Gangs of London
Season 3
Episode 1
And, we’re back!
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.
Season 3 of Gangs of London has this going for it, right out of the gate: this is a terrifically strong inciting incident.
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…
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
Much like a nightclub, a carnival is a good setting to situate the intoxicating excesses of Gangs of London’s action.
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.
After two seasons, the dynamic between Cole and Dìrísù feels lived-in.
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.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
- Review Series: Gangs of London
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.