Gangs of London
Season 3
Episode 5
Cradle and all
Probably my single biggest objection to the finale of Gangs of London Season 2 was the way Lale’s plotline was handled.
After seeing her at the end of S2 E6, betrayed by Sean and dragged screaming by her hair back into Asif’s torture dungeon, we didn’t see her for most of two episodes. It was implied that she’d met some unutterable fate offscreen, until in the final minutes of S2 E8, we found her alive and (apparently) well, listening impassively while Asif proposed a partnership between them. The scene’s clear implication was that these two arch enemies were preparing to join forces against Sean; Asif, for the expediency of business; Lale, for the spite of a woman scorned.
I hated that scene, and with the release of Season 3, I feel vindicated: there were creative staff behind the scenes who also hated it. Specifically, executive producer Vikki Tennant, who the linked Radio Times article notes was “opposed to including the scene, feeling that reconciliation between Lale and Asif would not be “truthful” to either character.”
The article continues, noting that Tennant and lead writer Peter McKenna made it their “top priority” to “write [themselves] out of this corner.” Season 3’s authors looked at the dreadful way Lale had been flattened and undermined as a character by Season 2’s ending, and treated it as a kind of writers-workshop prompt. How best could they join these dots, in a way that made sense?
After half a season of buildup, S3 E5 finally attends to that question head on. Following the cliffhanger that closed out S3 E4 – Elliot held at gunpoint by Zeek – we flash back to eight weeks earlier. An empty, nondescript office building in the outskirts of London flares to life; abandoned Christmas decorations start blasting Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” as Lale stumbles past the cubicles into the stairwell. Clutching a pistol, she climbs one flight before she has to rest, panting, leaning against the railing. She turns, and slowly reveals to the camera: a heavy, pregnant belly.
We flash back seven months further still, to the immediate aftermath of S2 E6. Asif’s minions hold her down on a sheet of plastic wrap, saving the expensive rug from the bloodletting to follow.
“I’m pregnant!” she cries, playing her trump card.
“I don’t give a fuck!” Asif snarls, holding a knife to her lips, preparing to cut out her tongue the way she did to Nasir.
“It’s Sean’s!”
Now, that gives Asif pause. With the Investors in retreat, his business concerns in London have become tenuous. Lale’s child could be a very handy little hostage in negotiations with Marian – provided she survives long enough to deliver it. She’s managed to win an eight-month stay of execution.
She waits out the prenatal period as a prisoner in Pakistan, cared for in Asif’s Lahore mansion by Ayesha (Rina Mahoney), a kindly nurse. Ayesha admonishes Lale for smoking during her third trimester, which she responds to disdainfully. She openly doesn’t give a shit about the baby’s prospective welfare; she regards the new life growing inside her in terms just as ruthless and mercenary as Asif does.
[Lale] regards the new life growing inside her in terms just as ruthless and mercenary as Asif does.
Marian arrives in Lahore to inspect the merchandise, as it were; if she’s going to enter into a business relationship with Asif in exchange for her grandson’s life, she wants assurances that it definitely has Wallace blood, and that it’s being well looked-after. Lale tries a gambit to get Marian to take her back with her to London; using her room’s furnishings, she surreptitiously cuts and bruises her own arms. She presents her ligature marks to Marian as evidence that she’s being mistreated in Pakistan.
Not a bad plan, honestly, and it almost works. Marian informs Asif that the deal’s off if Lale doesn’t return with her for the baby’s birth, and in this instance, she’s the one holding all the cards. For all of Asif’s rage and anguish at letting his chance at revenge slip through his fingers, he’s a businessman at heart. After a little nudging from Ayesha, he grudgingly accedes.
BUT THEN.
Just as Lale’s preparing to get on the plane with Marian, Asif takes a phone call. We don’t hear the voice on the other end of the conversation, but whatever it’s saying, it puts Asif’s smug, cat-digesting-a-canary grin right back on his face. He has Lale confined to her room once again, and lies to Marian that her grandson died from complications with the pregnancy.
Some mysterious client has made him a better offer than he was getting from Marian. Now, Lale’s baby has become valuable in a new way. With her connections in London, Lale has ways to circumvent the border controls that are hampering Asif’s operations in the British capital, and he has a very precious piece of cargo that he wants moved, in exchange for her child’s safety. (It’s not made explicit, but it’s obvious from context that this very important cargo is the fentanyl-tainted cocaine.)
Lale scoffs. “You can take this baby and drown it in the fucking river.”
“You say that,” Asif answers, “but you cannot control the love you have for your child. Believe me. It controls you. When you will hold it for the first time in your arms, you will feel that power. And I’m confident you will do anything to keep him alive.”
“You’re wrong.”
“We’ll see.”
Yes: indeed we will. Because when they return together to London, at her first opportunity, Lale stabs Asif’s driver in the face with a broken bottle and flees into the city, just as her water breaks. She holes up in an abandoned office building while Asif’s henchmen give chase, and here, at last, 23 minutes into a 46-minute episode, we catch up to the framing device.
At this point, I think Sky Atlantic and Pulse Films are well aware of the long shadow that S1 E5 casts over everything Gangs of London has done since. It is, by a wide margin, the show’s most beloved and most talked-about episode. At time of writing, it has a score of 9.2 on IMDb. (For comparison, the second-highest rated episode is S1 E1, with an 8.5.) I’ve seen countless comment sections on YouTube and Reddit where Gangs of London will be recommended with the sentiment: “bro, just wait till you see the episode with the farmhouse siege.”
I think Sky Atlantic and Pulse Films are well aware of the long shadow that S1 E5 casts over everything Gangs of London has done since.
S3 E5 seems like a very conscious attempt to replicate the magic that Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery summoned with their TV magnum opus back in 2020. Much like S1 E5, it’s a parenthetical story, set chronologically before the episodes either side of it, taking time out from the broader drama to focus on an isolated subset of the core cast. Much like S1 E5, its conflict is tangential to the rest of the show and largely self-contained, while also shedding light on some of the season’s larger mysteries. Much like S1 E5, it begins with half an episode of considered buildup, followed by half an episode of explosive, cathartic action, with a scrappy, resourceful protagonist mounting an astonishingly heroic defense against overwhelming odds.
And yet, at time of writing (April 21st, 2025), S3 E5 is actually the lowest rated episode of Gangs of London on IMDb, with a score of 6.4. (Poetically, the second-lowest is S2 E8 with a 7.1, so S3 E5 is at the bottom by exactly the same 0.7-point margin that S1 E5 is at the top.)
…throughout its runtime, I had a nagging sense that I should have been more excited than I actually was.
I think that’s a bit harsh – this isn’t Gang’s of London’s worst episode, not by a long shot. But throughout its runtime, I had a nagging sense that I should have been more excited than I actually was. On paper, I ought to be loving this. It focuses on my favourite character in the series. It causes a bunch of Season 3’s lingering questions to click into place. It’s structurally ambitious, and conceptually audacious, with a killer USP: a woman has to fend off multiple armed attackers while she’s actively in the process of giving birth. In all the thousands and thousands of hours of action movies and TV I’ve seen, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever encountered that before.
So, what gives? What isn’t working here, exactly? Unfortunately, I think the answer to that question is a boring one: from moment to moment and shot to shot, S3 E5 isn’t directed very well.
This is the first of two episodes helmed by Tessa Hoffe, a veteran of British television who’s spent decades at the coal-face of UK soap operas. (She’s credited with over 50 episodes of Coronation Street, and over 100 episodes of Hollyoaks. A run of Hollyoaks episodes she directed starting in 2012 also have – drum roll, please – Vikki Tennant credited as “storyliner.”)
Now, far be it from me to disparage her skills as a director: anyone who’s directed a hundred episodes of anything clearly knows their way around a set, and can wrangle an hour of presentable footage out of a cast and crew working to daily deadlines. I couldn’t do that, and you, reading this, probably couldn’t do that either. Hell, there are Oscar-winning filmmakers I doubt could do that.
But I’m not convinced that the skills involved in making Hollyoaks necessarily transfer to making something like Gangs of London, a prestige show with an emphasis on action and visual showmanship.
There’s a cynical part of me that wonders if Pulse Films assigned this episode to Hoffe, with its themes of motherhood and childbirth, specifically because she’s the lone woman in this season’s stable of directors. (It’s not lost on me that, where S3 E4 was focused on Sean Wallace’s death, S3 E5 is focused on the birth of his child; here in the middle of the season, they form a kind of thematic diptych.) In case anyone’s interested, I checked, and yes: Tessa Hoffe is herself a mother. And, indeed, the most successful elements of S3 E5 are the ones that unflinchingly present pregnancy as a visceral, corporeal experience. Most notably, there’s a sequence where Lale, after having given birth, bites through her umbilical cord, and then uses it as a weapon to strangle one of her assailants to death, the placenta still swinging from the end like a pendulum.
…the most successful elements of S3 E5 are the ones that unflinchingly present pregnancy as a visceral, corporeal experience.
Again: on paper, that’s fucking amazing, the strength of the bonds associated with motherhood being literalised and instrumentalised in the most gruesome way imaginable. Lale, the ruthless, unhesitant soldier becomes aligned with Lale, the caring, principled woman, by virtue of the bloody, messy, painful process of giving birth. The emerging emotional connection to her newborn is reified by the physical connection; here’s a being with whom she shares tissue and sinew and plasma.
Someone smarter than me could write a thesis about the imagery in this episode. So, it’s a shame that as action, it’s kind of crap. The choreography is ponderous and clunky, lacking the intuition for the rhythms of anticipation and release animating good action design. Beats that ought to be building tension feel more like waiting for something to happen, and when the flare-ups of violence do arrive, they’re edited with the kind of choppy, disorienting, late-2000’s cutting that doesn’t belong anywhere near a project with Gareth Evans’s name attached to it.
The umbilical cord set-piece is a good case study: after temporarily giving her pursuers the slip, Lale finds an empty room; sits down; shushes her child; methodically ties off the umbilical cord; severs it; extracts the placenta and places it to one side; quiets her baby when it starts crying by suckling it. All in, this takes more than 3 minutes of unbroken screentime (roughly from the 33- to 36-minute mark in this 46-minute episode). The score is subdued; Narges Rashidi’s body language is unhurried, weirdly lacking in urgency. Right when it ought to be reaching a crescendo, it’s like the episode forgot its heroine is being actively pursued by armed gunmen for three solid minutes.
When Asif’s henchmen finally are alerted to her location by the baby’s cries, the peculiarly low energy persists. A single gunman slowly steps into the wide open conference room, and advances towards Lale’s hiding place. (We’re now at minute 38.) He moves at a brisk-ish walk, holding his pistol at waist level. He doesn’t call for backup. His expression is impassive, and he doesn’t make much of an effort to check blind corners or angles for a potential ambush. He seems oddly unwary, considering that Lale shot one of his colleagues to death just minutes earlier. Frankly, when Lale lunges at him from out of a cubicle and smashes a laptop over his head, he has no-one to blame but himself. The umbilical cord strangulation, when it happens, lasts only a few indifferently-framed seconds, and doesn’t even look like it takes Lale much effort.
S3 E5 is like that; a terrific concept, but badly fumbled in the specifics. The scenes in the first half of the episode suffer from this, too. One of Gangs of London’s great strengths, even at its lowest ebb, has always been its locations. It presents its titular city as a vibrant, dynamic ecosystem. In any given episode, we might find ourselves in a seedy pub, or a high-rise boardroom, or a doss-house, or a riverside fishmarket, and they all occur as parts of a single, great, seething, multifaceted, urban organism. Regardless of what contrived drama the show attends to, the setting for that drama always feels vibrant and specific.
So, it’s dispiriting to spend the first half of S3 E5 in Lahore, when it’s obvious that the production never once got within four-thousand miles of Pakistan. The dynamics between Marian, Lale and Asif feel uncommonly stagebound – and, frankly, drab – for this show.
S3 E5 is like that; a terrific concept, but badly fumbled in the specifics.
The same is true of the anonymous office building where Lale makes her last stand. It’s such an anodyne, flatly-lit space, lacking any of the kind of atmosphere of the last location where we saw Lale go on a rampage. (Remember all those dramatic shadows and primary-coloured light sources in S2 E6?) If I could change just one thing about this episode, I think it would be immeasurably improved if the action in the back half was set at night, rather than the bland, overcast English daytime that could be morning, afternoon or evening.
I get the impression that Pulse Films wanted to pay tribute to Die Hard, with the ironic detail of jolly Christmas decorations, juxtaposed against the ultraviolence committed around them. I mean, it’s always ill-advised to set yourself up to be compared to Die Hard, a perfect film, but S3 E5 is just asking for it with the sequence where Lale crawls through some kind of ambiguous, liminal space above the ceiling tiles to evade her captors.
You know what Die Hard has a lot of? Dialogue. There’s a walkie-talkie
repartee throughout between John McClane and Hans Gruber that imbues the action with personality and flair. Pretty much the whole back-half of S3 E5 is dialogue-free, save for grunts of exertion. The henchmen dispatched to retrieve Lale are all anonymous nobodies. Asif effectively disappears for twenty minutes; was there really no scope to have some kind of conversation between Lale and her worst enemy during her last stand, rather than have her just be a screaming, stabbing automaton?
The episode’s resolution actually works very well, and even flirts with poignancy. In the midst of a fight that sees Lale kill several men, one of them manages to grab her baby and escape down to the building’s lobby while she’s still busy with his associates. She gives chase, but is greeted in the lobby by Asif, Ayesha, and several more bodyguards holding her at gunpoint. Ayesha clutches her baby protectively to her breast.
Lale aims her gun at her own child, visibly anguished. “What life is this going to be for my child, huh? A hostage forever?” She sneers at Ayesha, but it’s obvious that she’s trying to talk herself into doing something she’s not prepared to do. Shots ring out, and Ayesha flinches away, but she and the baby are unharmed. Lale emptied her pistol’s clip into the ceiling; Asif called her bluff, and she blinked. As it turns out, he was right: you really can’t control the love you feel for your child.
The episode’s resolution actually works very well, and even flirts with poignancy.
They leave Lale alone in the lobby, sobbing, exhausted, caked in sweat and blood, and defeated. She’ll be their catspaw; Asif, and whatever mysterious client is also pulling Zeek’s strings.
It’s a forceful, dramatic image to see Lale reduced to this, and I wish that the episode leading up to it had been a more effective genre exercise. The brutal truth is that I come to Gangs of London for its spectacle first, and I think that’s true of most of the show’s viewership – certainly the people casting votes on IMDb, at any rate. That’s what it promises to its audience, and why we keep coming back to it, despite seeing the plot and characters subjected to one risible decision after another. If the spectacle doesn’t land, then the whole mechanism shudders to a halt, regardless of what else it might be doing well.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
- Review Series: Gangs of London
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
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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.