Gangs of London
Season 1
Episode 9
Investor? I hardly knew 'er!
I have my bones to pick with the way that Gangs of London’s first season wraps up – quite a few of them, honestly – but I also don’t want to come out of the gate sounding too negative.
It would have been easy for the endgame of this story to play out in a way that felt rote and perfunctory; a pitched final battle between the Wallaces and their enemies, or some such. After the doldrums of the Xavier Gens-directed episodes, “rote” and “perfunctory” had come to feel like all we could expect. At this point, the show seemed like it had lost the energy and flair that made its first few hours so electrifying.
But instead, in Episode 9 the series gets some of its mojo back. Corin Hardy returns to direct the Season 1 finale, working from a script by Claire Wilson that does some bold, interesting things with structure and character perspective. While there are subplots that end up feeling underserved, if not downright neglected, the biggest swings that the story takes land beautifully, and it arrives at a satisfying denouement. I might quibble with aspects of pacing and presentation, but broadly speaking, Season 1 of Gangs of London has a satisfying shape to it, by the end. As an epic tragedy cooked out of overclocked gangster- and action-movie tropes, it’s crude, and often clumsy, but there’s poetry to it nevertheless.
As an epic tragedy cooked out of overclocked gangster- and action-movie tropes, it’s crude, and often clumsy, but there’s poetry to it nevertheless.
One choice that Wilson’s script makes which I wholeheartedly endorse is to centre it on Elliot. He’s the wild-card in this whole scenario; the rogue, unpredictable element who could tip proceedings in the Wallaces’ favour, or the Investors’. We open on a flashback to his childhood, when he witnessed his father take a fall during a boxing match. In this show that’s fascinated with the legacy passed down from father to son, Elliot’s relationship with his Dad is a marked contrast to Sean’s relationship with Finn. What Sean learned from Finn was the importance of making oneself appear big and strong; to project dominance and power with the confidence that they’ll become real in due course. Elliot learned the value of appearances from his Dad, too; but in his case, the lesson was how to look weaker than he is; how to conceal his true intent; how to quietly hold on to his self-worth and his sense of identity, even when he has to act in ways contrary to it.
From this flashback, we move to the episode’s main framing device; Elliot has been taken into custody by an unidentified appendage of British intelligence. The editing and camerawork are jagged and disorienting as he’s subjected to a litany of forensic examinations. His confused, stammered requests to speak to Vicky or Harks are denied. He’s zip-tied to a steel chair in a windowless room, wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. He’s interrogated by Agent Joseph Singer (played by the delightfully hammy Cornell John) in connection with the Belvedere Tower bombing, and the circumstances of his last meeting with Sean Wallace.
That final confrontation between Sean and Elliot is the centrepiece of Episode 9, the moment that it converges upon from ahead and behind in chronology – it’s some real gnarly, twisty, Christopher-Nolan-type stuff. In the framing scenes, the interrogation grows more and more intense, with Elliot eventually getting waterboarded as Singer presses for information about who he’s really working for.
… it’s some real gnarly, twisty, Christopher-Nolan-type stuff.
Back in the present, Sean is hiding out in the back room of a nightclub (referred to in dialogue as “The Reno,” although a couple of flickering letters in a neon sign identify it as “The Renoir.” Nice touch.) It’s here, while keeping his head down from the authorities, that he finally learns the truth about Elliot’s identity. Anthony’s phone, recovered by Marian’s men from the site of the shooting in the previous episode, has been cracked, revealing unambiguous text exchanges with Vicky that refer to “UC Elliot Carter.”
Meanwhile, Elliot gets Billy on the phone, and successfully persuades the Wallace who always liked him best to disclose his brother’s location. With Sean now wanted for domestic terrorism, Elliot heads to the Reno intending to arrest him and hold him to justice. He’s followed by a SWAT team organised by Harks, who fully intends to arrest Elliot together with Sean.
En route to his objective, Elliot is intercepted by a mysterious car with tinted windows… the same car that, earlier in the episode, Jevan entered and didn’t leave alive. He spends a few minutes talking with the car’s occupants. What does he discuss with them? Well, that’s the kind of information Singer is employing enhanced interrogation techniques to learn.
Elliot arrives at the Reno; he’s subjected to a patdown before he meets Sean. Sean confronts him with the truth that he pulled off Anthony’s phone. The Wallace scion is, as we might expect, furious at his enforcer’s treachery. Livid, even; disgusted. He pistol whips him, knocking out a tooth. But, notably, he doesn’t shoot Elliot where he sits. Instead, he presents him with a microchip full of years’ worth of incriminating data on the Investors. For all that Elliot has betrayed his trust, for all that he’s insinuated himself into his family… Sean still sees him as a potential ally.
Into this already tense scenario, Alex arrives. He bribes the guards at the door to let him through with a gun. In the back room with Sean, Elliot loitering in the background, Alex holds the pistol’s barrel between Sean’s eyes.
And Sean talks him down. “You’re not an evil bastard like your father, Alex,” he says: and it works. “We’re nothing like our fathers.”
Sean has finally defined himself, independently of the role that Finn set out for him. He’s cast himself as a revolutionary. He, Sean Wallace, will take down the power structure that Ed capitulated to, and that Finn fled from. He’s a rebel; a revolutionary.
Alex stands down, and tearfully lowers his pistol. Elliot moves in, and gently takes the weapon from the Dumani heir apparent. For a moment, it looks like there’s hope for these two sons to step out from the shadow cast by their Dads.
Then, Elliot raises the gun and shoots Sean in the face at point-blank range.
I don’t see the need to leaven my enthusiasm: I think this is a fantastic plot twist, almost a case-study in how to manipulate the viewer’s expectations and whip the rug out from under them. Watching this episode with my Dad back in April 2020, we were both completely caught by it in the moment, by the sheer “what the hell!? Did that seriously just happen!?” energy of it. But after the initial jolt passes, you realise that it makes total sense. The surrounding context all snaps into place; the flash-forward to Elliot’s interrogation; the mysterious rendezvous with the dark-windowed car. The Investors – personified here by Ms Kane (Amanda Drew) and Mr Jacob (Tim McInnery) – got to Elliot before he reached the Reno, and held his father’s life to ransom in exchange for Sean’s. Singer is trying to trace back the Wallace organisation’s financing to its source, just as Elliot had been… before the targets of his investigation turned him into their thrall.
The script has played completely fair with the audience; all of the hints that Sean Wallace would die tonight, and that Elliot would kill him, were in place. But the redemptive, hopeful framing of the confrontation with Alex, the way that emotional stand-off is successfully de-escalated, acts as an incredibly effective sleight-of-hand.
Best of all: the twist feels true to Gangs of London’s characters and its themes. Sean never learned the lesson that Elliot did back in Episode 3, when he got his ass kicked by Cole. There is always someone bigger, and stronger, and more connected, and more well-funded than you. It’s not enough to insist upon your principles with brute force. If you want to destabilise the powers that be, you’ve got to be wily, and sneaky.
Sean never learned the lesson that Elliot did back in Episode 3, when he got his ass kicked by Cole.
Sean Wallace isn’t wily, or sneaky. He’s loud and proud and boisterous. He’s finally confident in himself; confident in his motivations; confident in his objectives. And it’s for that self-assurance that he gets a hole blown through his head.
Elliot, though? He’s extricated from Singer’s clutches, and he strides into the sunset, alive. He’s alone, now: his umbilical cord to the law is cut. Harks is dead, having caught a stray bullet in the raid on the Reno. Vicky is dead, blown away by a shotgun blast after having grossly misjudged Shannon and confronted her with the fact that Elliot is in the police.
But he’s not defenceless. He inserts his fingers into his mouth, and from the gap in his teeth left where Sean pistol-whipped him, he retrieves the microchip with the incriminating information on the Investors. Season 1 ends on a note of cautious, tenuous hope, with a shot of the London skyline: hope that the pernicious tendrils of international finance can be repelled. Sean Wallace’s crusade was smothered as soon as it was articulated; but it will survive, thanks to the man who swore to destroy him.
Basically, I love everything that this episode does with Sean and Elliot. Their character arcs dovetail in profound ways, and the ingenuity of the plotting is, genuinely, something to behold. But, Episode 9 is so meticulous and careful with its handling of the show’s two main characters, that it leaves a lot of the surrounding plotlines adrift and unattended.
I like the conclusion of Lale’s enmity with Asif, at least. In the traffic-jam chaos of the Belvedere bombing, Asif gets out of his car and makes his way on foot to his son’s celebration at being elected Mayor of London. On his way, he shakes the hand of a woman wearing a blonde wig and sunglasses (Lale in disguise, if it wasn’t obvious). His hand comes away wet with blood. Panicking, he arrives at the venue; only to find his son’s corpse posed on a balcony, with its tongue cut out.
The recurring motif of sons who can’t escape their fathers’ shadows, despite their best intentions, is resonant in this subplot. Nasir Afridi’s campaign for public office, and the tension over his father’s underworld connections, has been a background subplot running through Season 1, never doing much to inform the main story. But while this subplot lacks narrative utility, it has thematic resonance. Here, again, is a son who wants to remove himself from his father’s insidious influence. Here, again, is a son sacrificed for the sins of the father, despite his best intentions.
One detail that I avowedly don’t like, mind you, is the turn that Sean’s relationship with Lale takes. Having got her revenge on Asif and fulfilled the conditions of her contract with Sean, she announces her intent to return to Kurdistan. After exchanging some tense words about their respective motivations, they start tearing each other’s clothes off.
I just don’t buy it. Way back in Episode 1, Lale’s attitude towards Sean was somewhere between indifferent and contemptuous. “He has known one death. One.” That was how she dismissed his grief at Finn’s passing during the funeral. She saw him as a coddled child, whose pain paled in comparison to hers in her fight for Kurdish liberation. (FWIW, Narges Rashidi is Joe Cole’s IRL senior by nine years.) I could see Lale coming to view Sean as an ally of convenience, after the way they clashed in Episode 3. She might even gain a grudging, professional respect for him. But to consider him as a potential sexual partner, let alone an honest-to-God love interest?
I don’t see it. I don’t think the groundwork was laid. And the sex scene that seals the deal is very corny: the camera is powerfully attentive to Rashidi’s arching spine, while breathy moans resound through the sound design, and solemn, minor-key piano plays on the soundtrack. It’s the cheesiest sort of hetero-male wish-fulfillment. Lale emerges from Season 1 as one of the most charismatic characters in the show, but it’s not helped by the way she’s turned into a cliched object of male gaze here.
Lale emerges from Season 1 as one of the most charismatic characters in the show, but it’s not helped by the way she’s turned into a cliched object of male gaze here.
And then there’s the matter of Marian’s showdown with Ed. After an episode-and-change of buildup to their confrontation, with Ed’s Investor-backed forces on one side, and Marian’s ex-IRA militia on the other… the episode just kinda glosses over the battle. The two senior figures of the Wallace organisation sit next to one another on a park bench in a cemetery; they surreptitiously point their guns at each other. Ed has the quicker trigger finger, and he sets Marian on the bench to look like she’s sleeping, while his men mow hers down in brief, slow-motion shots in the background.
I’ve spent enough time bemoaning the lack of action scenes in Gangs of London after Episode 5. And I really don’t want to come across as the sort of gore-obsessed simpleton who loses interest in a TV show if it goes five minutes without a snapped collarbone. But goddammit, when a show makes highly choreographed violence a part of its promise to its audience, I feel within my rights to be disappointed when its dramatic climax conspicuously elides scenes of highly choreographed violence.
And, in a very Marvel Cinematic Universe-style stinger at the end of the episode, it turns out that Marian survived anyway. So what was the point of any of this?
One particularly noticeable omission in Episode 9 is that we never find out what happens to Leif. The Danish, private-military bloodhound who slaughtered Darren and Kinney in Episode 5 has been sort of hanging out in the background for the past three episodes. You might reasonably expect that, as the Investors’ go-to enforcer, he’d factor into the season’s climax; perhaps have a showdown with Elliot, or something. But no, he’s… just sort of forgotten. (Spoiler alert, I suppose: he doesn’t show up in Season 2, either.)
Leif’s absence feels symptomatic of Gangs of London, Season 1’s foibles. Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery set out to create a show with the sensibilities of mid-budget genre cinema, treating each episode as its own short film. For better and worse, they succeeded; each episode does feel, to some extent, like a self-contained object. The laissez-faire showrunning leads to a show that’s relentlessly, restlessly dynamic; reinventing itself from one installment to the next, never quite settling into a comfortable groove or rhythm. It’s a sketch of a story that’s been coloured in by several sets of hands; each with their own sensibilities and priorities. Gareth Evans’s idea of what’s important in Gangs of London is subtly, but noticeably, different from Corin Hardy’s, as is Hardy’s from Gens’s.
At its best, Season 1 is infectious and fascinating for its wild pivots in structure and emphasis. At its worst, it’s incoherent; it undercuts itself, and reneges on promises it makes to the viewer. The finale captures both at once.
In discussions of Gangs of London, there are three texts that it typically gets compared to: Game of Thrones (for being about ultraviolent wars of succession between feudal houses); The Godfather (for being a gangster drama about a son who reluctantly takes up his father’s mantle) and Hamlet (for the angst of the son acting on behalf of his father’s ghost).
What’s not so often discussed is that, with Season 1, Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery have effectively released a crypto-remake of The Raid 2.
Or, if “remake” is too strong a claim, at least a restatement of the story beats and tropes and signifiers that so fascinated them in their 2014 Indonesian martial arts film. Again, they’ve written a story about a tormented undercover cop who ingratiates himself with the son of a prominent crime family. Again, the son whom the UC befriends is a pampered, hot-tempered brat who starts a gang war because of his daddy issues. Again, the UC has to kill the son when he’s left with no other recourse.
When I reviewed The Raid 2, I discussed how it’s a sprawling movie. Even with its indulgent, 150-minute runtime, it feels like the viewer only gets a blinkered glimpse into a far larger universe. The Raid 2 is an action movie, and its obligation, ultimately, is to get to the action scenes. But with all its branching tangents of lore and backstory, it compels the viewer to wonder about the larger context that its characters live in.
It’s a panoramic playground of tropes; manic and indulgent and thrilling and flawed. I’m glad it got made.
Gangs of London’s Season 1 is the answer to that. It’s Gareth Evans’s vision of a heightened, operatic, criminal world, applied to a canvas broad enough for everyone to stretch out and breathe. It’s a panoramic playground of tropes; manic and indulgent and thrilling and flawed. I’m glad it got made.
Am I glad that it continued to get made after Season 1? Well… that’s another conversation, and we’ll get to it.
- Review Series: Gangs of London
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Season 1 overall
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
More Gangs of London reviews
Andrew is a 2012 graduate of the University of Dundee, with an MA in English and Politics. He spent a lot of time at Uni watching decadently nerdy movies with his pals, and decided that would be his identity moving forward. He awards an extra point on The Goods ranking scale to any film featuring robots or martial arts. He also dabbles in writing fiction, which is assuredly lousy with robots and martial arts.