Gangs of London
Season 2
Episode 3
Safe house? More like strafe-house!
So: Sean Wallace is – big, theatrical sigh – still alive.
It’s funny: when I was Googling the show in the process of writing this retrospective, I came across this article from Deadline, published in June 2021. (The headline, for posterity, or in the event of a broken link, is “‘Gangs Of London’ Season 2 Shooting For Sky & AMC, But No Word On Joe Cole’s Return As Sean Wallace.”) If you scroll down to the comment section beneath the article, you’ll find several commenters poking fun at the idea:
“Are you people serious about the headline? With what happened to his character it would be disingenuous for him to reprise his role. Guess you all think it just must have been a graze or some unbelievable junk like that.”
“Yeah, the fake death gotcha scene is really old. As much as I loved Joe Cole in this, he’s clearly dead and should stay that way.”
“I loved his character but the only feasible way back would be through flashbacks. Cannot wait for season 2!”
There’s a certain amount of schadenfreude, here. With the benefit of hindsight, I guess Deadline writer Jane Kanter had her finger on this series’ pulse more than the fans did. On the other hand… well, the commenters (even the unwarrantedly snippy ones) weren’t wrong to feel that bringing Sean back from the dead would be ridiculous.
Because it does happen, and it is ridiculous. It gets stupider and stupider the more you think about it. It’s the cardinal sin of Season 2; a top-level storytelling choice that unavoidably compromises and cheapens everything it touches. Even the good parts of Season 2 need to have an asterisk appended to them now.
It’s the cardinal sin of Season 2; a top-level storytelling choice that unavoidably compromises and cheapens everything it touches.
It’s not just that it’s implausible – although, it absolutely isn’t off the hook for being implausible. A large part of S2 E3 is spent in flashbacks, catching the audience up on how Sean’s spent his year after Elliot shot him in the face back in S1 E9. The story goes: when Harks and his team were raiding the Reno, and Elliot and Alex were making their daring escape, one of the SWAT team members was actually Lale in disguise! She covertly removed his unconscious body from the scene of the crime. In an unmarked van acting as an impromptu ambulance, she and her people stitched him up and defibrillated him.
BUT THEN! The Kurds’ van was ambushed by a mysterious third party, who took both Sean and Lale prisoner, holding them both captive for months in Abu Ghraib-like conditions. It emerges that their captors are actually a faction of British intelligence; the very same group headed up by Joseph Singer, trying to coerce Sean into giving them intel on the Investors.
Nine months into his captivity, Sean persuaded Singer that he was more of an asset as an ally than as an informant. He was released back onto the streets of London by the promise that he could rally its gangs to his cause; strike at the Investors in ways the legal process could not (Lale’s release alongside him was a perk he managed to negotiate). His string of hits as the Mysterious Red BMW Guy were just the opening salvo in his reprisal against the cabal that killed his father.
Utter nonsense. Flagrant bullshit, all of it. Set aside for a moment the unlikelihood of Sean surviving getting shot in the head. Medical miracles happen. But why on Earth would Lale have disguised herself as a member of Harks’ team ahead of the Reno raid? How could she have organised an EMT team at extremely short notice, from her Rolodex of on-call Kurdish freedom fighters in London? For that matter, hadn’t her whole unit been recently massacred by Asif? By S1 E9, wasn’t she essentially a lone operative?
And, allowing for all of that, how the hell did Singer know where she’d be!? For that matter, given the timescales implied by these flashbacks, wouldn’t this mean that Singer had Sean in custody while he was interrogating Elliot in S1 E9? And why on Earth would he agree to set Sean loose, unsupervised on the streets of London as a rogue manhunter, as if that’s a skillset he ever possessed?
This is the kind of transparent retcon that I’d supposed – perhaps naively – would be beneath prestige TV in the Year of Our Lord 2022. I honestly can’t imagine that this was the direction that Thomas Benski, or Gareth Evans, or Matt Flannery, envisioned the show taking when they developed Season 1. I’ve gone back and watched the assassination scene in S1 E9 multiple times. Elliot does shoot Sean in the cheek; not between the eyes, or any other more obviously, immediately lethal locus point in the skull. But Sean is definitely meant to be dead, as Season 1 presents it. The baroque series of contrivances leading to his quasi-messianic resurrection was ABSOLUTELY NOT set up in advance.
And why would it be? That’s the thing: Sean being alive isn’t just implausible; it’s dramaturgically insensible. The whole point of Sean in Season 1 was that he lacked finesse; lacked subtlety. I’ve written before about finding Sean unlikeable, but I’d argue the best thing he ever did for this story was die. He was the heir apparent; the uninhibited, prissy Mummy’s-boy who catalysed the rebellion against the Investors, but whose heedless boldness and failures of foresight got him killed before he could see it through. For characters like Elliot, or Marian, or Billy, or Alex to pick up Sean’s baton and run with it: that’s an interesting way to continue the story that Sean set in motion. One that forces the characters to reckon with the choices they’ve made, and their consequences.
I’ve written before about finding Sean unlikeable, but I’d argue the best thing he ever did for this story was die.
Instead, this “plot twist,” if we want to call it that, effectively walks back the drama of Gangs of London to where it was at the end of S1 E8. Sean appears unaltered by the trauma of being shot in the head. He still has all of his faculties; he’s as physically able as he ever was; his priorities are still the same. He doesn’t seem to bear any special animosity towards Elliot (in the single, perplexing scene they share in this episode, Elliot seems angrier at Sean than the reverse). Even the makeup used for his triangular gunshot scar is pretty understated; in certain lighting conditions, you can barely see it. (Christ knows what sort of reconstructive surgery must have been done to the exit wound, considering he was shot at point-blank range. It never comes up.)
It isn’t reckoning with the events of the previous season finale, so much as trying to sweep them under the rug, and that’s a very dubious precedent for a long-form story to set. How are we supposed to be persuaded that any big story development is permanent or consequential, now? How are we supposed to trust Gangs of London, going forward?
So, I started S2 E3 feeling miffed, to say the least. I continued to feel miffed through the first half of the episode, which puts the ramifications of Sean’s survival on hold for a moment for another heavy action setpiece. You’ll recall that, in the last episode, Luan successfully extracted the location of Marian’s safe house from her go-between. Koba wastes no time in acting on that information, sending – no joke – an attack helicopter to raze the chic, modern country house to the ground. Sean warns Marian and Floriana by phone, but not soon enough; they have to escape the house and the surrounding estate, Floriana’s newborn in tow, while everything around them is chewed to pieces by Gatling gunfire.
S2 E3 was directed by Marcela Said, a newcomer to the show. The Franco-Chilean director got her start making political documentaries before pivoting to narrative features in the 2010s; her best-known film is Los Perros, an award-winning 2017 drama that was quite celebrated in Latin America. Regrettably, I’ve not seen any of her other work, so I can’t speak to its quality; notably, though, she’s the first director to work on Gangs of London without a substantial background in the action or horror genre.
Unfortunately, that’s evident in the helicopter attack sequence. I suspect that when Season 2 was being drafted, Corin Hardy and Thomas Benski wanted another large-scale, shock-and-awe setpiece to recreate the magic of S1 E5; here again, we have a country house coming under sustained assault from military-grade weaponry. But all of the panache and showmanship that animated the best episode of the whole show is absent here. There’s no real build-up; the helicopter and the Gatling gun are introduced just moments before the attack commences.
The sequence itself is oddly low-energy; the shot scales and editing are peculiarly languid and relaxed, often holding on the helicopter’s targets for long enough that it’s really obvious the plumes of blood and flame have been digitally composited in. The sound design is low-key, too, nothing like the terrifying roar you’d expect of 6,000 rounds per minute. The presence of the helicopter feels weirdly remote and abstract throughout. The gunner and the pilot aren’t characterised at all; they never occur as active, antagonistic players in the scene. They’re just NPCs, representing a general, directional threat, passively reacting to any target that enters their crosshairs. And the helicopter never gets shot down, or anything like that; Marian and Floriana escape (with the help of a driver acting as a decoy), and we never see it again. It’s anticlimactic, and unsatisfying.
It also strains credulity, in an episode that’s already done a lot to strain credulity. Gangs of London takes place in a heightened version of reality, and I’m willing to meet it halfway, but there are limits. For a Danish mercenary squad to lay waste to a lone farmhouse on the Welsh coast? I can sort of buy that could be done without attracting attention. But for a helicopter to repeatedly strafe a house in, I dunno, maybe Surrey, or Oxfordshire? In the middle of the day? Britain is a densely populated island, and the southeast of England is especially so. At the very least, you’d think the neighbours would have noise complaints.
Britain is a densely populated island, and the southeast of England is especially so. At the very least, you’d think the neighbours would have noise complaints.
While we’re at it: why would Koba have thought that a single attack helicopter was the best way to deal with Marian Wallace, strategically speaking? A noisy machine that loudly announces its presence before it’s in view? Which offers a single, distant vantage point, making it almost impossible to confirm the elimination of a specific target? What can a helicopter bring to this assignment that a squad of heavily armed mercenaries on foot can’t?
(And, while I’m thinking about it: wasn’t the inciting incident of this season the receipt of a shipment of assault rifles? Because Britain has stringent gun-control laws, and that sort of weaponry is hard to come by? How the hell did that M134 Gatling Gun make it through customs? Surely that’s the thread that Singer’s people should be pulling, right?)
It’s a surprising and unwelcome development, that a major action sequence should represent an L for this show, of all shows, where the action scenes have long been the most reliable element. All the more so, because once the helicopter attack is over, S2 E3 does a curious thing: it becomes good.
Marian and Floriana are successfully extracted to Lale’s hideout, a warehouse complex where she and her PKK allies have holed up. The Kurds are under Koba’s thumb, their drug-smuggling operation heavily monitored and policed by his agents (we see the punishment for thievery exacted in a scene that’s grisly even by this show’s standards). Sean represents a potentially powerful ally for Lale and her people, if he can make good on his promise of Marian’s connections and Floriana’s funds. At the same time, he could be a disastrous liability if Koba discovers them harbouring the Wallaces.
Most of the back half of the episode plays out in the pressure cooker of the Kurdish hideout, and with that limitation of scope, we get the narrative clarity and the coherent sense of stakes that I’d been missing from Season 2 up till now. Can Sean negotiate all of the competing interests at play and come out on top, with the power to strike back at the Investors? That’s a good spine for this story; something for the individual scenes to be organised around.
The human drama is well-calibrated here, all the major players grappling with conflicting incentives and motivations that overlap in interesting ways. Lale has to weigh her genuine affection for Sean against her responsibility to her people, and whether he represents the best choice for Kurdish liberation (her subordinates see her indecision in making this choice).
The human drama is well-calibrated here, all the major players grappling with conflicting incentives and motivations that overlap in interesting ways.
Marian, in turn, is mistrustful, suspecting her son of lying about his motives and his reasons for reappearing when he chose to reappear. Her rooftop confrontation with Sean is a tremendous bit of acting from Michelle Fairley, who gives Marian Wallace the gravitas of a Shakespeare heroine wherever she finds the opportunity. What begins as a terse negotiation between gangsters for control of Floriana’s funds blends seamlessly into the hurt and the vulnerability of an empty-nester, confused and betrayed by her son’s months-long failure to let her know he was alive.
And then there’s Floriana herself. Finn’s mistress has, for the longest time, been an unknown quantity; a MacGuffin, more than a character. Here in S2 E3, she exerts some agency, and it turns out she’s quite devious. Holding a conference with Sean, Marian, and Lale present, she offers to finance the Kurds on her own terms, with the condition that Sean leaves forever, inconvenient as he is to her alliance with Marian.
Sean shoots Floriana dead on the spot, making an orphan of his newborn half-brother, as soon as she’s done giving her sales pitch. It’s almost a jump-scare.
It’s a little bit rich for a character who once was the recipient of a surprise headshot to inflict the same fate on another. And Gangs of London Season 2 is maybe leaning a little too hard on abrupt character deaths to keep its audience fired up. But in the moment, it works: Floriana’s immediate and remorseless murder acts as the proof of conviction from Sean that Lale was looking for. (This, incidentally, gets them both very horny.)
As a viewer, I am similarly compelled by that lack of hesitation. It makes me hope that Sean’s revolution against the Investors will be fearsome, and bold, and overthrow the show’s staus quo.
But, let us not forget that all-important asterisk: it’s bullshit that Sean is alive in the first place.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
More Gangs of London reviews
Andrew is a 2012 graduate of the University of Dundee, with an MA in English and Politics. He spent a lot of time at Uni watching decadently nerdy movies with his pals, and decided that would be his identity moving forward. He awards an extra point on The Goods ranking scale to any film featuring robots or martial arts. He also dabbles in writing fiction, which is assuredly lousy with robots and martial arts.