Gangs of London
Season 3
Episode 6
The web, and the flies therein
After 62.5% of a season spent teasing out a labyrinthine network of connections and shady dealings between its cast, hinting at a larger agenda lurking beneath the surface of its events, S3 E6 is the episode that Gangs of London lays its cards on the table.
The answers to most – not quite all! – of Season 3’s mysteries are laid bare in this episode, and my reaction to its revelations on this viewing was a resounding “Huh. Yeah, I guess it all fits together.”
Following S3 E5’s parenthetical flashback episode, we rejoin the main cast in the present tense. Elliot has been taken captive by Zeek following his ambushing at the end of S3 E4. He wakes up with a sack-cloth secured over his head, his wrists duct-taped to a section of guardrail, and presumably incredibly cramped legs, in what looks to be a disused school building. (There apparently exists no shortage of derelict, abandoned structures in London that characters can use at a moment’s notice to hide, take hostages, or fight to the death. Seems unlikely to me, but then, I live in a village with a population of ~700, about as far from London as it’s possible to get on mainland Britain. I can’t really talk to this detail’s veracity.)
There apparently exists no shortage of derelict, abandoned structures in London that characters can use at a moment’s notice…
Meanwhile, Ed, Shannon, Faz and Saba break into Elliot’s Dad’s flat, where Elliot told Shannon he was headed when they last parted. Inside, they discover the cache of Belgian beer kegs that Zeek planted; on its face, a pretty damning indictment that Elliot was complicit in the fentanyl spiking. Ed doesn’t waste any time arriving at a judgement. “We never should have trusted him,” declares the Dumani patriarch. “I want him found, and I want him killed.” Harsh, but for a crime boss dealing with a new associate known to have once been an undercover cop, not unreasonable.
Or, so one might think, until the following scene, which finds Asif arriving at a secluded rendezvous under a bridge, with none other than… Ed Dumani (shown shaking hands with Asif in a sinister, low, canted-angle shot, no less). Meanwhile, Shannon shows up where Elliot is being held hostage, and meets Zeek as though he’s an old business associate. “I’ve been trying to call you,” he says to her.
“Where is he?” she replies.
Skipping ahead a little: later in the episode, Asif has another rendezvous; this time on the bank of the Thames in broad daylight, with Henry, aide-de-camp to the Mayor of London. They shake hands like old buddies. “You were always a loyal friend to Nasir,” Asif tells him, “and now to me, too.”
For anyone who’s following along with these recaps, and who might be (understandably) lost at this point, I’ll try to break it down:
1: Henry is manipulating Simone into enacting drug legalisation in London.
2: Supposedly, drug legalisation will win public and political support off the back of the fentanyl poisonings from the product moved into the city by the gangs.
3: The fentanyl spiking was facilitated by a covert partnership between Ed and Asif, both of whom stand to profit if drugs are legalised. Shannon is in on it, and, by extension, so is Zeek.
4: The poisonings were achieved by Lale’s coercement, Asif holding her baby hostage.
5: Ed and Asif initially redirected suspicion towards Sean, Billy and Cornelius as the perpetrators. Now that Sean’s out of the picture, they’re framing Elliot in the same way. It’s a two-tier framing.
All of this is, honestly, quite clever, for a certain value of “clever.” A set of secondary characters who appeared to be separately pursuing their own agendas and objectives are revealed to be collaborating on a larger mission; it makes you reinterpret the season up to this point, feeling like your brain’s been rewired to see things in this new light. That’s not not an aesthetic pleasure.
All of this is, honestly, quite clever, for a certain value of “clever.”
As twisty and ingenious as the plot mechanics might be, however, they’re not particularly satisfying at the level of character and theme. In particular, for Shannon and Elliot’s relationship to have terminated at this betrayal just falls flat. I’ve said multiple times over that I’m not particularly invested in Shannon and Elliot’s relationship, but it’s disappointing that the writers apparently agree with me; she colludes with Ed in his machinations to frame and murder Elliot, and aside from Pippa Bennett-Warner giving the camera a couple of pained expressions, she doesn’t meaningfully experience any self-doubt or inner-conflict about it. In this episode, she enthusiastically presses Zeek to kill Elliot; at one point shoots Elliot in the shoulder herself; and the episode ends with him fleeing from her together with Lale, while she takes potshots at their car with a shotgun (in the middle of a suburban street, in the middle of the day). The notion that she ever felt any authentic affection for Elliot is effectively discarded, and that just feels like leaving opportunities for juicy drama on the table.
I feel similarly about the scene later in the episode, in which Billy spitefully shoots and kills Faz, after trying to torture Elliot’s location out of him. Here, yet again, is a sympathetic character introduced in a previous season, whose arc the writers couldn’t figure out how to integrate into the larger story, so he’s just killed off for shock value, his whole onscreen existence a non-starter. (I guess Saba will want – sigh – revenge next season, or something.)
I’m also dubious about the idea that the mass deaths caused by a fentanyl spiking are likely to galvanise support for drug legalisation. I understand the rationale of it, from a policymaking perspective. The public harms involved with drugs often have more to do with the illicit channels of distribution and consumption than with the risks inherent to the substances themselves; legal, regulated, taxable channels for drug use have the potential to choke the supply chains of illicit channels and offer a net improvement to public health.
But I don’t think the emotional logic of it tracks. By Simone’s accounting in S3 E3, over 600 people died in in one night, with many more survivors surviving debilitating brain damage. That’s a tragedy on the sort of scale that traumatises a nation; if it happened in real life, the UK would commemorate it the way the US does 9/11. There’s never really been a big groundswell of support in the UK for drug legalisation, or decriminalisation (as in the Netherlands, or Portugal) – even cannabis remains wholly illegal. The idea that, just days after the country was scarred by drug-related deaths, the Mayor of London would publically call for all drugs to be made legal seems epochally tone-deaf; political career suicide of an order that would make Liz Truss’s head spin.
All of which is to say; the scenes where Simone and Henry dig into the specifics of their proposal to Downing Street play like first-draft ideas for a story about drug legalisation, rather than the finished product. I realise that Gangs of London takes place in a heightened, comic-book space, somewhere resemblant but adjacent to our world, and that addressing the nuances of real UK politics probably isn’t a fruitful avenue for criticism. But the simplistic, A-to-B logic of Henry’s plan doesn’t suggest stylisation, so much as writers who just haven’t thought about this plotline very hard.
Elliot manages to break free from his bonds, and, while still blinded by the sack over his head, stabs Shannon through the foot after she shoots him. She flees (remarkably spryly, it must be said), and leaves Elliot to grapple with Zeek.
…the simplistic, A-to-B logic of Henry’s plan doesn’t suggest stylisation, so much as writers who just haven’t thought about this plotline very hard.
The Elliot/Zeek brawl is the highlight of the episode; a dirty, scrappy, one-on-one, no-holds-barred fight of the sort that Gangs of London hasn’t done in a while. I criticised Tessa Hoffe’s handling of the action scenes in the last episode, but this one lands: I imagine having Andrew Koji on set probably facilitated the execution of a fight scene that doesn’t rely on jittery, disorienting jump-cuts. (If you’re not familiar with his work: Andrew Koji is the star of Cinemax’s period action-drama Warrior, and probably the most experienced martial-artist and TV screenfighter ever to work on Gangs of London.)
It’s a brutal, ugly duel, with one particularly harrowing beat when Elliot wrenches a wooden plank out of the wall and gouges a chunk out of Zeek’s calf with its embedded nails. Eventually, though, Elliot hesitates too much – he tries to interrogate Zeek for the reason he killed his family, which gives Zeek the opening he needs to regain the advantage. He bullrushes Elliot through a wall, and then, in a beat that got a shout out of me, throws him to the ground with such force that Elliot crashes through the floor to the storey beneath.
Elliot crawls out to the overgrown playground outside the building on hands and knees; Zeek starts to choke the life out of him with the chain of a children’s swing. Just when it looks like Elliot’s number is up, Zeek relents. “I didn’t know your boy was going to be in the car,” he mutters, his beaten opponent gasping and wheezing on the ground. “I just did what I was paid to do. They were both still alive when I left.”
The killer, it appears, has something resembling a conscience. Koji’s dark fringe of hair flutters across the dour expression beneath his hood, his voice low and husky. Serious emo bad-boy vibes. “I’m supposed to kill you, but I’m not going to. Make sure you remember that.”
Zeek is still an intriguing wild-card; what he’s after, and why, remain compelling questions as we head towards the season finale.
It’s an episode that makes me reflect on previous Gangs of London episodes, and wonder if it always looked quite so drab.
For S3 E6, I stand by what I said in S3 E5 about the blandness of Tessa Hoffe’s direction; most of this episode takes place in eye-level medium shots, flatly lit and with a colour scheme of beige and eggshell-white. It’s an episode that makes me reflect on previous Gangs of London episodes, and wonder if it always looked quite so drab. Excepting the jolt provided by Elliot’s fight with Zeek, it feels like such a perfunctory episode of TV, indifferently staged, dumping the season’s revelations out for the viewer to rummage through without fanfare or panache.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
- Review Series: Gangs of London
Is It Good?
Not Very Good (3/8)
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.