Series: Gangs of London

In the spring of 2020, in the early days of the COVID pandemic and following the wet thud that was the ending of Game of Thrones, audiences were craving something to fill that niche in the landscape of Peak TV.

After Apostle – an offbeat, ambitious stab at a folk horror movie from a writer-director working in his own country and language for the first time in over a decade – released on Netflix in 2018 to solid-but-not-stellar reception, it wasn’t at all clear what Gareth Evans would do next.

Something that sets Gangs of London apart as a TV production is the pedigree of the directors brought in to work on it.

“Gangs of London” is quite a freighted title to give to a piece of media.

Something that tends to get buried in the discussions I’ve heard around Gangs of London is that it’s a videogame adaptation.

Episode 4 of Gangs of London ended on a heck of a cliffhanger, with Elliot bleeding out on the Wallaces’ dining table, while an assassin embedded in the wait staff (Laura Sofia Bach) almost succeeds in gunning down Sean in his own home.

After the apocalyptic farmhouse siege sequence that closed out Gangs of London’s fifth, parenthetical episode, the first question on everyone’s lips was: how the hell can the show possibly top that in the four episodes left in the season?

The last time I watched Gangs of London’s first season all the way through was in the spring of 2020, fully four years ago now, but my memory of the show up to this point has, I think, been pretty sharp.

There’s a scene early in Episode 8 of Gangs of London which finds Sean Wallace at his lowest ebb.

I have my bones to pick with the way that Gangs of London’s first season wraps up – quite a few of them, honestly – but I also don’t want to come out of the gate sounding too negative.