Gangs of London
Season 2
Episode 4
Mud and thunder
Of all the characters in Gangs of London who could act as the “heart” of the story – the player with the most sympathetic motives and framed in the most sympathetic light – it’s peculiar that Season 2 seems to have settled on Luan. More than Sean, more than Elliot, more than Marian, more even than Saba, at this point he’s the character I’m rooting for hardest to succeed.
After the helicopter attack in the previous episode failed to take Marian out of the picture, Luan is now on the very thinnest of ice with Koba. The Georgian suspects him of having gone behind his back, that he was the one to extract Marian and Floriana from the country estate before the minigun could rip them to shreds. Of course, we viewers know that Luan had nothing to do with it, so we naturally empathise with his sense of powerlessness when Koba holds up his phone, displaying a livestream of his wife from the inside of her coffin, where she’s buried alive and fast running out of oxygen. Koba gives him an ultimatum; only if Luan capitulates completely and surrenders all of his gang’s resources to Koba’s authority will he have a slim, brief chance to save Mirlinda.
It’s “peculiar” that Luan is so sympathetic, I said, because he’s just as capable of ruthlessness and cruelty as anyone else on this programme. You’ll recall that his involvement in Season 1 started with having butchered an Albanian family (children included) on Finn’s behalf. In hindsight, his having done something so unequivocally, unforgivably monstrous seems like a miscalibration; a failure of foresight on the writers’ part, given the direction his character eventually went. Luan is a man who’s always on the back foot; always playing defense; constantly afraid for the safety of his wife and daughters, to whom he’s deeply, authentically committed. The show makes us want to see their wholesome family dynamic survive its adversity; that Luan was responsible for wiping a different Albanian family off the face of the Earth is an uncomfortable issue that Season 2 doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge.
Then again, this is Gangs of London; the main cast are pretty much all morally irredeemable people, even the “nice” ones. That’s part of the buy-in it asks of the viewer. The victories to be found here are victories of sentiment; not of right or wrong.
And Orli Shuka’s performance provokes sentiment. A couple of reviews ago, I praised Lucian Msamati for grounding Gangs of London somewhat, with his understated, delicate performance of Ed Dumani. As Luan, Orli Shuka represents the opposite end of the show’s spectrum; he consistently goes big and goes loud, leaning all the way into grandiose, theatrical gestures. Here in S2 E4, Luan Luans harder than he’s ever Luaned before: mouth twisting and eyes bugging out; falling at Koba’s feet in the rain and noisily weeping for Mirlinda’s life.
It’s a funny thing: this sort of go-for-broke acting style, which I criticise for being histrionic when Joe Cole does it, feels natural when it comes from Shuka; it even conveys pathos. Obviously, this is all quite subjective, but when Sean Wallace pitches a screaming fit, it always feels affected; like an actor willing himself to “go big.” When Luan does it, it feels congruous with how the character comports himself in lower-key scenes. Even at his most subdued, Luan always has a wary, twitchy intensity to him; always a sense that he knows how much he has to lose. (Notably, Mirlinda is played by Eri Shuka, Orli’s IRL spouse of almost three decades. Knowing that, it’s no surprise that he communicates such depth of feeling while coming to her rescue.)
Even at his most subdued, Luan always has a wary, twitchy intensity to him; always a sense that he knows how much he has to lose.
Pairing Luan with Ed for this thread of the plot is an excellent choice; for the chalk-and-cheese quality of the actors’ respective performances, and for the ways that their characters play off one another. Ed’s misery at being made to do the Investors’ bidding is building towards an inflection point after Alex’s death, and the pitiable spectacle Luan presents with their boot on his neck only deepens his resentment for Koba and Asif. So, when Luan takes him captive at gunpoint, and forces him to guide him to the site where Mirlinda is buried, he complies without resistance.
“They took everything from you,” Luan exhorts Ed during their tense car ride. “Your power; your principles; and then, your son. When will you fight back?”
This dynamic comes to a head in one of the best sequences in the season. In a bleak patch of overgrown ground outside an industrial estate, Luan frantically hacks away at the earth covering Mirlinda’s coffin, first with a pickaxe, then with his hands, scraping away dirt on his hands and knees. His efforts are interrupted by Koba’s men; they tapped his phone and followed him, natch. The hired goons drag him away from the grave and prepare to execute him… when Ed smacks away the hand of the guy raising the gun with a shovel. When will he fight back? Right now, apparently. It’s a thrilling, cathartic moment; Ed Dumani, a character whose philosophy has always been to go with the grain, to side with the people who hold all the cards, has finally been pushed too far.
The fight scene that ensues is harrowing and intense, and makes tremendous use of the setting. As you can probably glean from the screenshots that Dan sources for these reviews, Gangs of London’s cinematography has a house style; dim and dingy and desaturated, favouring earth tones. This isn’t always the best look (the daylight helicopter assault in the previous episode kind of looks like dogshit, IMHO), but it’s very well suited to a scene like this, meant to maximise the suffering and squalor of the situation. Luan and Ed grapple with Koba’s cronies in an intensifying rainstorm; the ground beneath them gets wetter from shot to shot, the grey mud thickening and coating their bodies as they struggle. (I suspect that the showrunners wanted to emulate the prison fight in The Raid 2.) Orli Shuka’s ragged, wheezing exertion noises complete the sense of wretched, animalistic desperation.
I suspect that the showrunners wanted to emulate the prison fight in The Raid 2
It’s a heart-pounding scene, and one that hits all the harder for the fact that Ed and Luan lose. They come so, so nail-bitingly close, but they’re both finally dragged back to await whatever punishment Koba sees fit to inflict.
The rest of the episode? Yeah, it’s alright.
At this point in the season, I’m finding Elliot increasingly difficult to care about. He’s theoretically in a similar position now to where he was in Season 1; he’s once again working as a hired hand for the biggest criminal organisation on the scene, and once again, he’s surreptitiously feeding information to the authorities behind the scenes.
The difference is his motivation. In Season 1, Elliot was a zealot. He was always the one arguing with his superiors to let him keep pursuing his case; pushing deeper and deeper into the Wallace organisation with obsessive righteousness. It was clear that he was a wounded man, traumatised by the deaths of his wife and son, who threw himself into the work of an undercover detective as a means to rebuild his sense of self-worth.
In Season 2, Elliot is no longer driven by that need to impose justice on a cruel and fickle universe. His relationship with Singer is purely transactional, motivated wholly by Singer’s ability to extradite him and his father to some promised paradise of witness protection. This is made abundantly clear in a scene where he rendezvouses with Singer, confronting him about his plan to turn Sean loose on London as a sort of cleansing fire to drive out the Investors. When Singer suggests that Elliot hang around to act as a watchdog for Sean, Elliot is having none of it; he blackmails Singer, threatening to sell what he knows about the spook’s operation to the Investors, if he doesn’t deliver on his promises.
Elliot’s motives are understandable. He’s spent a year acting under the Investors’ coercion (it wouldn’t be overstating the point to say he’s their slave). It’s perfectly comprehensible that he’d just want to remove himself from the whole sordid mess; throw up his hands, declare “fuck it: I’m out,” and vanish together with his Dad to Jamaica, leaving London to its fate.
But “understandable” isn’t the same thing as “compelling.” Elliot’s relationship to the plot of the story he’s participating in is wholly negative; he’s trying his hardest to remove himself from the show’s drama. In a programme concerned with big personalities, each with grand visions for a future they’re trying to will into being, this Season 2 Elliot occurs as a drab, myopic character. He’s dispiriting to watch, because what he’s working towards is so limited: not victory over the Investors, just his own safe exit from a conflict that will carry on without him.
Elliot’s relationship to the plot of the story he’s participating in is wholly negative; he’s trying his hardest to remove himself from the show’s drama.
And then there’s Shannon; a character who, I confess, I keep forgetting about. I get the impression that the writers do, too. Gangs of London has consistently struggled to make her an active agent in the plot, rather than just being an appendage of Elliot’s story, and in Elliot’s absence, the show scrambles to find things for her to do. Marian was the one to bail her out of jail after she killed Vicky in S1 E9. Now, Marian has her running odd jobs without Sean’s knowledge, taking advantage of her resentment for Alex’s death.
One such job involves the lawyer acting as the proxy for Finn’s finances, who Asif got to in S2 E2. Two-thirds of the money protected by Floriana’s biometric data, meant to finance the Wallace insurgency, has gone missing, and Shannon meets him in his office with a silenced pistol, determined that the remaining £500 million shouldn’t go AWOL as well.
And, wouldn’t you know it: Asif dispatches Elliot at the same time, to the same lawyer’s office, to retrieve the same £500 million for the Investors. Elliot arrives too late, and finds his mark slumped at his desk, his brains dripping out through the hole in his forehead. He and Shannon have a Mexican stand-off; it’s all quite John Woo.
I think S2 E4 is aiming for a kind of turbulent, sexy, Mr. & Mrs. Smith dynamic between Elliot and Shannon, here; that’s certainly the vibe I get from the scene they share in the car they use to escape the crime scene. Shannon angrily tries to get out, Elliot stops her, and their lips almost touch.
But it all just feels sort of flat. Partly because I still don’t fully buy Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Pippa Bennett-Warner’s romantic chemistry.
Partly because it’s all just too convoluted. Their respective allegiances are so tangled and obscure at this point that I had to pause the episode to catch myself up on how, exactly, these two estranged lovebirds came to be pointing guns at each other, because there are a lot of dots to be joined. Luan’s quest to save Mirlinda has exactly the kind of elemental, emotional primacy that this subplot needed, and lacks.
Partly because it’s too little, too late; four episodes into this eight-episode season, this chance encounter is the first indication that Elliot has even thought about Shannon in the time they’ve been apart. A flashback reminds us that the Investors are threatening her life, too, as leverage to keep Elliot in line, so there’s an effort to present his leaving her as noble and self-sacrificially tragic. That’s an emotional beat that might have landed if, at any point in the previous three episodes, Shannon had factored into any of Elliot’s thoughts, decisions, or dialogue. As it is, she occurs as an unwelcome complication for his planned retirement; not as a lover he’s been pining for over the past 12 months.
S2 E4 hits its crescendo when Sean and Lale’s forces mount an attack against Koba; a synchronised night assault on all eight of his strongholds throughout the city, taking advantage of a Kurdish mole among the representatives to his assembly. The plan goes off spectacularly well for the Wallaces; their attack leaves Koba’s forces decimated, the London skyline lit up with the fires their forces leave in their wake.
It’s not really an “action sequence.” Marcela Said directs again, and between this and S2 E3, I get the impression that the large-scale, heavy-ordnance side of Gangs of London’s action design doesn’t interest her very much. What we see of the carnage is mostly confined to a montage, with Sean, Lale, and Billy marching imperiously into hostile territory, blasting away with assault rifles and pump-action shotguns. It’s all somewhat abstract.
It works, though, as a flourish to end the episode, with Sean proving himself as a proactive, brutal leader. The conflagration that lights up the city is a solid, mid-season, “the stakes are raised” moment. The rebellion agains the Investors is out in the open, now. Faz and Saba, who had the bad fortune to be making a delivery to one of the strongholds, are given the dubious privilege of delivering a message to Koba on Sean’s behalf: “tonight was just the start.”
The conflagration that lights up the city is a solid, mid-season, “the stakes are raised” moment.
Coincidentally, Sean’s assault struck right at the moment when Koba was preparing to execute both Ed and Luan for their treachery. In the confusion, Ed is left behind, but Luan is spirited away to safety. In the final shot of the episode, at long last, he releases Mirlinda from her coffin; still alive. He clutches her to him in the pouring rain, and howls in pain and relief and joy like a werewolf.
The people who resisted the Investors’ order have been rewarded; the people who propped them up or tacitly went along with their regime have been punished. It seems no power structure is eternal or invincible.
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.