Gangs of London
Season 2
Episode 8
Sound and fury
At around the thirty-four-minute mark of Gangs of London’s second season finale, we check in with Ed and Shannon Dumani, who are keeping a watchful eye out through the curtains of their room in the Red Lion Motel. In the adjoining ensuite bathroom, filling the space from wall to wall, they’ve piled the entirety of Asif’s stolen heroin shipment. They’ve pulled a double-reverse-Uno-card betrayal on Marian, and stolen the shipment from her and Luan in turn.
They see a pair of black SUVs pull into the motel’s car park. “Albanians,” Ed intones, sounding grave. Their erstwhile business partners have tracked them down.
“I’m not running,” Shannon insists.
“Look at me,” says Ed. Lucian Msamati turns to face the camera, his eyes wary and deathly serious. “If we do this, there’s no turning back.”
While the adults in the room are talking business, Shannon’s son Danny amuses himself by watching a movie on the room’s TV.
The movie he watches is The Raid.
Specifically, he watches the first major hand-to-hand fight in the movie, the seventh-floor corridor battle where Rama has to defend himself and his injured colleague Bowo from the hordes of petty criminals spilling out of the surrounding apartments.
S2 E8 isn’t subtle about this bit of intertextuality; the TV screen displaying The Raid is the first thing we see when the scene cuts to the interior of the motel room, and Danny has the sound turned up loud: Shannon and Ed’s hushed exchange of dialogue is underscored by exaggerated foley effects and Iko Uwais’s grunts of exertion.
The Albanian operatives burst through the door, balaclava’d and bristling with armaments, but the room is empty. Shannon and Ed are one step ahead of them; they’ve snuck to the adjoining room to wait in ambush. As the Albanians are trying to figure out what happened, Ed and Shannon unleash a volley of heavy automatic weapons fire through the connecting wall. The moment they begin shooting coincides exactly with the beat in The Raid, still playing on the empty room’s TV, when Tama’s men start shooting at Jaka’s unprepared unit in the stairwell.
(Note: strictly speaking, this is a continuity error. The stairwell shootout precedes the hallway fight in the actual movie. It’s weird that director Corin Hardy would insist on this reference to The Raid as hard as he does, if he didn’t expect a viewer familiar with The Raid to notice that.)
Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery are listed as “Created By” in the credits of each episode of Gangs of London’s Season 2, but at this point they had no direct involvement in the show’s creative process. As far as I know, the only creatives who worked on both The Raid and S2 E8 in an active capacity are composers Arian Prayogi and Fajar Yuskemal. And yet, Gangs of London lays quite a specific claim, here: that it is carrying on the artistic and aesthetic mission of The Raid, and of its Season 1 showrunners, whom that movie catapulted to stardom.
In my ridiculous, dissertation-length account of my thoughts and feelings on The Raid, I contended with Roger Ebert’s one-star excoriation of that movie. Back in 2012, Ebert suggested that the audience for Evans’s film required “no dialogue, no plot, no characters, no humanity.” Speaking on behalf of that audience: I agree about the dialogue, plot, and characters, but I dispute the “humanity” part. In my humble opinion, it’s possible for a story to strategically omit elements like character interiority and multifaceted plotting, and still deliver an empathetic experience.
Now, I’ve never been trapped in a Jakarta apartment block full of armed drug manufacturers who’ve been ordered to kill me; if you’re reading this, chances are neither have you. But if you’ve ever been required to give a public speech, or held the ball in the last ten seconds of a sports game, or played a solo on a musical instrument, then you can relate to the emotional experience The Raid describes on an elemental level. It’s all about the stress of performing when the stakes are high. It’s about rising to the occasion when fight-or-flight instincts kick-in. It’s about knowing that every split-second, microcosmic choice you make could be the difference between success and failure. It’s about the anxious, giddy act of trusting your own reflexes, and hoping they steer you true. Those are all human experiences, and The Raid focuses on them with laser-like precision. By its rhythms, by its performances, and, yes, by the intensity of its violence, it expresses something relatable.
The reason I’m relitigating all this is that I read back my criticisms of Gangs of London, Season 2, and… well, I find myself sidling over to Roger Ebert’s side of the fence. It lays claim to lineage from The Raid, but I think this season of TV is a much better example of genre entertainment that lacks “humanity,” for what I understand the term to mean. There are plenty of set-piece moments in these eight episodes that are well-constructed on their technical merits, and gripping in the moment. But, taking a step back and looking at the big picture, at the wider arc of the story, I’m at a loss for what all that spectacle was meant to express. I don’t require its characters to be paragons of depth, but I need something.
…taking a step back and looking at the big picture, at the wider arc of the story, I’m at a loss for what all that spectacle was meant to express.
S2 E8 necessarily prompts reflection on the season as a whole; being a season finale, its responsibility is to draw all the disparate plot threads together and give them some kind of resolution. In that regard, it’s a pretty limp, hollow episode of TV, one that was obviously made with the conviction that a third season was forthcoming and the can could be kicked further down the road. Scenes that seem like they ought to be climactic reckonings end up being half-measures and pulled punches. Given the precedent this season set in its second episode with Sean’s resurrection, it would have to go to pretty extreme lengths to persuade me that any outcome or consequence these characters face will be permanent going forward.
It doesn’t even try to, really. There’s nothing here remotely as dramatic as Sean getting shot in the face in S1 E9; nothing that the premiere of Season 3 couldn’t walk back right away if it chose to. Sean confronts Marian about her treachery, for instance, and she finally admits to it. He wraps his hands around her throat, but can’t quite bring himself to strangle his mother to death. On his way out the door, he makes it known in no uncertain terms that their relationship is over, but, like, whatever. Considering how readily the characters in this show seem to make and break alliances, at this point disowning a close relative barely registers.
One major character does meet their maker this episode: Koba. With Billy’s arm acting as a grisly ultimatum, Sean and Koba rendezvous and marshall their men to meet Elliot with a show of force.
Or, so Koba is led to believe. En route to the final confrontation, their caravan stops at a roadside service station, where Sean steps inside to buy a couple of burgers for the journey ahead; one for him, one for his Georgian friend. While eating his burger in the back of the car, Koba starts bleeding from the nose and eyes.
There’s an obvious joke to be made here about the quality of the cuisine you can expect from an English petrol station, but no: Sean laced this particular burger with a neurotoxin, making it at least slightly more immediately lethal. Turns out that there was another clause in Elliot’s ultimatum; Sean was to assassinate Koba first, and then come to the real hostage exchange, alone and unarmed. Sean, apparently, is sufficiently dedicated to Billy that he’s willing to come to Elliot on his terms. (I note that this comes just two episodes after Sean delivered Lale to Asif, in order to shore up his own position in the underworld. But Billy is a bridge too far, I guess? If screenwriter Tom Butterworth recognises any opportunity for dramatic irony or contrast, here, he doesn’t take it.)
So, R.I.P. Koba; you were at least consistently entertaining to watch, even if your presence in the story ultimately amounted to very little.
R.I.P. Koba; you were at least consistently entertaining to watch, even if your presence in the story ultimately amounted to very little.
(There *is* one other character death in this episode, that being Hakim. After Koba orders him to execute Saba for her treachery, Saba overpowers him and shoots him instead. R.I.P. Hakim; you were barely in this show. I had to look up your name to remind myself of it.)
The headline event in S2 E8, of course, is Elliot and Sean’s big, long-deferred showdown. Midway through the episode, there’s a curious, diegetic needle-drop; one of the cars carrying Koba’s men is blasting Iron Maiden’s 1984 track “The Duellists” on its stereo. This is, I think, a wry reference by proxy, alluding to Ridley Scott’s 1977 film The Duellists. Elliot and Sean are being likened to Keith Carradine’s d’Hubert and Harvey Keitel’s Feraud; another two men who spend years trying and failing to kill one another, far past the point of reason or sense.
The stand-off, when it arrives, is admittedly pretty cool; not one of the season’s best set-pieces, but choreographed with a sense of precarity and desperation. At the outset, it looks like Elliot has Sean dead to rights; holding Billy at gunpoint, he holds up his hands and lowers himself to his knees; ready, to all appearances, to die for his brother to live.
However, earlier in the episode, Billy managed to filch a screwdriver out of Elliot’s glove compartment and hide it on his person. This is a well-planted plot device, and it’s paid off when Billy shivs Elliot in his side, just as he’s preparing to execute Sean.
On the face of it, it seems kind of absurd that Sean would be a match for Elliot in a physical altercation. Sean has never been involved much in Gangs of London’s actual action scenes. In Season 1 he was presented as a liability whenever he got near any sort of violent conflict. (Ed practically needs to babysit him during the campsite shootout in S1 E2, and in the alleyway battle in S1 E4, his deer-in-headlights vulnerability leads to Mark dying and Elliot almost dying.) Season 2 makes him a bit more of a pro-active, physically competent presence – he did a lot of press-ups in his cell when he was being interrogated by Singer, and his stint as the red-BMW killer obviously tempered him with experience of up-close-and-personal violence.
Even so: Elliot is pretty much this setting’s equivalent of Michael Myers at this point, and to their credit, I think Corin Hardy and Tom Butterworth realised that. Having the fight start with him getting seriously (but not mortally) injured works as a way to level the playing field, Sean tackling him off his feet when he sees a slim chance for both he and Billy to live. It’s an operatic fight, the scrapyard illuminated by variously-coloured lights made diaphanous by the fog. The editing alternates between distant crane shots and intimate close-ups, framing the action with all sorts of dramatic, high-contrast compositions. Cole and Dìrísù both give terrific physical performances, hurling themselves at one another like they both genuinely have murder on their mind.
The upperhand is traded back and forth multiple times throughout the fight. The fact that neither character is sympathetic at this point actually, peculiarly, works in the scene’s favour. The way that the show has framed them, both Sean and Elliot are cruel men who believe in the providence of power, and power alone. So it really does feel like the battle could go either way; Sean could kill Elliot, or Elliot could kill Sean; either outcome would feel legitimate. And there is a moment when Sean looms over a wounded, crawling Elliot, holding a metal fencepost like a spear, that genuinely made me think that the former detective was going to die, for a few seconds.
That’s an exciting, dramatic climax to a season of TV. I wish it corresponded to the season of TV that I just watched.
Then, Elliot lashes out with a length of industrial cable, smashing Sean’s face just as he’s winding up for the killing blow. He wins; Sean loses.
That’s an exciting, dramatic climax to a season of TV. I wish it corresponded to the season of TV that I just watched.
Sean on his knees, whispering “I love you, Billy,” as he prepares to trade his life for his brother’s: in isolation, that’s a great moment. The melodrama is exquisite. But what has Season 2 done to earn it? At what point, in the preceding seven episodes, was Sean’s relationship with his brother ever presented as something at stake?
For that matter: Billy wanted Elliot dead, right? For shooting his brother in the face? That’s the whole reason that he ended his Mediterranean vacation. What happened to that? Did that motivation just dry up and blow away after S2 E2?
And how about Luan? After all the pathos of S2 E4, after being given better reason to hate Koba than anyone else in the cast, he spends the second half of the season on the sidelines, while Koba dies miles away from a terminal case of tainted burger?
How about Singer’s whole operation? That clandestine appendage of Britain’s intelligence network, which apparently evaporated overnight when its boss was assassinated in the middle of busy airport without anyone noticing. By a woman carrying a baby, who we’d never seen before and haven’t seen since.
And, while we’re at it: The Investors??? The greater-scope villains of the whole series, whose machinations set the plot in motion; after S2 E5, apparently they’re yesterday’s news. Koba obliquely suggests that they might bounce back, but as far as the last three episodes of the season are concerned, they’re treated as though they were never relevant.
There’s no other way to say it: Season 2 does a consistently awful job of signifying to the viewer what it considers the important parts of its own story. Trying to find a throughline to hang on to from episode to episode is like trying to hold a fistful of water vapour.
In the end, Elliot chooses not to kill Sean. Oh, he comes close; he winds a cable around Sean’s neck and hoists him off the ground, hanging him from a disused piece of machinery. But, at the last second, Elliot reconsiders. Whether because he can’t stand the guilt from the accusatory stares of his Dad’s ghost, or because he wants Sean to live to suffer the full depth of his defeat, he cuts down his arch-enemy.
The final moments of Season 2 see a new, ad-hoc coalition being formed between the surviving criminal elements of London. There’s a literal, honest-to-God round table. Luan has a chair; so do Ed, and Marian, and Merwan (Lale’s Kurdish colleague). So does Shannon, and Elliot takes a seat next to her. Sean goes to prison for Koba’s murder; the police, alerted by Elliot, find him tied up in the scrapyard next to the Georgian’s dead body.
I don’t derive a single iota of catharsis from this conclusion. I’m left wondering what the significance was, of all this sound and fury. As far as I can tell, I watched a bunch of horrible people screw each other over for eight hours, mostly for spurious and flimsy reasons. A lot of people died extravagant deaths along the way.
As far as I can tell, I watched a bunch of horrible people screw each other over for eight hours, mostly for spurious and flimsy reasons.
Oh! I haven’t even mentioned the most galling part of the final montage. The camera circles Asif, as he gives a speech: “When the world shifts, so must you, or it leaves you behind. London is in my dreams; my shining city on the hill. Yet I find myself an exile. I need a partner, with experience of that wretched goldmine of a city. I need a fellow exile.”
The camera pans and refocuses to reveal the person he’s speaking to: it’s Lale. He offers her a cigarette, and she accepts it.
To reiterate, just so we’re perfectly clear: S2 E8 suggests that Lale is teaming up with Asif. The man who cooked her husband alive, and whose son’s tongue she cut out. A brief history of Lale and Asif’s relationship would read like a summary of Titus Andronicus, as written by a C-minus high school student on uppers. I can think of few characters in all of fiction who are enemies as hard as these two are enemies. If they’re considering an alliance, then Gangs of London really has arrived at a point where nothing means anything.
S2 E8 isn’t a terrible episode of TV when considered in isolation. I accused it of chickening out and backing down from any lasting consequences for its cast of characters, but if I think about it, I’m not sure what consequences would have made this season finale more satisfying. Would I have felt more dramatically fulfilled if Sean had choked Marian to death? Or, in turn, if Elliot had hanged Sean to completion?
Maybe. It’s hard to say. But it’s not as simple as saying I needed more characters to die for this to be a satisfying conclusion. Nor did I need fewer characters to die. It’s more that, I wish the choices of who’s to live and who’s to die felt like they came from characters with consistent motives and values and priorities. Characters whose roles and dynamics aren’t redefined at the drop of a hat. S2 E8 feels hollow and unsatisfying, but that’s only because, as a season finale, The Buck Stops Here. As an episode, it bears the weight of all the accreted, compounded failures of storytelling that precede it.
As an episode, it bears the weight of all the accreted, compounded failures of storytelling that precede it.
Season 1 had a lot of problems, and I’ve talked about them at length, but for all its faults, it was a story with something to hold on to. Sean, Elliot, Marian, Ed, Alex, Shannon, etc… in Season 1, they felt like people, whose competing interests and priorities drove the story. Their actions could reasonably be anticipated, because their needs and wants were persistent and explicable.
Season 2 is something else, on a fundamental, philosophical level. It aspires to be “the most dangerous show on television.” It stacks contrivances atop contrivances. Episode after episode, it manufactures reasons for gore and conflict and gory conflict, however tortuous and artificial those reasons become. If characters behave in ways that seem inconsistent or perverse, it’s no big deal; they’re just marionettes to be posed; action figures to be rearranged ahead of the next action scene.
It lacks – in Roger Ebert’s verbiage – humanity.
At the time of writing (August 2024), a third season of Gangs of London has been filmed and is in post-production. It’s being helmed by a new showrunner, the South Korean director Hong-Seon Kim whose action/horror epic Project Wolf Hunting was a big hit at TIFF 2022. (I didn’t like it, but a lot of people whose tastes I respect did.)
I’m not sure there’s a way back for Gangs of London, to be honest. After a season that’s been so cavalier regarding what it’s about and how it’s about it, I don’t know that there’s a way to right this ship. I don’t see how to make these characters and their dynamics mean something again.
That could be a failure of imagination on my part. There might be a long game I’m not seeing. Rest assured: I will watch Season 3 the day it comes out, and I will be here to report on it when I do.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
Is It Good?
Not Very Good (3/8)
Season 2 overall
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.