Sean Wallace had, when all is said and done. The end he got in S1 E9 was the most dramatically fulfilling he was ever likely to reach; for its vulgar, tragic irony, that he’d finally asserted his own identity distinct from his father, only to immediately get killed for his trouble. It wasn’t a perfect character arc by any means, but it did at least feel like a closed loop.

And then he spent 9 months in a prison cell; got released; caused a bunch of borderline-arbitrary mayhem; got arrested; spent a further 9 months in a different prison cell; broke out, and was promptly murdered for obscure reasons only tangentially related to anything he’d been doing up to that point. Classic story structure. Tale as old as time.

Lead writer Peter McKenna gave an interview to GQ Magazine recently where he talks in detail about this twist, and the decisions that led to it. Most of McKenna’s reasoning comes back to the same old chestnut: that the show needs to feel dangerous and high-stakes, that it keeps the audience on their toes when anyone can die at any moment, etc. etc.

Which, OK, sure, I guess so. But that line of thinking disregards what motivates an audience to watch a show from week to week and year to year in the first place. It’s because there are characters we get invested in seeing grow and change and interact. When a character dies, we can tell when it’s a death that dignifies the time we spent with them with meaning, as opposed to when it’s merely a tactic to “raise the stakes.” Sean Wallace is a great case study, now that he’s done both.

An interesting detail from that GQ interview is that McKenna says the decision to kill Sean off was reached early in the writers’ room drafting process, and the agreement between the creative staff was unanimous. If the decision was as easy as McKenna makes it sound, it suggests to me that Pulse Films were as tired of this asshole hanging around as I was. Better to get him out of the way and refocus attention on Season 3’s new mysteries and intrigues.

The third season in Sky Atlantic’s ongoing chronicle of all the least-cuddly people in southeast England dropped as an eight-episode block on streaming services worldwide on Thursday, March 20th, 2025. It’s been just about two-and-a-half years since the divisive second season, and the first season which made the show a hit during lockdown is now almost five years old.

The attention economy being what it is, I expected that interest in this show might have started to flag by now; two-and-a-half years is the kind of viewership fallow period that a TV series can ill afford these days, unless it’s Stranger Things. However, in late 2024, Gangs of London got a shot in the arm when the first two seasons were uploaded to Netflix, as part of an expanded partnership with AMC. I’m no market analyst, but even in the post-COVID landscape where subscription-based streaming is collapsing under its own bloated weight of content, Netflix is still the biggest of those streamers by a wide margin. (Over 300 million subscribers, compared to 11.8 million for AMC+, and only 2 million for the UK’s NOW TV).

That’s a lot of eyeballs landing on Gangs of London for the first time, especially outside the UK. (Ampere Analytics saw an uptick in its US popularity from an 8.8 in their proprietary metrics in July last year to a 31.5 in September, whatever that means). Anecdotally, here at The Goods, we can corroborate that; last August, I got a DM from Dan to say that the readership for this very review series had blown up, practically overnight – we were both very perplexed about what had happened for a moment there.

The AMC/Netflix deal came at a fortuitous moment in advance of the third season (check out the engagement for the trailer on Youtube, for example: 1.1 million views and 7,700 likes after less than 2 months, compared to Season 2’s 542,000 views and 3,000 likes after being online for over 34 months). Those are all encouraging metrics if you’re Thomas Benski, and the stage was set for Gangs of London to re-enter, re-energised and fresh, with the benefit of a whole new audience.

Eight months have passed since the Season 2 finale, which ended with Sean Wallace (Joe Cole) being arrested and jailed after his defeat by Elliot Carter (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù). Elliot, an ex-detective now fully off the reservation, left Sean alive in order that he might watch Elliot supplant him at the top of the London criminal hierarchy – a sort of slow, lingering revenge for the murder of his father.

In the time that’s passed between seasons, Elliot appears to have settled into the role of kingpin quite nicely, orchestrating drug deals on the scale of tonnes alongside his paramour, Shannon Dumani (Pippa Bennett-Warner). Faz (Fady Elsayed) and Saba (Jahz Armando) serve loyally as his lieutenants. With the Investors seemingly ousted from London, the ad-hoc coalition of gang leaders that also includes Ed Dumani (Lucian Msamati), Lale (Narges Rashidi), Marian Wallace (Michelle Fairley) and Luan Dushaj (Orli Shuka) appears to be holding. They’re not quite holding hands and singing kumbaya together, but business is steady, and the division of power is equitable. It’s about as good a situation as any criminal underworld could ask for.

In S3 E1, this new status-quo is dismantled in the course of a single, spectacularly bad night. Elliot and Shannon meet with a crew of Korean gangsters in a nightclub, headed by Kim Kyu-Tae (Shin Seung-Hwan), looking to purchase their newest consignment of cocaine, smuggled into the country in kegs of Belgian beer. After some haggling over price, and Elliot’s guarantees of quality, Kyu-Tae sniffs a great, big sample of the product. At first, he appears to be quite pleased with the high provided by Elliot’s gear… right up until he starts bleeding from his nose, and his face and neck start contorting in ways that prompt all sorts of uncomfortable foley effects.

Saba rushes in, defusing a tense stand-off with Kyu-Tae’s bodyguards; the problem isn’t limited to this meeting room. Elliot tentatively walks through the nightclub floor, which increasingly resembles a scene from a Hellraiser movie. Partygoers drop like flies in seizures and conniptions, blood pouring from their various orifices as they OD.

(Man, nothing ever seems to go right for Elliot when he encounters Koreans in nightclubs, does it?)

It emerges that the shipment of cocaine was spiked with lethal doses of fentanyl. The questions naturally emerge: why, and how, and by whom?

Season 3 of Gangs of London has this going for it, right out of the gate: this is a terrifically strong inciting incident, every inch as good as Finn Wallace’s assassination back in S1 E1. All of the conflict in the season to follow ripples out from this one horrifying act of indiscriminate, mass violence (the death toll eventually lands in the hundreds). Business partners start looking askance at one another, suspicious of who in their supply network might have had the opportunity and motive to sabotage their position like this.

There’s an extra-cruel, extra-personal twist of the knife, as well, pulling tensions even tighter. The mass-poisoning event happens to fall on the same night that Luan is hosting a birthday party for his eldest daughter, Elira (Azra Rexhepi). While Luan is conferring with Marian about Sean’s upcoming trial date, Elira is given a “birthday present” from a friend out in the back garden; a small, plastic pouch of white powder, stamped with the same insignia we saw in Elliot’s warehouse.

It’s an excellently conceived scene; a stomach-dropping “oh, NO” moment for the viewer. We know exactly how this will end, well before any of the characters catch on. More than that, we can already sense just how extreme Luan’s response will be, the fervently committed family-man that he is. Orli Shuka is in his element, his ragged, desperate breathing intensifying by degrees as his chest compressions fail to elicit any reaction from his firstborn child.

Meanwhile, the new mayor of London, Simone Thearle (played by series newcomer T’Nia Miller, who nails the faux-bravado of a public-facing politician while threading in little tells of genuine fear and vulnerability) has been handed the pretext she needs to crack down on gang activity. (Her crusade is given a nice, ironic frisson by the fact that she herself has a covert coke habit.) She takes a particular interest in Elliot when his file crosses her desk, and the prospect of a former police officer to blame for the poisonings is just too good for a career politician to resist.

The game is on; Elliot has to put his detective skillset to use to figure out who was behind the poisonings, before the tensions they created can erupt into open warfare. He teams up with Luan and, with Faz’s help, sets out to backtrace the route the cocaine took after entering the country.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Gangs of London script if it wasn’t making things screamingly convoluted, so this season premiere lays the groundwork for another overarching mystery, alongside the question of who spiked the coke. The episode’s first few minutes are spent in a cold open. We see a woman (Evelyn Miller) returning from a late-night rendezvous in the woods. She’s holding a folder conspicuously marked with a logo; a bold, serif character that’s not quite a “V” and not quite a “W.” She’s climbing back into her car, where her son (Aryel Tsoto) is waiting in the back seat, when a gunshot rings out from the direction she just came from.

She drives off, increasingly fearful when she realises she’s being followed. A short car chase ensues; the black SUV pursuing her quickly catches up and pulls alongside her family-friendly estate car. A very angry man in the SUV’s passenger seat starts shouting threats and obscenities in a thick Irish accent. (Eagle-eyed viewers will recognise him as Jack (Emmett J. Scanlan), Finn’s driver from S1 E1.) Jack tries to ram her car off the road, but suffers a blowout and crashes in the attempt; our heroine and her son, shaking and amazed by their good fortune, carry on driving into the rainy London night…

…and then, just when they think they’re safe, a lorry T-bones their car at a junction, hard enough to knock it onto its roof and set its engine alight. A silent, hooded figure (Andrew Koji) climbs down from the cab and approaches the woman where she sits, upside-down, face bloodied, begging for life. He retrieves the folder we saw earlier and walks away, without so much as a backward glance when the car’s engine explodes, incinerating the woman and child inside.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me who these mother and son characters were when I saw this scene at first – I imagine it won’t be obvious to most viewers. It’s spelled out for us, though, when Elliot recovers security footage from a massacre at the site where his shipment was dropped off, showing a silent, hooded figure (Andrew Koji) slaughtering his men with a combat knife. Elliot recognises the man; it’s the same guy who surveillance cameras caught after the hit-and-run car accident that killed his wife, Naomi, and son, Samuel, seven years ago. That accident, it seems, may not have been so accidental.

I… don’t love this. It’s a terribly blatant retcon. Elliot having a dead wife and son was established in Season 1, primarily as an emotional motivator; an explanation for why he threw himself into his role as an undercover cop so zealously. For them to have already been connected – however obscurely – to the criminal underworld that Elliot would coincidentally go on to investigate after their passing reads as contrived in the extreme; no less implausible than when Sean was brought back from the dead in Season 2. I don’t think this story choice is quite as damaging as that one was (it doesn’t actively undermine or cheapen any previous plot points), but I’m still looking at it with some serious side-eye.

Elliot and Luan eventually find the van that brought the drugs from the pier where they were dropped off on the south coast; examining the built-in sat-nav, it turns out that it made an unscheduled stop somewhere around Grays (a town in Essex, east of London proper). Following the course of the van’s detour, they find themselves at the gate of an abandoned funfair (an atmospheric set, built on location in Gunnersbury Park in Ealing). Luan climbs the fence, impatient for answers; Elliot reluctantly follows.

They’re greeted inside, after they trigger a laser tripwire, by a group of armed men led by Cornelius (Richard Dormer, playing the character with a wolfish grin, threats of violence concealed behind exaggeratedly false bonhomie). They deny any knowledge of any van coming through this way; Elliot tries to de-escalate the situation, but Luan is having none of it. He shoots one of the goons in the head, and from there, we’re off to the races, with the first big action setpiece of the season.

It’s an okay fight scene, I guess? S3 E1 was directed by South Korean filmmaker Kim Hong-Sun, who’s the impresario of Season 3, taking the reins from Corin Hardy before him and Gareth Evans before that. Hong-Sun is a completely new addition to the Gangs creative staff; on paper, he’s just the kind of director that this show wants. He’s best known to English-speaking audiences for his action-horror epic Project Wolf Hunting, a big hit in the Toronto International Film Festival’s 2022 “Midnight Madness” lineup, just as The Raid had been 11 years earlier. (The actors Shin Seung-Hwan and Lim Ju-Hwan, appearing in S3 E1’s nightclub scene, are both veterans of that movie.)

Project Wolf Hunting has an 88% positive rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 64% audience score, so I guess I’m the outlier when I say I didn’t like it very much. A single-location thriller set on a cargo ship used for a prisoner transfer, thrown into disarray when a Frankensteinian monster escapes and runs amok, it ought to have been my jam, but I thought it was ill-paced, overplotted, and – I hate to say it – specifically poorly directed.

Watching S3 E1, I found a lot of the criticisms I had for Project Wolf Hunting a few years ago coming back to me. Namely: I don’t think Hong-Sun has a very strong sense for camera placement or blocking. Moments that should be high-energy are let down by sleepy camera movement and indifferent editing rhythms. So many of his compositions are these ambivalent, inert, medium-long shots, keeping the relevant narrative elements in focus but doing little to guide the viewer’s attention or emotional response.

(One moment in this episode stands out as an example of what I’m talking about. Exiting the conference with the other gang leaders, Marian has a terse exchange of words with Ed as she moves to climb into her car. The shot-reverse-shot editing is periodically interrupted by cuts to a wide shot, where we see Marian and Ed cramped to the right side of the screen, and Marian’s driver Liam (Tim McDonnell), silently holding an umbrella over her head, is afforded equal visual prominence to them both. And, like… why? It undercuts the tension and the intimacy of Ed and Marian’s dialogue, makes it feel more public and less intense than if the scene had emphasised tight close-ups.)

It’s stuff like that: shot-to-shot, Filmmaking 101 decisions, none of which are by themselves egregious or wrong, but in aggregate, they make Gangs of London feel less like HBO and more like basic cable, if you know what I mean. Compare the visual language here to how motivated and focused every shot feels in S1 E1, and the difference is like night and day.

(I will say, to give Kim Hong-Sun the benefit of the doubt: this might be partly a budget issue. Season 3 wrapped its principal photography back in April 2024, well before the boost in profile from the AMC/Netflix arrangement. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but it wouldn’t shock me if Season 3 was made for less money than S1 or S2, and had less scope for ambitious shot setups.)

So, anyway, yeah: that fairground fight. Luan slips away after Cornelius’s men open fire; finding the fairground’s circuit breaker, he turns on all of the switches, lighting up the carnival with music and flashing lights as a distraction tactic. Elliot grabs a novelty hammer from a test-your-strength machine as a weapon, and trades a few blows with Cornelius. It’s all a bit surreal and tonally dissonant, and I mean that as a compliment. Much like a nightclub, a carnival is a good setting to situate the intoxicating excesses of Gangs of London’s action, and a novelty for the series thus far (though, again, Hong-Sun’s direction errs a bit too sedate to make full use of it).

The title of Supervising Stunt Co-ordinator has been passed this season to Adam Horton, a Brit whose previous credits include Rambo: Last Blood, Angel Has Fallen, and last year’s reboot of The Crow. This episode’s choreography (credited to Maxime Ecoiffier and Marc David) is solid; well-framed and well-edited, if a bit by-the-numbers; Cornelius slips away, leaving Elliot to grapple with one of his henchmen, struggling for control of a machete. It’s a fight that’s most memorable for its excellently timed final punchline: Elliot, nursing a flesh-wound and backing away from his opponent, manages to judo throw him right into the path of a spinning tilt-a-whirl carriage, reducing him instantly to a red smear across the attraction’s railings. (The moment is defanged a little by how obviously Elliot’s victim becomes a CGI marionette at the point of impact, but if I was rating spectacular kills on The Goods’ proprietary 8-point scale, it’s still a solid 6.)

The best of S3 E1 comes at the end, though. Cornelius escapes, but Luan and Elliot recover a phone from the site with a single saved contact. Elliot calls the number… and who should pick up but Sean Wallace.

Meanwhile, who should Cornelius rendezvous with but Billy (Brian Vernel), now sporting a prosthetic left arm and a hard, unsympathetic glint in his eye. Because Cornelius, as it turns out, is Marian’s estranged brother, and Sean and Billy’s uncle.

Yeah, I don’t remember Cornelius ever being mentioned until now, either. I get the impression that, with all the new blood on the creative staff for Season 3, they were feeling pretty free and easy with retcons. (In addition to Hong-Sun, this episode’s credited writer is Peter McKenna, a new addition to the GoL writer’s room.) I don’t mind this development so much. I like the way that Sean is being cast as a kind of supervillain, in the vein of Heath Ledger’s Joker, or Raoul Silva in Skyfall; someone uninhibited by prison walls; who already outmanoeuvred everyone months ago with his galaxy-brained schemes.

The episode’s final scene is great; a confrontation between Elliot and Sean in prison, on opposite sides of bulletproof glass. After two seasons, the dynamic between Cole and Dìrísù feels lived-in. Sean, despite being the one behind bars, knows just how to get under Elliot’s skin. He affects a kind of casual, “good to see you, mate!” faux-friendliness that he knows Elliot doesn’t have the patience to reciprocate; drops hints about the fate of his wife and son like it’s no big deal, clearly relishing Elliot’s mounting frustration as he strings him along.

I groove with this newest iteration of Sean Wallace: a spiteful, Lecteresque arch-villain in total command of himself, psychologically torturing his enemies even while he’s physically constrained. S3 E1 isn’t quite the knockout blow I’d hoped for from this new, rejuvenated Gangs of London, but there’s a ton of promise to the plot threads it sets up, and it left me eager to see how it would follow through.

I had a long commute to a shitty job, about an hour of driving in western Massachusetts, and I needed something to fill the air. My Favorite Murder kept showing up in Apple’s Top 10 most popular podcasts, so I downloaded a chunk of episodes and hit play.

The hosts of MFM have maintained that their podcast helps their overwhelmingly female listenership in a couple of ways: one, by promoting mental health; two, by teaching women how to not get murdered. In an email exchange with The Atlantic, co-host Georgia Hardstark writes, “It’s a lot like exposure therapy, where you have to confront your fear to prove that it can’t actually hurt you. Basically neither of us are willing to let our horror of true crime keep us from our fascination [with] it. Reading an awful story and then thinking, ‘We have to talk about this on the podcast!’ instead of, ‘I have to hide this from my Google history!’ makes all the difference.” Framing your popular comedy show about the worst days of other people’s lives as “exposure therapy” is interesting: you have to wonder if the last thoughts of the black gay men Dahmer hacked to pieces to shove in his fridge were something along the lines of, “I hope the white middle-manager listening to the grisly details of how my head got pickled feels a little better about herself as she fires one of her employees for taking long lunch breaks.”

The MFM hosts are performing a really odd kind of magic trick here, a variation of the saw the woman in half trick, but where they saw the woman in half, then walk out to the front of the stage and explain how they’ve learned to be less afraid of being sawed in half (meanwhile, the woman sawed in half stays sawed in half). Abracadaver. I listened to the podcast for a while on these long commutes; the stories of the murdered women (and, rarely, men) were grisly, of course, but I had this uncomfortable feeling that after a year of listening, and hundreds of hours of “exposure therapy,” I still didn’t really know any better how not to get murdered, besides some obvious best practices: don’t be a person of color (), don’t be a sexual minority (), don’t be a sex worker ().

I stopped listening, and began to see the increasing popularity of the True Crime genre as another symptom of a terminally sick society that, instead of choosing to help people of color, sexual minorities, and sex workers, was doomed to merely empower white women on their morning commutes.

This is all a long preamble to talking about the film Red Rooms, which released in 2023, but nobody you know has seen. That’s changing a bit: an upcoming Blu-Ray release for the film seems to be sparking new interest on Letterboxd.

Red Rooms is a 2023 French court drama that was perhaps overshadowed by the other big 2023 French court drama, Anatomy of a Fall. That it’s a far better film than Anatomy of a Fall is selling it short: Red Rooms is easily in the top five films I’ve seen in 2024.

The story follows Kelly-Anne, played by Juliette Gariépy, a model and online poker player who is attending the murder trial of a man named Ludovic Chevalier. In one long, unbroken shot, the camera floats through the courtroom as the prosecution introduces the case: Ludovic is accused of murdering three teenage girls, filming the murders, and broadcasting them online. The nominal red room is something of an urban legend, a nightmarish space where murder is transformed into grotesque spectacle for others. David Cronenberg played with the red rooms legend in Videodrome, sending James Woods on a hellish investigation into a cult that is using red rooms to, paradoxically, purge society of the kind of viewer who would actively seek out this content. Videodrome’s most famous line—“Long live the new flesh”—is a sort of prophetic prayer for the media space Red Rooms is exploring in 2023, one where a woman like Kelly-Anne can become her own kind of murderino for the worst days of three young girls’ lives.

Who is Kelly-Anne? The camera, in this long, unbroken opening shot, finally settles on her in the courtroom audience. She’s lovely, in that French way: eyes as big and round as macarons, and a stare as cold and cutting as a guillotine. She sleeps in a cubby outside the court building. She’s the first in line at the courtroom security checkpoint. She takes the same seat in the far back row of the courtroom, the victims’ parents shoulders facing her. Is she homeless? No. She has a nice high-rise apartment, we learn, where she seems to spend most of her time playing video poker and earning outrageous sums in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. She only seems to consume smoothies. She is also a model, dressing in high fashion couture, posing enigmatically at a series of photoshoots. We never see her taking pleasure in these pursuits: there is a grim efficiency to Kelly-Anne’s life that narrows her pursuits to two domains: making money, and attending Ludovic’s trial.

Who is Kelly-Anne? We will be asking this question over and over for the next two hours, as we rarely leave the presence of Kelly-Anne, but whose motives and psychology become more and more inscrutable (and alarming) as the movie goes on. Is she a murderino like the MFM listeners, trapped in a fan’s echo chamber of empowerment and therapeutic best practices? Or is she… something else?

There’s another woman who keeps attending the trial, a mousey freak named Clementine, who catches the eye of Kelly-Anne. They share a lunch at break, and Clementine reveals what kind of murderino she is: more or less, she’s in love with Ludovic. Clementine gives an impassioned defense of Ludovic’s innocence, noting that the evidence the prosecution is relying upon is flimsy—that masked white man in the red room tapes, while he looks like Ludovic, could be any of a thousand white guys in Montreal. Kelly-Anne listens to Clementine dispassionately. Kelly-Anne looks, in fact, like a predator regarding some perfectly stupid prey. We understand pretty quickly that Clementine is a lunatic of a sort; she has that crazed, cultish energy of a Manson follower, of someone who can’t see beyond the quivering penumbra of their horniness to the grisly subject of their horniness (horniness usually requires this kind of defective vision).

Kelly-Anne doesn’t seem horny for Ludovic, nor for Clementine. In fact, Kelly-Anne doesn’t seem at all sexually motivated—though she invites Clementine back to her apartment, she makes no move to fuck. She seems to pity Clementine: the girl has traveled from the provinces to Quebec, and is running out of money. She says Clementine can keep her things at her apartment. She shows Clementine her computer array, and the artificial intelligence that she has programmed herself. We learn Kelly-Anne is quite good with computers, and with masking her online presence.

The trial progresses. Clementine and Kelly-Anne are now sleeping outside the courtroom together. The camera begins to take more interest in the victims’ parents, in particular Francine, the mother of the youngest victim. We learn that two tapes exist for the two other victims, but the third tape for Francine’s daughter was never found. In interviews with the press, Francine actually calls out the presence of Kelly-Anne and Clementine and the other murderinos attending the trial. One of the bitter ironies of fair and public trials is that they must be open to the public, which of course means that a murderino like Clementine, horny for Ludovic, is allowed to attend the same back-and-forth discussions of how your daughter was dismembered.

Kelly-Anne, so good with computers, discovers the address of Francine’s home. She goes on the dark web and… figures out Francine’s front door passcode. She begins to stake out the mother’s home, walking up to the memorial for her slain daughter, walking up to the windows. She peers inside. She goes to the front door, unlocks it, turns around, leaves.

Who is Kelly-Anne?

In one virtuosic scene at Kelly-Anne’s apartment, she and Clementine tune into a call-in TV show discussing the Ludovic case. Kelly-Anne projects the show on one of her apartment’s empty walls, while Clementine calls in. The hosts pity Clementine. They say she has been corrupted by the media, by her own foolishness. The framing of the scene, with the computer monitor positioned behind Clementine, and Clementine staring at the projection on the wall, suggests that people like Clementine live in a maze of mediating screens, the stories we tell about guilt and innocence, about empowerment and therapeutics, sold to an audience that has already made up their minds about their own righteousness (that their minds are made up of what they consume goes, gracefully and conveniently, unacknowledged).

The hosts hang up on Clementine, who is left in bitter tears. She knows Ludovic is innocent. She just does. This is when Kelly-Anne does something unlike herself, so far as we know her: she asks if Clementine would like to see the red room tapes. How on earth does Kelly-Anne have them, Clementine asks. Kelly-Anne tells her about the dark web, about media secreted inside media, screens within screens. Clementine agrees to watch the tapes, and the film pulls off another great trick: instead of showing us the tapes, it shows the two women watching the tapes. Their faces are bathed in red light. Clementine’s eyes begin to shimmer with tears. We hear horrible sounds from the tapes. Clementine looks as if she is about to vomit. Beside her, Kelly-Anne’s inscrutable face. What is she feeling? Her face changes like a glacier calving changes: one elemental coldness collapsing into another elemental coldness. She blinks. She stares. She looks over to Clementine, reduced to a quivering mess. The tapes end, and Clementine rushes to the bathroom to vomit. The next day, Clementine moves out of Kelly-Anne’s apartment and leaves Montreal.

It’s at this point that I won’t go further into what happens in Red Rooms, because the film still has some incredible and disturbing surprises. A late scene in the courtroom, involving Kelly-Anne and a costume change, had me screaming out loud in astonishment, then laughing at my own astonishment. There’s a climactic scene, too, that involves an auction and ungodly amounts of bitcoin that is shot and edited like a taut thriller. Even though what Kelly-Anne is bidding on is unspeakable (as is what she plans to do with it), I found myself rooting for her. Like a rabid murderino.

In this regard, Red Rooms’ greatest trick is probably getting you to empathize with a true freak like Kelly-Anne, who will go down alongside the Woman in Scarlett Johansson’s Under the Skin as one of cinema’s great freak fatales. There are limits to this kind of synthetic empathy, of course: regarding the pain of others isn’t the same as experiencing their pain. (Just as regarding freaks does not necessarily make you a freak—though maybe you ought to stop doing that.) Susan Sontag noted this distinction in her famous essay of the same name, Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag, after interrogating the value of war photography, arrives at a place of empathetic uselessness. She writes,

Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture. There’s no threat of protest. They are not about to yell at us to bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They haven’t come back to life in order to stagger off to denounce the war-makers who sent them to kill and be killed.

The victims in the red rooms aren’t looking out at their audience. They aren’t interested in shaming them for looking. For wanting to look. Their interests are far more immediate: they are begging to have their lives spared. Sontag goes on to say of the dead that they are “are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? ‘We’—this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like.

So what is the appeal for the murderino? For Kelly-Anne? Why do we want to look into these red rooms at all? For Sontag, the answer is simple: these photographs let us feel lucky that it wasn’t us. The red room is a relief, in this regard: it is their red room, not ours. When the hosts of My Favorite Murder say they are empowering their murderinos, they’re saying this: you are not dead. Congratulations.