“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
–W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919

“Well, I’m going to be a famous jazz musician. I’ve got it all figured out. I’ll be unappreciated in my own country, but my gutsy blues stylings will electrify the French. I’ll avoid the horrors of drug abuse, but I do plan to have several torrid love affairs, and I may or may not die young. I haven’t decided.”
–Lisa Simpson, “Separate Vocations,” 1992

In 2016, London-based photographer and sculptor Jason Shulman undertook an experimental project that would go on to be exhibited at the Cob Gallery under the title “Photographs of Films.” The premise of the series was simple: Shulman would set up a camera in front of a film as it played and capture its entire runtime (minus titles and credits) as a single, long exposure photograph. The hundreds of thousands of individual frames that make up a feature-length movie were, in effect, superimposed and pressed together to create a single impressionistic image.

The pictures Shulman derived from his chosen subjects are striking; catnip for anyone who’s interested in cinema for its abstract qualities of composition and framing. (Some of my favourites include his 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the phantoms of Douglas Trumbull’s production design are discernible through Kubrick’s glacial long-takes, or his Under the Skin, which derives from Glazer’s movie the haunting image of one dark figure looming over another’s supine body.)

I bring this up because – to the best of my knowledge – Schulman has never used a Nicolas Winding Refn movie as a subject, and I bet if he ever did, the results would be spectacular.

Well, one of his late-stage movies, at any rate. Winding Refn’s career has charted a long course to get to where it is today, where he occupies a niche at the intersection of arthouse and grindhouse. He’s a unique specimen of provocateur, puckishly courting controversy while demonstrating a fearsome command of the frame. He makes exploitation movies that look like spreads in glossy lifestyle magazines, his shots so freighted with potent imagery that they tempt the unsuspecting viewer to dive in, searching for meaning, and drown.

Born in Copenhagen in 1970, he was raised in a family steeped in the tradition of cinema. (His mother Vibeke Winding has worked as a cinematographer as far back as the late 60’s, and his father Anders Refn is blue-linked on Wikipedia; he has an incredibly robust résumé as an editor spanning seven decades, which includes a fruitful partnership with Lars von Trier.)

By dint of his upbringing, perhaps it was inevitable that Nicolas Winding Refn would work in movies, but it wasn’t inevitable that his career would chart the course that it did. He got his start directing Pusher in 1996, a crime movie focusing on the lives of low-level Copenhagen reprobates, shot with vérité intensity and written with a lot of vulgar, rapid-fire, button-pushing dialogue exchanged between its lowlife protagonists (including a star-making debut from Mads Mikkelsen, as the skinheaded delinquent Tonny). It’s full of piss and vinegar and kinetic energy, relishing in the sordid and the transgressive; a Danish entry in that early, 1990s wave of Tarantino-likes (see also: Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run, Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels, etc.). It’s visibly the work of a snotty, disillusioned twenty-something who, according to Wikipedia, “attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but was expelled for allegedly throwing a chair into a wall.”

Pusher was a local hit when it came out, but Winding Refn struggled to consolidate its momentum right away. His sophomore outing, the 1999 drama Bleeder, languishes in obscurity to this day (to the extent that it’s even quite hard to find). His first English-language feature, 2003’s Fear X (co-scripted with American novelist Hubert Selby Jr., one of the writer’s last works before he passed away in 2004), was a commercial catastrophe that almost destroyed his career, bankrupting his production company Jang Go Star and leaving him in debt to the tune of a million dollars while his wife was pregnant with their first child. There was even a documentary about it: 2006’s Gambler, directed by Phie Ambo.

This is a real shame, not least because Fear X is actually a really good movie, unappreciated in its time. John Turturro gives a harrowing performance as a small-town Wisconsin mall cop hunting for clues to the reason for his pregnant wife’s murder. The unbearably cold-looking scenes set in a midwestern midwinter are complemented by the austere, frigid quality of the camera movement, and the acting, and the dialogue. It presents a universe where every emotion is guarded and reticent. And then there’s the ending: a weird, anti-cathartic non-conclusion, suggesting that the search for meaning is fruitless.

Fear X is the earliest glimpse of the filmmaker that Winding Refn would grow into.

In time, NWR would claw his way back out of financial ruin. The process involved making two sequels to Pusher, a proposition that initially repulsed him, despite how well-received Pusher II and Pusher III ended up being (as well as a couple of episodes of Agatha Christie’s Marple for the BBC, of all things). He went on to make Bronson, a blackly comedic biopic of legendarily violent prisoner Michael Peterson that put Tom Hardy on the radar of a lot of casting directors, and Valhalla Rising, a bleak, mud-spattered, Viking-era riff on Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

It was 2011’s Drive, though, that really put him on the map as a major international talent, earning him the Best Director award from Cannes, followed by a nod from the Academy Awards for Best Sound Editing, and grossing $79 million against a $15 million budget. It was an enduring cult hit, a pivotal moment in star Ryan Gosling’s career, and arguably the cultural watershed that popularised synthwave as a music genre in the 2010s. Adapted from James Sallis’s 2005 novel of the same name, Gosling plays an anonymous stuntman with a side-hustle as a getaway driver for L.A.’s criminal element, whose romantic infatuation with his neighbour (Carey Mulligan) is complicated when her debt-laden husband (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison.

Drive’s story is a solid, pared-down neo-noir – tense and twisty, with a surprisingly warm romantic streak – but it was the style that caught audiences’ attention far more than the substance. You only need to see the first few seconds of the movie to recognise why it got the Best Director nod that year, beating out other In Competition offerings from the likes of Lynne Ramsay, Pedro Almodóvar, and Terence Malick (whose The Tree of Life won the that year’s Palme D’Or). It was with his eighth feature that Winding Refn established himself as the world’s foremost living director of surfaces; of streetlights reflected in car windscreens; of the scintillations of neons signs through motel windows; of the minutest flickers of Gosling’s eyes in the actor’s impassive, porcelain face. Winding Refn curated his frame with a meticulous, Wes-Andersonian attention to detail.

Practically every shot in Drive gives the viewer something to keep their eyes busy; nodes of light and colour forming patterns that wash across the frame like an impressionist’s canvas. Silky-smooth dolly shots and ultra-high-frame-rate slow-motion punctuate beats of extreme violence, giving them a composed, dreamlike quality outside of time. I was going to describe the way that Winding Refn poses his actors as “painterly,” but truthfully, the medium that feels closer to the mark is sculpture. The stillness of the performers in Winding Refn’s frame is always in tension with the nature of film as a temporal medium; for seconds at a time, his actors stand, impeccably frozen, and their capacity to move is braced against the fact that they don’t.

Drive is perhaps the most accessible instance of NWR’s house style; the movie struck just the right balance between his formal tics and a straightforward, compelling bit of genre fiction that global audiences could get on board with. (And, look, I think global audiences were right to do so. Drive is hands-down NWR’s best feature; I personally think it’s a masterpiece.) And he was presented with opportunities to parlay Drive’s success into mainstream, A-list status, being approached to direct a Barbarella remake, Wonder Woman, and even the James Bond entry Spectre. He turned down those shots at big-budget fame and fortune (admirably, in my opinion) and focused instead on developing his own original projects.

2013’s Only God Forgives and 2016’s The Neon Demon both doubled down on the kind of fussy, curated framing that Drive introduced to the world, in the absence of the 2011 movie’s relatable characters and propulsive plotting. Box-office and critical responses ranged from indifferent to repulsed, but Winding Refn seemed undeterred. He’d found his voice as a filmmaker, at last, and he pursued it with absolute confidence and self-assurance.

Which leads us, at last, to the nominal subject of this article: Too Old to Die Young, the limited series he directed for Amazon Prime, released on June 14th, 2019.

If you’re wondering what all that preamble was for: well, dear reader, I marathoned all of Nicolas Winding Refn’s works in order in July of 2025, and arriving at Too Old to Die Young, I had the distinct impression that everything NWR had done in the first quarter-century of his career, prior to 2019, was a warm-up for this show that Amazon buried and no-one saw. I binge-watched all thirteen hours of the series in the course of a week, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. If one were to collapse all ten of his films together, Shulman-like, starting from 1996’s Pusher and ending with 2016’s The Neon Demon, they would reach critical mass, achieve runaway nuclear fusion, and the resultant city-levelling explosion would be Too Old to Die Young.

The pitch for the show makes it sound fairly straightforward. NWR co-wrote the story with Ed Brubaker, the multi-Eisner Award-winning comic book author. (He has multiple acclaimed, noir-themed graphic novels under his belt, but Brubaker is probably best known as the writer who reintroduced Bucky Barnes – Captain America’s original sidekick from the 1940’s – as the Winter Soldier in his 2005 – 2009 run working for Marvel.) Miles Teller, still in the afterglow of his terrific performance in 2014’s Whiplash, would play the lead role.

In a bullish streaming market, it’s easy to imagine what Amazon thought they were commissioning: a prestige, slick, stylish, LA-set neo-noir with lots of sex and violence and sexy violence, with a hot young leading man, a writer indirectly responsible for one of the most successful appendages of the MCU, and a director who inaugurated a whole decade of LA retro-chic. What could go wrong?

Well: about that…

Teller plays Martin Jones, a junior LAPD officer who we’re introduced to while on patrol with his partner, Larry (Lance Gross). In the course of their evening, Martin listens without comment while Larry muses aloud about his plans to cover up his extramarital affair by murdering his mistress, and conspicuously fails to intervene when Larry intimidates and extorts a woman he pulls over on a traffic stop. This appears to be a pretty ordinary night for both of them, right up until the moment Larry is unceremoniously shot to death by Jesus Rojas (Augusto Aguilera) on the sidewalk, while taking a selfie to send to his side piece/intended victim. Martin fires after the assassin, but Jesus gets away.

(Note: the character’s name is spelled “Jesus”, not “Jesús”, as gringos like me might expect it to be. In paragraphs to follow, when you encounter sentences like, say, “Jesus’s wife makes him up to look like his dead mother and sodomises him with the handle of a bullwhip,” you’re just going to have to trust me that I’m not blaspheming on purpose.)

Larry’s slaying, it transpires, was an act of revenge; Jesus killed the cop who he thought was responsible for the death of his mother. However, he got the wrong cop; Martin was the one who actually killed his Mum, during a job he and Larry carried out together on the orders of local mob boss Damian (Babs Olusanmokun).

Martin, consequently, is locked into Damian’s employ as a hitman; a situation complicated still further by his relationship with Janey (Nell Tiger Free), the 17-year-old he counselled when he was the first responding officer after the death of her mother in a traffic accident.

Episode 1 of Too Old to Die Young, titled The Devil, through the entirety of its lugubrious 93 minutes, presents Miles Teller’s character as an ephebophile, as a corrupt cop, as an unrepentant murderer, and as a robotic, unsympathetic dork with no social graces whatsoever. He also has a habit of spitting, as a way to punctuate breaks in conversation.

A large swath of this first episode is given to Martin meeting Theo (William Baldwin), Janey’s sleazy, immensely wealthy father with his own off-putting, phlegm-related habit: he’s constantly sniffling and snorting, never quite comfortable with whatever’s going on in his nose. (There’s a fairly intuitive reason for why the character’s septum might be damaged.) The scenes set in Theo’s house – which include Janey’s bedroom, every inch a girl’s room, full of stuffed animals – play out like the kind of awkward meeting with a father-in-law you might see in a sitcom.

It’s hard to say what’s more upsetting; that Too Old to Die Young’s main character is in a sexually active relationship with a teenager, barely half his age, or that said teenager’s dad is apparently OK with this state of affairs.

That’s all in the first episode, and if you can believe it, The Devil is the closest that Too Old to Die Young ever gets to feeling like a “normal” piece of crime fiction.

The bulk of the show’s narrative is split between Martin’s story and Jesus’s. As it transpires, Larry’s assassination was an initiation of sorts for Jesus. He was raised north of the border by his mother, Magdalena (Carlotta Montanari); at the beginning of the show, he only speaks very shaky Spanish. His maternal uncle, the terminally ill cartel boss Don Ricardo (Emiliano Díez) doted fiercely on his sister, and rewards Jesus by taking him into his own family as a surrogate son.

Episode 2 (titled The Lovers) is set mostly within the confines of Ricardo’s compound in Mexico, the Don’s health slowly failing, regaling his family with long, slurred anecdotes of his cherished memories of Magdalena, and of seeing Pele play football. Jesus butts heads with his cousin, the hotheaded and belligerent Miguel (Roberto Aguire), primed to succeed Ricardo as head of the cartel.

Meanwhile, we’re also introduced to the profoundly mysterious Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), the beautiful, near-mute woman who emerged one day out of the heat-haze of the desert, who Don Ricardo accepted into his house, and who occasionally reads the tarot for him. Jesus is infatuated with her, and in time, she becomes his wife. Little does he know that his bride-to-be is leading a double life; she’s superhumanly gifted in combat, and is covertly liberating the cartel’s sex-trafficking victims by night. She’s spoken of in whispers as a local folk heroine, referred to by the amazingly metal title “La Alta Sacerdota de la Muerte” (“The High Priestess of Death.”)

Quick aside: the attentive reader might already have noticed, but Too Old to Die Young’s episode titles are all derived from names of cards in the tarot deck. I, personally, am not a superstitious person, and I don’t place a lot of significance on the mystical, unquantifiable relationship between playing cards and outcomes in our shared, material universe.

But NWR is, and does. Notably, he’s good friends with Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Franco-Chilean firebrand and self-reported kinda-maybe-rapist who directed El Topo and The Holy Mountain, wrote my favourite comic book ever, and is generally the old-school kind of iconoclastic, disruptive, hashtag-problematic creator that NWR styles himself as.

In My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, the 2014 documentary made by NWR’s wife Liv Corfixen, Jodorowsky provides Winding Refn a tarot reading in the course of the production of Only God Forgives. This fascination with divination – and esotericism more broadly – is by all accounts sincere, and suffuses Too Old to Die Young throughout. (We’ll come back to that.)

A reasonable viewer’s expectation after the first couple of episodes would be that the enmity between Martin and Jesus will be the focus of the rest of the series – such a viewer will learn the hard way that Too Old to Die Young has no interest in being reasonable. The two lead characters’ paths do eventually reconverge, but it’s a long, winding route to get there. In the meantime, Martin is promoted from a beat cop to a homicide detective, and during an investigation into the death of a known child predator, he stumbles across Diana DeYoung (Jena Malone), a wealthy hippie working as a victims’ advocate in the California penal system, and Viggo Larsen (John Hawkes), a retired FBI agent caring for his senile mother even as he himself is dying from terminal cancer.

Diana and Viggo have embarked together on a two-person crusade of retributive murder, tracking down and killing child molesters who’ve eluded justice, on behalf of the victims and their families. Martin tracks down Viggo easily enough (by the vigilante’s own admission, his illness has made him sloppy), but rather than arrest him, he opts to team up with them instead. Increasingly alienated from his job – both the legitimate and corrupt aspects of it – Martin leverages his work with Damian, cherry-picking targets he feels best deserving of death.

That’s quite a lot of plot that I’ve just outlined, and if you’ve been paying attention, then I’m sorry, because very little of it ultimately matters. There are a lot of answers to the question “what is Too Old to Die Young about?” and almost none of them involve frivolous, superficial things like “stakes” or “characterisation” or “conflict.” Recapping the events of the show does less than nothing to elucidate the experience of watching it.

If you’ve never seen a Nicolas Winding Refn movie before, then:

A: Mother of God, don’t start with Too Old to Die Young, are you crazy? You have to graduate to this shit. Start with Drive, then progress to Only God Forgives, and if you’re still on board then maybe you’re ready.

B: There’s a very specific cadence to the way that he frames and blocks his shots; to the way his characters exchange dialogue; to the performances he asks of his actors.

His visual language is characterised by stasis and inertia. The camera is either utterly still, or else moves by such slight increments that it only makes the stillness more noticeable. (When a shot pans or zooms slowly enough that the second-to-second difference is only just noticeable, the viewer’s eye is guided to the edge of the frame, paying attention to the regions of mise en scène crawling out of view. It turns you into a suspicious viewer.)

Similarly, the visual elements within the frame are not dynamic. If it’s a close-up of an actor’s face, the actor will hold their head unnaturally still, their stoic expression unvarying; the slightest twitch of the eyes or lips is a big deal. If it’s a medium shot or a long shot, the players in view will stand like statues, each waiting their turn to do anything so dramatic as lift a glass or scratch their nose.

His average shot length isn’t actually that long. In the case of Episode 6, The High Priestess (a representative sample for the series), I counted 333 cuts in total, in the course of 88 minutes and 48 seconds (excluding title cards and credits). That makes for an average shot duration of 16 seconds. By most standards, that’s pretty long, but it’s not outlandish; we’re not quite in Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr territory. However, whenever he does cut, the cut is always conspicuous. No invisible continuity editing; it’s always one fussed-over, painterly image being abruptly swapped for another.

And then there’s the dialogue, which has the same deliberate lack of flow and seamlessness as the editing. Here’s a sample from Episode 5 (The Fool) to give you a taste. In this scene, Martin is working to infiltrate a gang of snuff pornographers (using “Kevin” as an alias), introducing himself to them at a booth in a mostly empty dive bar:

WENDY: “Would you like to sit?”

MARTIN: “Yeah. Thanks.”

(Wendy shifts along the couch and Martin sits.)

(6 second pause)

ROB: “I’m Rob, that’s my brother Stevie. That’s Wendy. This is Sandy.”

MARTIN: “It’s nice to meet you guys.”

WENDY: “Mm-hm.”

(5 second pause)

ROB: “What brings you to Albuquerque, Kevin?”

(4 second pause)

MARTIN: “I’m a salesman.”

(7 second pause)

STEVIE: “What do you sell?”

(7 second pause)

MARTIN: “I’m not a salesman.”

(Everyone laughs)

MARTIN: “I don’t know why I said that.”

THE WHOLE SHOW IS LIKE THIS.

You know how Robert Altman movies famously feature chaotic, motor-mouthed dialogue, characters talking over each other to the point that the words become hard to make out? NWR is like the anti-Altman when it comes to dialogue. It is impossible to imagine any real human conversation playing out according to the rhythms in this scene. It would be unbearably awkward at best; at worst, Martin would be outing himself as an astonishingly poorly trained undercover cop, and his interlocutors would immediately shoot him to death.

The weird, off-kilter tempo of the dialogue and the editing is underscored by the sound design. During the scene transcribed above, for example, there’s a country ballad playing in the background of the dimly lit bar, and in every yawning gap between lines, you notice it. This sort of auditory ambience is present in any given scene; if it’s not diegetic music, then it’s the sound of traffic, or the wildlife of the Mojave desert, or the rantings of a radio shock-jock. Persistent reminders of a larger universe, out of focus, churning on, indifferent to whatever’s happening here in NWR’s minutely controlled dioramas.

The cherry on top of this aesthetic is Cliff Martinez’s soundtrack. NWR’s collaborator through thick and thin since Drive, Martinez gilds the elaborate visual language with warbling, trilling synth swells. At times, the score throbs with rhythmic, pulsating bass; at others, with spacey, psychedelic theremin warbles. If the visuals, dialogue, and acting didn’t already tip Too Old to Die Young into the realm of surrealism, the music is the conclusive nudge.

“Drone” is a word I’ve occasionally heard used to refer to the style of filmmaking Winding Refn deploys in Too Old to Die Young. (Or else its conjugation, “droning.”) It’s not necessarily being used pejoratively; rather, it’s used to liken Too Old to Die Young to the Drone genre of music, typified by artists like La Monte Young, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Sunn O))). An avant-garde variant on rock and electronic music, Drone is a specific type of minimalism, using the sheer duration of sustained notes and tones to achieve a kind of mesmeric effect.

You’ve heard of “mumblecore” cinema. Well, here’s “dronecore”; an aesthetic that prompts the viewer to search the frame for the smallest shifts and deviations against a static backdrop. The viewer is compelled, almost forcibly, to focus on details and filigree; context and narrative recede to a dim blur.

Earlier, I mentioned NWR’s penchant for esotericism. If you bear that in mind, so much of Too Old to Die Young’s mannered, baroque presentation starts to make sense. It’s ritualistic, literally; he stages scenes like they’re rituals, the kind that early 20th-century weirdos like adherents of Thelema or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn might have done. Or, indeed, present-day weirdos like the British monarchy. (Check out the way the knighthood ceremony is framed and edited in the linked video. Throw in some high-contrast lighting, some electronic music, and a couple of people getting shot in the head, and that’s basically any Too Old to Die Young scene.)

Nothing about this series is remotely naturalistic; that’s not the point. In fact, it falls short to say that it’s “not the point”: it’s the opposite of the point. The rigid body-language; the frozen facial expressions; the monosyllabic dialogue; they’re not meant to be evocative. On the contrary: they’re invocative.

Quite a lot of scenes in Too Old to Die Young explicitly depict ceremonies, of one kind or another; initiations, or hazings, or executions. There’s Jesus’s wordless, shirtless conference with his cousin in The Lovers, where Miguel baptismally rubs fistfuls of cocaine into Jesus’s bare skin. There’s our introduction to Diana in Episode 3 (The Hermit), which finds her accepting a talisman from her clients – a married couple, sitting cross-legged beneath a brass, wire-frame pyramid – in exchange for Viggo killing their son’s rapist. There’s the bizarre parody of a Passion Play that opens Episode 8 (The Hanged Man), where Martin’s Lieutenant (Hart Bochner) absolves him of his decision to quit the police force. (The Lieutenant emerges into the scene with his arms held in a cruciform pose by a mop; a subordinate wearing a legionnaire’s helmet mimes sticking him with a spear on the end of an American flag, then barrels away, chanting “Fake news! Fake news! Fake news!” The scenes in the police precinct are among the few where the show leverages surrealism for comedy, rather than portent.)

What is the function of ceremony, anyway? (In art, or in life?) Why do we dedicate time and energy to the rigmarole of getting dressed up and following the elaborate, preordained steps involved in weddings, or funerals, or military parades, or ritual Satanic sacrifices?

My back-of-a-napkin answer would be: because they connect us to a power greater than ourselves. The participants in a ceremony relinquish their personal agency in exchange for being involved in an institution that transcends any one human life. Be it the sanctity of marriage, or the authority of the Crown, or the fervour of MAGA, or the providence of God, or of Baphomet; we are harnessed to some larger thing; some inevitable, irrevocable process.

In the course of thirteen hours of Too Old to Die Young, the impression of ceremony becomes overwhelming. All of its disparate plotlines feel like they orbit around the periphery of some vast, nameless dread, tracing its event horizon. A singularity that can’t be directly observed, but which its players inexorably spiral towards, down and down and down.

The most elaborate, most extended ceremony in Too Old to Die Young takes place in Episode 8, The Hanged Man. Jesus and Yaritza, having taken up residence in Magdalena’s old house in LA, begin their campaign of reprisals, and take Damian prisoner after cutting off his hands. In exchange for a relatively quick and painless death at Yaritza’s hand, Damian sells out Martin; he was the one truly responsible for Magdalena’s slaying.

Jesus’s men track down Martin and Janey where they’re having a peaceful stroll on the beach. They shoot Janey in the head, and drag Martin back to a barn on a remote ranch, where they suspend him by his wrists. Jesus tells Martin, in no uncertain terms, that he will be flogged for three days before being allowed to die.

With two episodes of the series left to go, the reasonable TV watcher might expect some plot complication or intercession on Martin’s behalf; that he might escape, in order for his conflict with Jesus to arrive at some kind of dramatically satisfying crescendo.

Nope. Jesus does precisely as he promises; with the occasional break for increasingly kinky and Oedipal sex with Yaritza, he spends three days lashing Martin with a bullwhip before summarily decapitating him.

Martin Jones’s whole involvement in the plot of Too Old to Die Young ends up being one massive red herring. He has glimpses of a character arc and flecks of dramatic irony in the first seven episodes; the wrongness of his relationship with Janey is held in tension with him discovering his calling as a vigilante paedophile hunter. The show glances up against the idea that he hates himself; that by teaming up with Viggo and Diana, he seeks expiation for his own attraction to young flesh. (He murders Theo in Episode 7 (The Magician) after Janey’s 18th birthday party, when Theo makes lewd comments about his own daughter.)

Just as it looked like he was reaching some kind of self-actualisation by leaving the police force, though: blam. No catharsis. No redemption.

“Too Old to Die Young” is an interesting title for the series to have, and one that the series is clearly proud of. There’s no introductory credit sequence, but each episode begins with those five words superimposed across the screen, one by one, in big, pastel-coloured capitals that a graphic designer somewhere is extremely proud of.

At first glance, it doesn’t bear any obvious reference to the show’s content. When I think of the phrase “die young,” my mind immediately leaps to, e.g., the members of the 27 Club: your Jimi Hendrixes; your Kurt Cobains; your Amy Winehouses; those stars who burned too fast and too bright. None of the cast of Too Old to Die Young are living the kind of fast-paced life of excess and hedonism that some might see as aspirational, that puts you in the ground before your youth and beauty have a chance to dwindle.

But then, there’s the scene in The Hermit when Martin introduces himself to Viggo, over roadside diner coffee. Viggo asks him how old he is, and after a pause (of course), Martin sullenly answers: “Thirty.”

Viggo seems impressed. “Thirty. And already working homicide?”

“I’m just on loan-out from the station.”

“Either way, good for you.”

The viewer, by this point, is keyed-in to the irony here. For Viggo, an old veteran for whom mortality is a very urgent concern, Martin’s future is all in front of him. (Miles Teller would actually have been 30 when this scene was shot, or very close to it; John Hawkes would have been 58.) For Martin, his relationship with Janey burning a hole in his conscience, it must have been agonising to say that number. If you’ve recently experienced a two-digit birthday, you can relate, even if you’re not fucking a teenager on the down-low; that feeling of “oh God, I can never again identify myself by a number that starts with a 1, or a 2.” It feels like a crypt door slamming shut.

There’s no way to phrase this that doesn’t make it uncomfortable: age of consent is a recurring theme throughout Nicolas Winding Refn’s body of work, particularly in the back half of his career. In Drive (by some margin his warmest and most humane film), Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac) reminisces about the way he met his wife, Irene (Carey Mulligan):

STANDARD: “We were at a party, and she was nineteen years old.”

IRENE: “Seventeen.”

STANDARD: “You weren’t seventeen!”

IRENE: “I was.”

STANDARD: “Wow. So it was illegal?”

(BOTH CHUCKLE)

In Only God Forgives the entire plot is set in motion because Billy (Tom Burke), quote, “wants to fuck a 14-year-old” in a Thai brothel, and precipitates a cycle of retribution when he tries to take one by force.

And then there’s The Neon Demon, which… hoo boy. 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) moves out to LA to pursue a modelling career, and lies about her age to get signed with Roberta Hoffman’s (Christina Hendricks) agency. Roberta encourages her to say she’s 19; 18 would be too obvious. Fanning, in reality, would have turned 17 while The Neon Demon’s principal photography was ongoing. There are several sequences in the finished movie that deliberately skirt the line between “this is a thought-provoking satire of the fashion industry” and “FBI!! OPEN UP!!!”

I want to be absolutely, 100-percent crystal-clear on this point: I do not believe that Nicolas Winding Refn condones paedophilia, or that his movies act to launder paedophilia as something acceptable. (By most accounts, away from the camera, he’s kind of a boring, conventional family-guy).

I do think that he’s an edgelord, and that he uses the spectre of paedophilia to wedge open his audience’s fear of aging.

Even as early as 1996, there’s Pusher, which finds Frank (Kim Bodnia) showing up at his mother’s house to beg her for money to pay off the creditors coming to kill him. It’s easily the best, most poignant scene in that movie; this is clearly the first time that Frank’s seen his mother in a while, and she does her best to make him welcome. That her son only needs her to help him clear his debts clearly breaks her heart, and the fact that he clears out her savings to finance his own bad decisions offends our moral sensibilities.

Casting Kim Bodnia as Frank in Pusher was a stroke of nascent genius. NWR was 26 when Pusher came out. Bodnia was 30, but looked older; with his receding hairline and his beer-gut, he’d easily have passed for 34 or 35. Visibly too old to be carrying on with the lowlifes he hangs out with until the wee hours of the morning; visibly too old to die young.

(It’s not lost on me that, when Jang Go Star was going bankrupt, Winding Refn leant on his parents to stay afloat.)

Throughout NWR’s filmography, there’s this persistent theme of characters who don’t want to grow up. Frank in Pusher and Tonny in Pusher II, for starters. In Bronson, Michael Peterson returns to his parents’ house after a stint in prison, and when he arrives in his childhood bedroom, plaintively demands of his mother: “Where’s my stuff?” In Only God Forgives, Julian (Ryan Gosling) is so thoroughly dominated by the expectations of his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) that he hires a prostitute to pretend that he has a girlfriend, and allows himself to get beaten to a pulp to impress her.

It’s easy to feel too old to die young, in the 21st century. It’s easy to feel that certain milestones have passed you by: losing your virginity; buying a house; getting married; having kids; not being addicted to coke; not being in debt to a gangster; not being financially dependent on your parents.

Martin Jones is too old to be dating a high-schooler, but fate kills him, young or not. He only survived the first ten minutes of the show by accident, anyway; Larry caught a bullet because Jesus made a mistake. For the entire time we know Martin throughout the series’ first eight episodes, he exists in a sort of ontological limbo; granted a few months’ leeway by capricious chance, living on borrowed time before inevitability catches up to him.

Too Old to Die Young, for as much as it’s a singular object, is nevertheless in dialogue with other prestige TV shows. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is the big, obvious one, the progenitor of surreal, avant-garde American television. (Twin Peaks: The Return was airing in 2017, just as Too Old to Die Young was gearing up for production. Critic Matt Lynch described Too Old to Die Young as “the Goofus to Twin Peaks’ Gallant,” which I wanted to quote because it’s just a terrific turn of phrase.)

Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul can’t have been far from NWR’s mind either, with their oblique scene setups, their panoramic shots of the Mojave desert, and their focus on organised crime transgressing the border between Mexico and the USA. (Episode 5 (The Fool) temporarily relocates the action from LA to Albuquerque, and I don’t imagine that specific choice of city was a coincidence.)

But, in the age of prestige, big-budget TV, Too Old to Die Young’s closest relative is probably Season 1 of HBO’s True Detective. Not unlike Too Old to Die Young, when it debuted in 2014 True Detective was an auteur-driven project to an extent that was rare for television. It was the passion project of novelist and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, who single-handedly penned the scripts for all eight episodes. (Notably, there was also just one director for the whole season: Cary Joji Fukunaga. In contrast to NWR, when CJF was asked to direct a James Bond movie, he said “yes.”)

There are a lot of parallels to be drawn between Too Old to Die Young and True Detective S1. Both start out with the veneer of being hard-boiled police procedurals before shedding their skin, emerging as something much darker and stranger and more surreal. Both are cosmic horror stories, wearing the prosaic trappings of crime fiction like drag. Both feature ambiguous supernatural elements that can maybe be dismissed as hallucinations if you squint. In True Detective, it’s the repeated invocation of “Carcosa” and “The Yellow King,” derived from Robert W. Chambers; in Too Old to Die Young, it’s Diana’s visions of silver-eyed extraterrestrials, showing her an impending apocalypse.

Both shows are legendarily pretentious, although they diverge in the specific nature of their pretensions: Too Old to Die Young’s pretensions are visual, whereas True Detective’s are literary. Pizzolatto loads his characters up with erudite, philosophical soliloquies about the provenance of human consciousness and the impetus towards suicide. (Much of the dialogue would register as ridiculous, if not for the career-best performance from Matthew McConnaughey as Detective Rust Cohle.)

I love True Detective S1: if it was the subject of today’s review, I would probably award it an 8-out-of-8, Tour de Good certification. But there’s one part of that legendary eight-episode run that never quite sat right with me, which is the uncharacteristically pat, sentimental epilogue. A convalescent Rust reconciles with Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) – his erstwhile police partner and the man he cuckolded – and they share a kind of thematic debriefing about the preceding events of the series.

Rust, having survived being stabbed in the gut, looks up at the night sky outside the hospital and reflects upon his childhood in Alaska, contemplating the stars, making up stories about them in his head. “I tell you, Marty,” he says, “I’ve been up in that room, looking out those windows every night here, just thinking. It’s just one story. The oldest. Light versus dark.”

“Well,” Marty replies (who’s always been more literal-minded than Rust), “I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”

“You’re looking at it wrong,” Rust rebuts, in True Detective S1’s last line of dialogue, and its final, summative statement. “At the sky. Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”

I think I get what McConnaughey and Pizzolatto were driving at, poetically speaking – the long arc of history bends towards justice, and whatnot – but as someone with an amateur interest in cosmology, it’s always frustrated me how busted Rust’s metaphor is, here. He’s kind of got it exactly backwards. According to any modern study of the night sky, the universe was an infinitely hot, infinitely dense, infinitely bright point of light 13.8 billion years ago. Astrally speaking, the passage of time is marked by the world growing colder and more diffuse, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics charts its course. In Rust’s own parlance: once upon a time there was only light, but the dark is steadily winning.

In Too Old to Die Young’s cosmology, time is not a flat circle. It’s more like a drainpipe, or a sphincter. Martin and Viggo’s macho, Rambo-esque war against the iniquities of their day is futile; a coping strategy for the inexorability of entropy. Society is fraying at the seams; cities being reclaimed by the desert. Threads of carcinogenic silk are weaving through the hollows of Viggo’s lungs, while his mother’s brain eats itself alive. Sexual conquests that would have been lionised for Martin in high school become wrong and repulsive by dint of the passage of time.

But, hey: if they can blow up some child molesters in the process, maybe they can make themselves feel better?

There’s no moment at the end of Too Old to Die Young that neatly ties up its storylines and character arcs in a writerly ribbon. You who enjoy things like “plot resolution” will be badly disappointed. The beginning of Episode 9 (The Empress) focuses heavily on Diana, and her interactions with “The Entities,” as she names them. She’s being sent extradimensional visions of blood, and fire, and death, and apocalypse, and at the centre of it all, there’s a woman. (We’re given to understand, of course, that the woman she sees is Yaritza).

In an address to his lieutenants, Jesus pledges to turn America into an amusement park of torture and rape and sadism, like a pitless new Caligula.

With Martin dead, and his mother dead, Viggo marches into a trailer park on the edge of the desert, which Diana assures him is swarming with perverts. His bolt-action rifle rampage is the most aestheticised and perversely beautiful moment of the entire series; a montage of destruction that completely discards spatial continuity, heads being blown off and US flags being spattered with gore and shacks erupting in bright orange fireballs, all in hyper-slow-motion that evokes footage from A-bomb tests, scored by Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture. The fragmentation of visual logic expresses the concomitant breakdown of order and morality that Too Old to Die Young foresees.

That’s not the real climax of the show, though. That comes in Episode 10 (The World), maybe one of the most wilfully confounding television finales this side of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s original run. Even the episode description in the Amazon Prime app is cryptic, reading simply: “The High Priestess of Death reigns supreme.”

It’s only half an hour long – the shortest episode of the series by a wide margin – and what it elides speaks as loudly as what it includes. Neither Viggo nor Jesus even appear onscreen. The terminally ill Viggo is still alive, as best we’re aware, by the time the final credits roll. Yaritza’s dual identity remains in place and undiscovered by her husband. Diana’s prophesied meeting with The High Priestess of Death never transpires on camera. Any plot point involving Martin, Janey, Theo, or Damian is entirely forgotten, like relics buried beneath shifting desert sands. It’s as though they never existed at all.

Too Old to Die Young performatively ignores all of the sources of narrative tension and drama introduced while it was still pretending to be a crime thriller. I can’t imagine what kind of viewer would have stayed with the series for this long if they were invested in it as a story, as opposed to an exercise in form and style. If such a viewer exists, though, The World beats the point into their head with a sledgehammer: this show was always meant to be understood poetically, not literally.

In place of plot resolution, The World instead begins with… a three-minute shot of Diana kneeling on her bed in a silk gown, masturbating while wearing a VR headset. She takes a shower and shaves her legs while the iconic title cards roll; calls in sick to work, while dangling her legs in her pool; watches a public-access TV show about UFOs; dances to Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La” in her capacious living room. (Is this how victims’ advocates in California’s penal system live? Damn, I’m in the wrong line of work.)

Finally, eleven-and-a-half minutes into this thirty-minute finale, we reach the real crescendo of Too Old to Die Young: a shot of Jena Malone, sitting in an armchair, talking towards the camera.

The jaw-dropping monologue that Diana delivers really deserves to be transcribed in its entirety (and bear in mind: this came out in 2019):

“Soon, violence will become erotic, torture euphoric, as the masses hail public executions, propelled by the wrath of fascism. Concentration camps will be rebuilt. Ignorance will be exalted, and there will be race wars, for hate will be rewarded, and seen as truthful, and beautiful. Faith will be reduced to venomous platitudes; a morphine infested enslavement of thought. Perversity will be dignified. Incest, molestation and paedophilia will all be praised. Rape will be rewarded. The few will have everything, and most will have nothing, for not all men are created equal. Narcissism will no longer be suppressed, but worshipped as a virtue. Indulging one’s impulses will become instinctual. Our identities will be defined by the pain we cause. Pure, unadulterated nihilism will be the only solution in the face of glorious Death.”

(Here, Diana’s breath hitches a little, and she pauses for a few seconds before continuing.)

“In time, we will have our own religion. Our own dynasty. And with it, we will wake the true fury of the world. And as man implodes in a wash of blood and silence, a new mutation will emerge.”

(Diana pauses again, and blinks for the first time in three-and-a-half uninterrupted minutes. A single tear runs down her cheek.)

“And on that day, I will declare the dawn of innocence.”

Jena Malone recites this speech in a low, slow, steady voice; ASMR-like, almost a whisper. She’s not speaking to anyone in particular. Diegetically, there’s no-one else in the room with her. She’s not addressing the camera; her eyes are fixed somewhere above and to the left of the lens, seeing something only she can see.

As with every other scene in Too Old to Die Young, the unyieldingly static shot composition forces us to contemplate Malone as a compositional element. We’re forced to notice the twin worry-lines in her brow; the anxious flexing of the cords in her neck; her chest rising and falling beneath her pristine white blouse as she takes irregular, shallow breaths. Her affect is this peculiar combination of beatific and horrified; like if Joan of Arc was a Lovecraft protagonist.

And then, there’s the actual content of the speech. In the fiction of the show, we’re given to understand that Diana is reciting a revelation handed down to her by the extraterrestrial entities who have guided her on her journey thus far. But, as cosmic revelations go, it’s surprisingly blunt and literal in its prosody, isn’t it? (And all the more disturbing for it.) “This awful thing, then this awful thing, then this awful thing, etc.” It’s Too Old to Die Young in microcosm; hushed, reverential intonation afforded to a near-arbitrary sequence of profane images.

In 1919, exactly a century before Too Old to Die Young dropped on Amazon Prime, Irish wordsmith and noted Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn member William Butler Yeats composed his most famous poem, “The Second Coming.” With World War 1 not long finished, the Irish War of Independence revving up, and the Spanish Flu dropping Europeans more expediently than four years of mortars and mustard gas, it encapsulates the apocalyptic mood of the era in twenty-two lines of free verse. “The Second Coming” is much more artful in its metre and phrasing than Jena Malone’s monologue, and evokes a more religious mode of terror in its imagery.

Still, there’s a peculiar similitude in their sentiment. “We’re fucked” is the thesis of both texts, and both play out as a series of bone-chilling statements, straining to capture the enormity of just how fucked we are. (I’m particularly struck by the resonance between Yeats’s “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed” and Diana’s “…as man implodes in a wash of blood and silence…”)

Donald Trump is never once named in dialogue in the course of Too Old to Die Young; his image is never seen, and his voice is never heard. And yet, his spectre haunts the series from beginning to end. If one were to collapse all thirteen hours of the series into a single, Shulman-esque image, I have to imagine it would be his beady-eyed, Fanta-orange visage, staring out at the viewer. Too Old to Die Young was filmed between November 2017 and August 2018, in the back half of Trump’s first term. Back then, his regime, though monstrous, still had something pathetic and buffoonish about it. Alec Baldwin – William’s brother – could still elicit laughs from his broad impersonation on Saturday Night Live.

Jump forward to 2025, and it’s not funny anymore. Diana’s prophecy feels far more vivid; higher resolution.

In a world where Venezuelan expatriates are being requisitioned to concentration camps in El Salvador without trial; a world where the head of the newly initiated Department of Government Efficiency (kill me) performs a Nazi salute in celebration of the President’s second term; a world where seemingly every influential figure you can name crops up in the flight logs of a conveniently hanged sex trafficker; a world where multimillionaire pastor Joel Webbon preaches how “Christians must recover the lost virtue of Hatred…”

How are we to conclude that the world hasn’t been turned upside-down? In what version of events is there a way out of this, a sluice gate through which we might escape this downfall? As I write this, I’m a few weeks away from my 35th birthday – I’m too old to die young, myself – and for me and a lot of millennials my age, we’re confronted with a time when the institutions we thought were secure and sacrosanct are crumbling beneath our feet; when the virtues we believed inviolable have been inverted.

The centre cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

In the course of writing this review, I’ve debated whether Too Old to Die Young should be called a “nihilistic” show, or merely a “fatalistic” one. (Yes, the distinction matters.) I think the latter is probably more accurate. (Genuinely nihilistic art is rare, if not outright paradoxical; if you care enough to get up in the morning and shoot, then surely you must attach enough meaning to something that it’s worth the effort of communicating it?)

I don’t think Too Old to Die Young discounts the possibility of human beings finding meaning in their endeavours or their relationships. It does, however, discount the possibility of any individual’s actions making a difference to their macroscopic circumstances. Prestige TV in the streaming era loves its antiheroes, but Too Old to Die Young doesn’t even exist on the hero/antihero continuum. It regards even the idea of a protagonist with savage disdain and mockery. In hindsight, the idea that Martin Jones was ever equipped to be the protagonist of anything is laughable.

If hope exists in Too Old to Die Young’s setting, it lives in Yaritza, who gets the final word before the credits roll. Much like Martin and Viggo, she’s a vigilante avenger, disrupting the channels of human trafficking by brutally killing those who participate in it, with guns and knives. Martin and Viggo’s efforts are framed as futile and pitiable; self-deluding men who think they can turn back the tide. Yaritza, however, has an escape clause that they don’t: she’s not human. It’s not clear what she is (remember: poetic, not literal), but she’s equipped with an inviolable purpose and intent that transcends the limits of fallible humans. “An unadulterated extermination machine,” as she describes herself, “eliminating all evil from the universe.”

(Of note: the next series that NWR would make was the Danish-language Copenhagen Cowboy, released on Netflix in 2023, which features as its protagonist another mysterious, near-mute young woman of seemingly otherworldly origin, who comes to the rescue of people in need with her preternatural combat prowess. Clearly there’s an archetype that NWR enjoys, here. I don’t like Copenhagen Cowboy nearly as much as Too Old to Die Young, in large part because it makes its supernatural elements much more textual and unambiguous. It’s far more of a straightforward superhero story.)

The final scene in the show finds Yaritza confronting a unit of Jesus’s men where they’re hanging out in a church, refitted as a bar where a group of trafficked women wait upon their pleasure. After messing with their heads for a few minutes, she shoots them all dead in a brief firefight that looks as easy and natural to her as breathing. She strides out the door into the glare of the desert sun, leaving the bodies where they lie, a cleansing fire poised to engulf the world. The camera shamelessly objectifies Cristina Rodlo as she goes, with her incredible printed bomber jacket/red-leather trouser combo; her bare midriff; her sashaying, catwalk-ready gait. A sexy beast, her hour come round at last, strutting towards Bethlehem to be born.

The final credits kick in, with a deep cut from Judas Priest’s 1974 debut album closing out this whole, meandering, 13-hour vision quest:

Rocka Rolla woman
for a Rocka Rolla man.
You can take her if you want her,
if you think you can.

So… what are we to take away from all of this, in the final reckoning? Deriving meaning from Too Old to Die Young often feels like trying to catch a greased pig. Themes flit hither and thither, glimpsed out of the corner of your eye and gone by the time you turn your head. It’s an elusive, mercurial experience, and it frequently gives the impression you’re being baited. The moment you think you’ve found something to attach significance to, NWR will shout “psyche!” and open his fist, revealing nothing in his palm.

Is it about the rise of American fascism and MAGA? Is it about coercive sexual power dynamics? Is it about the futility of violence and vigilantism? The pain of aging? The unstoppable arrow of time? The Jungian Collective Unconscious? The impending apocalypse?

Kind of all of the above, and kind of none of them, I guess? Some ineffable feeling, lurking at their common centre of gravity?

It’s probably a mistake to ascribe intent to any meaning you do find in Too Old to Die Young. In a 2013 profile by The Guardian, NWR rather infamously referred to himself as a “pornographer.” The full quote is as follows:

“It’s like pornography. I’m a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me. What I want to see. Very rarely to understand why I want to see it and I’ve learned not to become obsessed with that part of it.”

On more than one occasion, he’s described his approach to his subjects as “fetishistic.” I agree, with the provision that it’s not in the contemporary sense that the word “fetish” is used to mean “weird sex thing.” It can mean that, and sometimes does, but at its root, a “fetish” refers to an inanimate object treated as possessing some kind of indwelling spirit or potency. (Google’s dictionary suggests “talisman” or “totem” as potential synonyms.) To shoot something “fetishistically” is to treat it as having some kind of inherent, a priori significance. Why not linger for minutes at a time on the ornaments on the walls of an Albuquerque dive bar, or a character’s unnamed daughter practicing a figure-skating routine, or the eye/tree/skull print on the back of Yaritza’s bomber jacket? Why does there have to be a reason for these images, except that they call to the person composing them, the way that, say, a card calls to you when you draw it from a deck?

In The Hermit, when the Lieutenant is mentoring Martin as a newly-promoted detective, he gives him some sensible and level-headed professional advice about how he might track Viggo down, and then shows him a single, six-sided die he keeps on his person. “To me, it’s a philosophy,” the Lieutenant says. “I had the highest clearance rate in the squad because of this. You can follow evidence and build theories all day long, and then your perp turns out to be some random stranger. We force order onto life, so we believe our choices matter, but it’s really all random, isn’t it? So, you have to embrace that.”

This speech is where Too Old to Die Young tips its hand. It lives in that grey area between intentionality and chance; between determinism and free will. It isn’t just a core theme for the show, it’s also its artistic strategy. It’s the product of a cluster of creative impulses being pursued compulsively; instinctively; unconsciously; libidinally.

We return again to that tarot motif. Any one card by itself isn’t special, but any 10 cards drawn from a shuffled deck of 78 will produce one of 4.5 quintillion possible combinations. You could draw 10 cards once every second, and the sun would burn itself out long before the same combination of cards appeared in the same order twice. Its significance is generative. Invocative, you might say.

I don’t think that any of the elements in Too Old to Die Young’s 10 episodes are all that special by themselves. Not the themes. Not the performances. Not the dialogue. Not even the visuals or the music. But collapse all those parts together, Shulman-like, and you get something that’s never happened before. Numinous and potent and irrational, untouchable by sober-minded analysis.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say there will never be another TV show like Too Old to Die Young; in the fullness of time, who knows what might happen? Every so often, the planets align, and a visionary weirdo like Nicolas Winding Refn encounters an opportunity like the late-2010s streaming boom, and runs with it.

I will go so far as to say that, when I watch Too Old to Die Young, I experience a combination of feelings that I don’t get from anything else I’ve ever seen. Awe; dread; befuddlement; dark mirth; those are all there. But, beneath those, a sense of meditative calm. Of fortification against the essential randomness of life. I’ve watched it from beginning to end twice, now, and both times I’ve come away feeling oddly cleansed, like I’ve been scrubbed by a rough-bristled brush.

Do I recommend that anyone else should watch it? I can very easily imagine a viewer who would hate it, and I couldn’t even tell them they’d be wrong to do so. I guess all I can say is that, if anything I’ve described here activates something in you – if it arouses your curiosity – then give Too Old to Die Young a try. (After having seen Drive and Only God Forgives, remember.)

What that means in terms of score, hell if I know, but I’m writing this for a site whose brand is its 1-to-8 metric, and my best numerical approximation of my feelings is…

Something I’ve not really delved into so far in this series of reviews is Gangs of London’s politics. It’s not a show that makes a point of hammering home a message, but I’m of the persuasion that all art is political, whether it wants to be or not. Any story – any piece of media that wants to communicate meaning – has to start from a basis of shared assumptions. If you want to make an epic crime drama set in modern-day London, then you necessarily have to make your assumptions available to your audience, about what is “London”; what is “crime”; what is “modern-day.”

To wit: S3 E8 begins with Cornelius beating Ed Dumani like a rented mule after his treachery was exposed last episode, while Billy, Marian, and Luan watch dispassionately. Ed’s resilient under torture – he’s had practice – but he breaks when Marian gives Luan the go-ahead to hunt down Shannon and Danny, and kill them. As Elliot arrives, Ed tells them the identity of the people behind the fentanyl spiking; the proprietors of the corporate logo on the documents Naomi was killed for, the one that looks like a hybrid of a “V” and a “W.”

“Isobel Vaughn,” Ed grudgingly confesses, in return for the safety of his daughter and grandchild.

“Who?” Elliot asks (echoing my own sentiments).

“A businesswoman,” Ed says, doing the bare minimum to clarify.

“An Investor,” Elliot replies, picking up on Ed’s subtext.

Yep: Isobel Vaughn (played by Janet McTeer) is the ultimate villain behind the fentanyl poisonings. She has farms in Myanmar, Peru, Pakistan and Türkiye, where she’s spent the last decade developing high-yield cultivars of poppies and coca, even as her underling, Henry, groomed Simone for her political career, laying the groundwork for drug legalisation in the UK which her company will be uniquely suited to profit from. The cancer of the Investors’ influence in London – in remission ever since the purges Sean and Koba set in motion in S2 E6 – has recurred with a vengeance.

In the words of another TV show with long-term plotting almost as wonky as Gangs of London’s: “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” Lives in London were destroyed and cycles of violence inflamed by profiteering ghouls thousands of miles distant, for whom 600 deaths by overdose are just a rounding error on a spreadsheet.

Gangs of London’s politics in a nutshell, then: it’s pro-multiculturalism, but opposed to economic globalisation.

It’s a worldview that’s peculiarly consistent throughout all three seasons: honestly, more consistent than the characterisations of the main cast. The show’s underlying assumption is that it’s possible for communities from different national and ethnic backgrounds to peacefully coexist. Prior to Finn’s assassination in S1 E1, it’s implied that the various gangs from Pakistan, Kurdistan, Albania, Algeria and Ireland are essentially able to get along; that their interrelationships are stable, even if they’re not necessarily friendly. None of the conflict in Gangs of London proceeds from sectarian tensions. Even Lale, a character who’s committed to an explicitly political cause – Kurdish autonomy – hasn’t spent any of her screentime directly prosecuting that cause. Most of the action she takes throughout the series is motivated by her grievances with Asif, which are entirely personal, not ideological.

(It’s worth noting that Pulse Films CEO Thomas Benski is himself a French-Brazilian immigrant who moved to the UK as a teenager in 1998. For that matter, lest we forget, the series was created by Gareth Evans, who grew up in Wales, and is multilingual, married to an Indonesian-Japanese partner, and spent the better part of a decade living, working, and raising a family in southeast Asia, over 9,000 miles from where he was born.)

In Ed’s eulogy for Finn, way back in the show’s first episode, he characterises the generational partnership between the Wallace and Dumani households as a bastion of solidarity between minorities. “No blacks; no Irish” was the refrain that summed up the barriers that he and Finn faced while growing up as immigrants in the 60s, and which they fought to overcome together. It’s a hoary old trope, and the abiding explanation for organised crime as a sociological phenomenon; enclaves of minorities disenfranchised by the mainstream, coming together in their shared disenfranchisement to create a sort of parallel, illicit economy where they can flourish together.

Of course, Ed was being disingenuous when he delivered that eulogy back in S1 E1, just as he was being disingenuous when he feigned shock at finding the Belgian beer kegs in Elliot’s house. He was already in bed with the powers that had Finn assassinated, and he was in bed with the same powers again when he ordered for Sean to be killed.

The illicit, parallel economy of organised crime is vulnerable to the same perverse incentives of international capitalism as the mainstream economy. It can be coaxed and prodded by bad actors; communities torn apart and set at each other’s throats in the scramble to be part of the in-group.

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Ed when Marian finally blows his brains out in this episode. The confirmation that he ordered Sean’s death on his own initiative is the final nail in his coffin: he’s exhausted all of his second chances, and the Wallace dynasty is quite within its rights to be done with him. But there’s something that feels uncomfortably plausible, here in 2025, about his willingness to sell out his oldest friends and allies. The people at the top, the ones calling the shots, are all a bunch of grifters and hucksters. That being the case, isn’t it in a guy’s best interests to be a grifter and huckster himself, and be allowed a seat at the table?

Don’t get me wrong: the introduction of Isobel Vaughn as an antagonist at this late juncture is pretty lame. Not that it was badly foreshadowed; the recurring motif of the Vaughn Alliance logo throughout the season made it clear there was a common thread linking Ed, Asif and Henry, one more still-deeper stratum to the conspiracy. And Janet McTeer does a fine job with the part, in her limited screentime: aristocratic and businesslike, able to rationalise her misdeeds when interrogated with such cool intelligence that she almost makes it sound persuasive.

But during her scenes, I was thinking back to what I wrote about the Investors as villains when discussing S2 E5. The Investors derived their potency in Seasons 1 and 2 from their vague, numinous quality; the way that their members were never represented on screen; not identified by name; not identified by face; not even identified by individual agendas; always treated as a kind of aggregate force of will, effected through intermediaries. The introduction of Isobel Vaughn immediately collapses all of the mystique that made the Investors compelling. By giving her a face and a name and a history and a physical presence in the show’s universe, the Investors become just people, vulnerable to involvement in fistfights and shootouts.

I might have been willing to forgive the decision to make one of the Investors corporeal, if the mission to unseat her felt suitably epic. I can imagine a version of this season finale where Elliot, Marian, Cornelius and Luan launch a combined assault on Vaughn’s country estate shareholder meeting, and drag the truth out of her, inch by bloody inch. A British version of the finale of A Better Tomorrow II.

But, unfortunately, nothing happens that’s anywhere near that awesome. Instead, Elliot and Billy go together to the meeting, in what might be the easiest infiltration mission ever depicted on TV. At the gates to the estate, Elliot hands the guard the invitation he got from Ed, and identifies himself as Ed Dumani. He’s waved through. (Apparently, the security at this event doesn’t extend to photo ID. And for that matter, Billy is just allowed to come along with him, no questions asked, so I guess this congress of ultra-rich criminals operates on an RSVP basis, like your cousin Vera’s wedding.)

I think, overall, I like Gangs of London’s third season better than its second. This is mainly because – as I’ve said before – it has an internal consistency that Season 2 lacks. It has throughlines; plot points established in episode 1 that pay off in episode 8, in ways that bespeak rigorous planning and foresight.

Where Season 3 trails Season 2, though, is as spectacle and as action. (Let alone the first five episodes of Season 1, which feel like an unattainable ideal by this point.) Elliot and Billy step into the boardroom where Vaughn is buttering up her shareholders; they both look very tired and pissed-off and are dressed wildly out of step with the occasion’s sartorial standards.

Vaughn has the bright idea to forestall her shareholder meeting and invite Elliot (who is obviously not Ed Dumani) and Billy up to her office for a private conference. (Some of the decisions she makes in this episode, frankly, make me wonder if she’s qualified to operate a deep fryer, let alone a hundred-billion-pound market manipulation gambit.) Predictably, her explanations for why she murdered their loved ones (and hundreds of others besides) don’t go over very well. Billy and Elliot fight and kill all four of her bodyguards, the sounds of gunshots seemingly alerting no-one downstairs.

It’s not a terrible fight scene, by any means – the choreography is solid, and the editing is mostly clear. I like the detail where Billy uses his prosthetic arm to intercept the swing of an incoming cleaver. But, c’mon. For all the shit I gave Season 2’s finale, the construction site battle between Elliot and Sean at least had some operatic gravitas to it. Here, in the Season 3 finale… Elliot and Billy brawl with a handful of randos for a couple of minutes, and that’s the episode’s big centrepiece??? It feels like a fight scene included by mandate; because Gangs of London has to have action beats, even if the writers and directors and producers resent them.

(I suppose it behooves me to mention that, in the course of the melee, Billy stabs Henry to death. Good riddance to that unctuous wanker.)

The sense of showmanship and spectacle that once characterised Gangs of London feels like it’s fallen by the wayside. What I do appreciate about this season finale is how it retrenches and reframes the events of its story as a tragedy.

Elliot has Vaughn at his mercy, already bleeding from a gunshot wound inflicted by Billy. However, when he namedrops his wife and son, Vaughn’s eyes light up with recognition, and she launches the last, big, bombshell plot twist of the season. Naomi wasn’t working to bring down Vaughn’s operation; rather, Elliot’s wife was working for Vaughn, a true believer and passionate advocate for drug policy reform. Far from being killed for trying to expose Vaughn Alliance’s operations, she was killed by the Wallaces, for threatening their profits from the illegal drug trade.

Billy, of course, vehemently denies this. Elliot backs out of the room, swearing to kill whichever of the two parties who is lying to him.

The viewer might justifiably be as confused as Elliot at this point, but the truth of the matter swiftly becomes clear. Billy confronts Marian after she kills Ed, and presses her about the lawyer they killed seven years earlier. Vaughn was telling the truth, and Billy knew it, and he was consciously lying to Elliot. In fact, not only were the Wallaces responsible for killing Elliot’s family; Billy was personally present at the scene. In a remarkable bit of narrative sleight of hand, it turns out that Billy – not Zeek – was the hooded figure who retrieved the folder from the overturned car, leaving Naomi and Samuel to burn on Finn’s orders.

(I went back and reviewed the prologue sequence in S3 E1 shot by shot, and it is extremely cleverly edited. Zeek definitely drove the truck that T-boned Naomi’s car, but he never got out of the cab. The cutting makes it look like he and Billy were the same person so convincingly that it even sort of fooled me on a rewatch, knowing the plot twist. The Treachery of Images is surprisingly powerful.)

I have serious plausibility concerns about this plot twist. For one thing: it’s an astonishing coincidence that the Wallace family could have killed Elliot’s wife, and that Elliot, five years later, through completely independent mechanisms, could have ingratiated himself into the Wallace organisation as an undercover detective. For a second thing: that spectacular coincidence graduates to a straight-up plothole, in view of the fact that the Wallaces surely must have been aware of Elliot’s existence prior to the events of S1 E1. If they had enough intelligence on Naomi Keegan to assassinate her, they surely must have been aware of her husband and the father of her child, to the extent that they’d recognise him when he showed up in their organisation under the half-assed alias of “Elliot Finch”?

Season 3 treats the events of Seasons 1 and 2 as a kind of rough sketch. It cherry-picks the details that suit it, and discards those that don’t. It’s disorienting and unpleasant for anyone who’s actually paying attention, and a show that lasts as long as three seasons tends to do so because it has viewers who pay attention.

But, anyway: I was talking about how this season works as a self-contained tragedy, even if it emphatically doesn’t work as a continuation of what came before. Billy is cut up about what his family did to Elliot; he’s done the moral arithmetic in his mind, and he recognises that the loss of his left arm is small potatoes compared to the murder of a wife and child.

Amongst Gangs of London’s cast, Billy has always been the most cursed with self-awareness; exquisitely sensitive to the ways that his actions impact other people. It’s because of that sensitivity that he’s content to be drawn into other people’s causes; whether it’s his father, or his mother, or Sean, or Cornelius, he’s able to feel just a little less guilty and miserable if he’s hitched his wagon to someone else’s crusade.

For as violent and aggressive as he can get, particularly in this season, Billy always occurs as a stunted, scared boy. One particularly apt flashback in this episode is to the moment when he shot the bucket in S1 E2, killing the man cuckolding Finn so that Sean didn’t have to. That’s been Billy’s role his whole life: a sin-eater, taking his family’s iniquities upon himself to insulate them from their guilt. In his confrontation with Marian, Billy questions her in ways he’s never questioned any of his family before: when does it end? How many more lives, before he can be happy?

Marian, of course, doesn’t have a satisfactory answer. There is no number of lives.

Elliot is kind of Billy’s antithesis, in this regard. Elliot doesn’t march to the beat of anyone else’s drum. He’s fiercely, defiantly independent; relentlessly goal-oriented. Whether working to take down the Wallace organisation in Season 1, or getting his revenge on Sean in Season 2, or tracking down his family’s killer in Season 3, he’s always defined his own values and priorities, and pursued them single-mindedly.

Correspondingly, what he lacks is self-awareness. Elliot is focused on his objectives with such tunnel-vision that he blinds himself to the harm he leaves in his wake. It’s in Season 3’s denouement, rocked by Vaughn’s revelations, that he’s finally compelled to reflect upon his own actions, and reckon with the fact that he participated in exactly the system that got his wife killed, simply so that he might spite Sean. He turns Naomi’s files making the case for legalisation over to Simone, and tells her to keep following her conscience. Henry might have been corrupt, but she isn’t, and her push for drug reform comes from a legitimately noble impulse, even if Vaughn attempted to co-opt and corrupt it. For once, Elliot’s been given cause to step outside of himself, and it feels like a moment of authentic, personal growth.

For a hot moment, it looks like Season 3 will end on a positive beat. There are notes of sweet added to all the bitter with the resolution of Luan’s subplot; he takes Shannon and Danny hostage, preparing to execute them in reprisal for Elira’s death, as proxies for Ed. Mirlinda’s rebukes don’t dissuade him, but when he’s confronted by Shannon, pleading and crying and shielding Danny with her own body, he can’t bring himself to do it. (The moment wouldn’t be complete, of course, without Orli Shuka’s tormented, vein-popping reaction shots. Please never change, you great, big, Albanian ham.) We’re given cause to hope: maybe the cycle of reprisals really can end.

But then it all comes crashing down. While Simone is delivering her address declaring war on the criminal gangs, Billy invites Elliot to a rendezvous in an out-of-the-way warehouse. Billy spends the time waiting for Elliot to arrive drinking copiously from a bottle of tequila, interspersed with bumps of coke.

When Elliot arrives, he sits down opposite Billy at a steel table. Billy’s promised him information on who really killed his family, but seems oddly reticent to give it up. He keeps taking sips from his tin cup, with an increasingly shaky right hand.

“Look at my Dad.”

*Sip*

“Look at Sean. Look at the Dumanis. Even Luan’s family. All of them, fucked. Nobody wins. Nobody ever fucking wins.”

Billy places a loaded handgun on the table, and slides it across to Elliot. He confesses his complicity in the murder of his wife and child, and he begs Elliot to kill him.

As story themes go, “crime doesn’t pay” is one of the tritest and most basic and most reducible. But it’s a theme that acquires a certain elemental potency in this confrontation between two sympathetic characters. Ultimately, Billy isn’t able to escape his past sins; nor is Elliot able to divest himself of the need for revenge. The final shot of Season 3 is an exterior crane shot of the warehouse, where we hear two gunshots, punctuated by two muzzle flashes. The camera rises indifferently to view a sunrise over the London skyline, unchanged by all this tragedy. A title card intersects the horizon, and we cut to credits.

If this was the last episode that Gangs of London ever broadcast – if there was never another episode after this one – I would have a lot of respect for this as an ending. For the full-throated bleakness and futility of it; the insistence that all of these characters are fundamentally damned.

Of course, the thing about a tragedy is that it requires an ending as a fulcrum point. And I don’t think that Pulse Films are remotely ready to let Gangs of London end, for as long as they can feasibly keep it going. And I don’t remotely believe that Billy is dead: after a season full of major, named characters shown erupting with exit wounds, and Zeek still at large, this allusive exterior shot is far too obviously the showrunners leaving the door open for a Season 4.

(For what it’s worth, in the process of researching this season I stumbled across Executive Producer Vikki Tennant’s Linkedin profile, where she registers her job title as “Executive Producer – Gangs of London S3 & S4.” So, it definitely seems like the creative staff have a fourth season in mind.)

Something on the model of True Detective, or The White Lotus, resetting with a new conflict and a new cast of characters each season.

All three seasons up to this point have had different showrunners, and you can definitely tell, even if you’re not someone who’s taken it upon himself to write essay-length breakdowns of every episode. The game of telephone starting with Gareth Evans, leading through Corin Hardy to Kim Hong-Sun, has resulted in a series with a very erratic long-term narrative. It’s forever doubling back and disagreeing with itself; abandoning plot elements that seemed like they were going somewhere (where exactly is Jacqueline Robinson née Wallace these days, anyway?), or else relitigating plot points that were already satisfactorily resolved (i.e. the death of Elliot’s family, never remotely positioned as something suspicious in prior seasons).

The kicker is, Season 3 isn’t anywhere close to being the sloppy plie-up of plotlines that Season 2 was. For as much as it has going on, it’s honestly kind of impressive how tightly plotted it is. All of its characters have clearly established, comprehensible motivations, which they act upon in decisive ways. The answers to its whodunnit mysteries recontextualise prior events in ways that internally make sense.

My frustration with Season 3 comes from a different place than my frustration with Season 2. Season 2 was a mess on its own terms. Season 3 makes a mess of characters and plotlines it inherited. From the big details (Sean’s abrupt demise; the dissolution of Elliot and Shannon’s relationship) to the small ones (Faz’s sudden death; Marian has a brother??), it’s hard to escape the feeling that this story is not an organic extension of the story that preceded it. With a few judicious, minimally invasive rewrites, Season 3 could probably have worked as a self-contained plot, involving characters we’d never met before, and would have been a more satisfying viewing experience for it.

To wit: Ed Dumani. Relegated to the background for most of the season thus far, S3 E7 hones in on his perspective, as he tries to track down Zeek, and, by extension, Elliot. Zeek going off-script and letting Elliot go has left Ed in a precarious position; the highly capable, highly motivated man he tried to frame for the fentanyl poisonings is out there somewhere, and it’s Ed’s arse on the line if he can’t silence Elliot before he blows open the truth of the conspiracy with Henry and Asif. Lucian Msamati plays Ed with the same world-weary stoicism as always, but there’s a note of tension, even desperation, in his body-language. The scene where he interrogates Ray (Mat Fraser), an old associate who originally vouched for Zeek, is excellent, progressing slowly from the back-slapping bonhomie of two middle-aged male friends, towards terror and bloodshed, inflicted joylessly. (As an aside, it was cool to see Msamati in an Oscar-winning movie earlier this year. It’s not more than he deserves.)

I just can’t help but be disappointed with Ed, though. Let’s actually try to track his character arc, shall we? In Season 1, he collaborated with the Investors, selling out Sean and Marian to keep the Wallace organisation running smoothly. In Season 2, he finally rebelled against the Investors when their yoke became intolerable, after they drove Alex to suicide. And in Season 3, he’s… back on the same bullshit as Season 1 Ed; collaborating with Asif and his cronies in the UK government, throwing Sean under the bus so that he can prosper in the Brave New World of legalised drugs. He’s arrived right back where he started, and that’s just so unfulfilling. There’s a reason they’re called character arcs, not character loop-de-loops.

As for Elliot, he’s holed up with Lale, after she rescued him from Shannon’s clutches. She sheepishly admits that she was the one to frame him for the fentanyl spiking, having been coerced by Asif holding her baby hostage. Elliot, understandably, doesn’t take this well, and the two of them briefly exchange blows before they come to an understanding. They team up to infiltrate Asif’s mansion; Lale, looking to steal back her infant son; Elliot, looking to interrogate Asif and find out the truth behind his family’s murder.

This temporary alliance goes remarkably smoothly, at first. Lale and Elliot slip past Asif’s guards, and overhear a conversation between him and Henry. Henry’s side of the conspiracy is starting to unravel as well; Simone, in putting together her proposal for drug legalisation, has noticed that a company owned by Asif is prioritised in the list of potential suppliers. She’s begun to realise that, rather than cutting off the gangs’ funding, she’s being made party to legitimising them.

(Of all the characters at play in Season 3, Simone’s might just be the arc I appreciate the most. As a politician, she considers herself a firebrand and a radical reformer; she’s determined to make a positive change to society, after her brother Jermaine’s death to gang violence. But, in her legitimately idealistic zeal to change the world, she’s inadvertently made herself a patsy for the kind of people who killed her brother. Her own guilty, covert drug habit makes her that much easier for bad actors like Henry to manipulate. T’Nia Miller plays all of these conflicting impulses beautifully, and Simone emerges as a genuinely well-conceived, well-rounded character for it.)

After snapping a couple of guards’ necks, Lale and Elliot make their way into Asif’s inner sanctum. Lale retrieves her son from Ayesha at gunpoint, pistol-whipping her in the stomach. Elliot holds Asif to account.

Asif offers Elliot a bargain: he’ll tell him the truth about what happened to his wife and son, if he’ll just kill Lale for him. Lale pulls a gun, and Elliot smoothly disarms her. She urges him to kill Asif, just as emphatically as Asif urges him in the opposite direction.

It’s a juicy, tense dilemma; one that’s short-circuited when Ayesha (who Lale left alive) hits a panic button, and all the compound’s surviving guards are alerted. Elliot glances around, and while he’s momentarily distracted, Lale draws a concealed knife and slits Asif’s throat with a single stroke. “Fuck you,” she whispers, simply, as his neck gasps out the dregs of his lifeblood.

The most deeply felt enmity and most profoundly earned revenge in the entire show culminates here, and it’s weirdly sudden and brusque. Unlike Sean’s, Asif’s end doesn’t feel inappropriate – Lale deserved this moment – but it does feel unceremonious.

Elliot and Lale shoot their way out through the mansion with her baby in hand, in the episode’s one significant action beat. It’s an OK shootout (Kim Hong-Sun returns to direct the final two episodes), albeit pretty short and perfunctory as set-pieces go. They escape, and make for the Kurds’ hideout.

Unbeknownst to the erstwhile partners, however, Billy and Cornelius have been on the warpath all over London, squeezing low-level gang members as they hunt for someone who’ll point them towards Sean’s killer. And, in the course of their rampage, they find just such a lead: Merwan, Lale’s second-in-command who was already suspicious of her movements. Upon arriving at the Kurds’ base of operations, Elliot is ambushed by Billy and knocked out by Cornelius (I think that’s, like, the fourth time Elliot’s been knocked out in the last three days? To say nothing of being shot by Shannon and beaten to a pulp by Zeek. He’s holding up remarkably well, all things considered.)

While Elliot is taken away as the Wallaces’ prisoner, Merwan confronts Lale with an ultimatum; her baby represents a liability that their enemies can exploit, and she should step down from her position of command. The clear implication is that he intends to take her place, and that it would be very inconvenient for her relationship with her son if the Wallaces should find out that Sean’s child is alive after all. Lale listens to his proposal. Her counter-proposal is to mash his head to a pulp with a car door.

This is a bit of a clumsy story beat, if you ask me. Merwan’s motives are framed as sinister by the acting and the blocking; Murat Erkek circles Narges Rashidi with a wolfish smile and a cruel glint in his eye, while she bows her head and worriedly clutches her baby to her breast. The situation is presented as blackmail; Merwan exploiting his boss’s weakness to grab for power. This might make more sense in the context of one of the other gangs, but the script seems to have forgotten that the Kurdish Liberation Movement isn’t a for-profit endeavour; to be the commander of its London operations isn’t really a position one covets for its own sake. (Again, Season 3 seems indifferent to the context earlier seasons established.) With that in mind, Merwan’s objections to Lale staying on as leader actually seem pretty germane; cold and ruthless, sure, but the truth is, yes, her efficacy within the PKK is compromised by the presence of her child. And there’s been nothing to indicate that Merwan’s commitment to the cause of Kurdish liberation is insincere or corrupt.

The narrative’s framing is misaligned with the plot’s logic. Merwan comes off as unnecessarily creepy when making a cogent point, and Lale comes off as a psychopath for killing him in a really unnecessarily brutal way.

Meanwhile, it really looks like Elliot’s screwed. He’s hauled in chains before a meeting of all the gangs of London to await judgement. Ed anxiously presses for him to be killed on the spot, even while Luan insists that they need answers first.

Chairing the meeting is Marian Wallace, perched on her stool like it’s the Iron Throne, flanked by her brother and her eldest son. And, with a flourish, she presents the damning evidence that will resolve this rough tribunal: a smartphone that was left on her bedroom windowsill with a note, in the middle of the night. “The order to kill Sean, my son, was sent to this phone,” she tells the room. “And this is the number it came from.”

She presses redial. Ed’s pocket vibrates.

On the one hand, this is genuinely a pretty great plot twist, and a pretty great dramatic flourish. There have been incidental scenes seeded throughout Season 3 that Zeek has a kind of reverence and respect for Marian; for him to hand her the rope that Ed’s used to hang himself is a pretty ingenious plot manoeuvre.

On the other hand – and I admit, this is nitpicking – the moment doesn’t make a lot of sense, in context. From the perspective of the onlookers, all Marian did was dial Ed’s phone; they only have her word for the provenance of the handset. It’s not quite the instant, conclusive indictment it’s framed as in the moment.

Still; a cool moment, and one that’s contextualised by the episode’s main revelation. After severing ties with Ed, Zeek goes to visit his mother (Akiko Hitomi) in her care home. She’s confined to a wheelchair, her face badly burned, yet she seems to have nothing but love for her son. He tells her that he might not be back for a while: he has things he needs to do.

“No matter what happens now,” she tells him, “your father would be proud of you.”

In a brief aside, we get a glimpse of the apartment Zeek abandoned, and which Ed found after interrogating Ray. On the bedside table is a framed photograph of Zeek as a baby, with his mother on his left, and on his right side, his father… a young, smiling Finn Wallace.

Which, uh… that’s certainly a revelation, but I still have questions!

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.

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.”

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

S3 E4 (directed, again, by Farren Blackburn) begins with a portentous montage that I quite enjoyed. We cross-cut back and forth between Luan and Marian, both of whom are in their homes, both carefully dressing themselves in black. In Marian’s case, it’s mourning garb; in Luan’s case, it’s tactical combat gear. It’s the bluntest, most on-the-nose sort of dramatic juxtaposition, and it feels completely at home in Gangs of London’s cod-operatic register.

The sequence is overlaid with Luan’s voiceover; he’s confessing to his priest in advance, for all the sins he will imminently commit. (I’m not Catholic, but I don’t think it works like that?) Orli Shuka’s performance impresses me this season, as it has before; he’s exactly the right kind of not subtle this show needs. We can tell from Luan’s thousand-yard stare that he takes no pleasure in the prospect of killing the Wallaces (at a funeral service, no less); he isn’t hoping for justice, or even for satisfaction. He’s pursuing revenge knowing full well that it’s an unhealthy, destructive coping strategy; one that’s driving a wedge between him and Mirlinda.

But, in the throes of his grief, it’s a compulsion he can’t resist. In the previous episode, Elliot confided his doubts to Luan that Billy, Sean and Cornelius were behind the poisoning; Luan was angrily unwilling to listen. If he doesn’t have a target, someone he can make pay for Elira’s death, he’s liable to drown in his sorrow, his pain bursting its banks in the absence of a sluice to direct it. It’s good character stuff, elemental but well-expressed, and yet another example of how this show’s secondary cast shine when given the opportunity. (As long as you’re willing to forget about that innocent Albanian family Luan murdered prior to the events of Season 1. Honestly, at this point, it seems like the writers have.)

While the incipient gang war is rising to a boil, Elliot’s collaboration with Simone has borne fruit. Having tipped off the Mayor about the Belgian beer kegs being used to transport the coke, the police identified a van carrying a stack of just such beer kegs that was waved through a routine traffic stop. They identified the van’s license plates, but not its driver.

(The viewer, of course, knows just who the driver is, after S3 E3’s cliffhanger ending: it’s none other than Lale. The plot thickens!)

Elliot tracks the van to a seedy garage where its license plates were swapped out; he rendezvouses with Shannon, who, over his protests, tags along when he tortures the new plate number out of the garage proprietor.

Something I find curious about Elliot and Shannon’s dynamic in this episode is that there’s absolutely no romantic frisson between them whatsoever. OK, granted: he’s crushing a man’s forearm in an industrial vice while she watches. It’s not exactly a candlelit dinner. But, we’re now halfway through the Season, and they’ve only shared two scenes together; this, and the drug deal with the Koreans in S3 E1. In both scenes, Shannon comports herself as Elliot’s business associate; the dialogue they exchange is terse and guarded. (Elliot unhesitatingly lies to her when she asks where he got the information about the garage. He talks to Saba with more candour and intimacy than he does to Shannon.)

If a hypothetical viewer started watching this show in Season 3, without knowledge of Seasons 1 or 2, they would never glean that Elliot and Shannon were supposed to be lovers; not from the dialogue, nor from Dìrísù and Bennett-Warner’s performances. That seems like a pretty telling creative choice, even if – especially if – it was an unconscious one. When Simone interrogated Elliot in hospital in S3 E3, she asked him what it must have taken for a driven, idealistic detective to have enthroned himself as a drug kingpin. On paper, the answer to that question is: Shannon Dumani. In the previous two seasons, she was his Lady MacBeth; she was the one who rolled out the red carpet upon the dark path he was to walk.

Dìrísù and Bennett-Warner never had great chemistry, and Shannon was always a character that the writers struggled to integrate into the plot, but Season 3 seems uninterested in even trying. All of Elliot’s emotional energy is focused on solving the murder of his wife and son. Rather than developing and deepening his complicated relationship with the woman who beckoned him into the underworld, the writers opt instead to focus on his relationship with his dead family, whom the audience have no prior connection to or stake in. This is frustrating, because it makes Elliot feel closed-off; decontextualised from the conflicts that have shaped him for the last 16-odd hours.

I greatly prefer the half of S3 E4’s plot involving Luan and Marian to the half that involves Elliot; it’s in the former that we find big, strident, tragic emotions, articulated clearly and with artful symmetry. Luan and Marian each have deeply felt reasons to want the other dead. He blames her for colluding with her brother and nephew, whom he holds responsible for the death of his daughter. She holds him responsible for the death of her son, as a direct result of the bounty he placed on his head. They’re both equally mistaken, but the fuse has already been lit, despite Ed Dumani’s best efforts at mediation.

A squad of black-clad Albanians converge on the church where the funeral service is being held and storm into the nave, brandishing automatic weapons. Inside, they find… no-one. The pews, the pulpit… all empty.

The doors behind them slam shut.

Marian really did love Sean, in the end, after it would have counted. She’s just as furious as Luan – and, as it turns out, smarter.

Kim Hong-Sun and Farren Blackburn perhaps realised that Gangs of London fans were overdue for a major, extravagant showcase sequence. The action scenes in Season 3 so far have been fine, but sparse; we were owed a big, blowout gun battle, and here it is. The fusillade from assault rifles and shotguns tears the church to splinters, the Albanians scrambling for cover as the Wallaces flank them from the balconies, turning the nave into a killing floor.

It’s a pretty spectacular, satisfying action scene, well-storyboarded in pre-viz by Adam Hoton and his team, with clear, legible geography, and full of gnarly, satisfying kills (special mention has to go to the one unfortunate soul who has his arm impaled on a spiked fence post before Liam shoots him in the head). If I have one criticism, it would be that a lot of the effects – blood splatter; bullet holes; flying debris, etc. – are quite conspicuously digitally composited. This is to be expected in modern TV, and Gangs of London has always made use of digital compositing to an extent, but I feel like it’s not usually as obvious as it is here. (S1 E2 and S1 E5 both feature a lot of real explosions and props being thrown into disarray in-camera; again, I have to wonder if Season 3 was working with a reduced budget.)

Luan’s men put up a valiant fight, but being outmanoeuvred, they’re slaughtered almost to a man by the Wallaces. Luan just manages to escape by taking Marian hostage, and even then, Billy wings him. He and his driver, Artan (Nikolaos Brahimllari) escape back to Luan’s estate, where he gathers Mirlinda and Bukuroshe and flees into the woods before Billy, Marian and Cornelius catch up. Artan – loyal to a fault – stays behind to bargain for clemency on Luan’s behalf, which goes about as well for him as you’d probably expect. No promises of business concessions are going to make this war go away.

Meanwhile, Elliot traces the switched out license plates to a warehouse, and almost catches Lale in the process of transferring the barrels to a new vehicle. Lale, her face covered, keeps him at bay with a few shots of suppressing fire. She destroys any forensic evidence in the old van with a grenade tossed through the rear door, and speeds away in the new van with the coke. Despite Elliot’s heroic, Jackie Chan-esque attempt to cling on to the vehicle’s rear door, she throws him off, escaping without either him or Shannon identifying her.

Lale’s a skilful operator, and she’s pretty successfully thrown Elliot off her trail; the one lead he is able to extract from the scene is one he’d never have known to look for. His eyes alight on an old fire escape, where a faded logo is emblazoned with peeling, rust-red spraypaint. He recognises it, and so does the viewer; it’s the same logo that was printed on the paperwork his wife had on her the night that she and Samuel died.

Oh yes: it’s all quite a twisted web. I have to give this to Season 3: for as much as it disregards the dynamics and relationships between characters established in previous seasons, and for as much as it freely throws the baby out with the bathwater, it’s meticulous as a self-contained mystery story. Season 1, for all its strengths, wasn’t really much of a whodunnit: by the middle of that season, it was pretty easy to figure out who ordered Finn’s murder, and why. Here at the middle of Season 3, the intrigue is more tantalising and more obscure than ever. Why is Lale doing this? Who is Zeek, and what’s his agenda? And how does it tie in with what Naomi was doing before she was killed? We’re only just starting to grasp the threads that connect these questions.

A couple more twists close out the episode. The first concerns Simone, conferring in her office with her oleaginous aide, Henry (Sebastian Armesto). He suggests that this might be the appropriate time to start pushing for a radical policy reform that she’s been hesitant to advocate for: complete drug legalisation in London. It would mean cutting the gangs’ source of revenue off at the knees, while ensuring that users have access to a quality-assured, taxable product. After the six-hundred mortalities caused by the contaminated coke, Henry supposes that the electorate is willing to listen to solutions that will move the drug trade into legal, regulated channels.

Second, and more dramatically: Elliot returns to his father’s old flat, in the hope that he might find some documents that might shed some light on the mysterious logo. What he finds instead when he arrives is the whole shipment of Belgian beer cans, stacked ceiling high in his childhood bedroom. Stunned, he moves to leave… but before he can, Zeek walks into the room, holding him at gunpoint.

I criticised S3 E3 for feeling like a clunky gear-shift of an episode; no such criticism here. S3 E4 is an explosive 45 minutes of TV, materially moving the plot forward in dynamic, exciting ways.

(Something I don’t think I’ve made explicit in this series of reviews, and I probably should: I’ve already seen the whole season. I binged it on NOW TV within 48 hours of its release, before I wrote the first word about S3 E1, so I do know the answers to the various mysteries it sets up, and which characters are ultimately behind it all. Rewatching the season’s first half, it’s honestly rather impressive how well the intrigue is seeded; how scenes play differently when you know which characters know more than they’re letting on.

I bring this up, because even on a rewatch, there’s a detail that still confuses me. I don’t understand how Sean figures into the poisoning plot. By now, it’s clear that Sean was telling the truth when he said he was framed for the fentanyl spiking; the way he was eliminated by the actual conspirators confirms that. But we’re given to understand that the original shipment of “clean” cocaine was swapped out for a duplicate consignment of tainted cocaine, during the 30 minutes when the haulier stopped at Cornelius’s funfair.

So… what was actually going on during those 30 minutes, and why would Cornelius have denied seeing a truck? Was the SatNav history a deliberate misdirection by the real poisoners, with the expectation that Elliot would find it? Because that seems incredibly baroque, and also implies they knew about Sean’s communication with Cornelius. And are we to understand that the plot to break Sean out of prison was completely unrelated to the fentanyl spiking, and by an amazing coincidence, just happened to be planned for the same weekend?? Aaaaaargh.)

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.

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, 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.)

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

I had a long commute to a shitty job, about an hour of driving in western Massachusetts, and I needed something to fill the air. My Favorite Murder kept showing up in Apple’s Top 10 most popular podcasts, so I downloaded a chunk of episodes and hit play.

The hosts of MFM have maintained that their podcast helps their overwhelmingly female listenership in a couple of ways: one, by promoting mental health; two, by teaching women how to not get murdered. In an email exchange with The Atlantic, co-host Georgia Hardstark writes, “It’s a lot like exposure therapy, where you have to confront your fear to prove that it can’t actually hurt you. Basically neither of us are willing to let our horror of true crime keep us from our fascination [with] it. Reading an awful story and then thinking, ‘We have to talk about this on the podcast!’ instead of, ‘I have to hide this from my Google history!’ makes all the difference.” Framing your popular comedy show about the worst days of other people’s lives as “exposure therapy” is interesting: you have to wonder if the last thoughts of the black gay men Dahmer hacked to pieces to shove in his fridge were something along the lines of, “I hope the white middle-manager listening to the grisly details of how my head got pickled feels a little better about herself as she fires one of her employees for taking long lunch breaks.”

The MFM hosts are performing a really odd kind of magic trick here, a variation of the saw the woman in half trick, but where they saw the woman in half, then walk out to the front of the stage and explain how they’ve learned to be less afraid of being sawed in half (meanwhile, the woman sawed in half stays sawed in half). Abracadaver. I listened to the podcast for a while on these long commutes; the stories of the murdered women (and, rarely, men) were grisly, of course, but I had this uncomfortable feeling that after a year of listening, and hundreds of hours of “exposure therapy,” I still didn’t really know any better how not to get murdered, besides some obvious best practices: don’t be a person of color (), don’t be a sexual minority (), don’t be a sex worker ().

I stopped listening, and began to see the increasing popularity of the True Crime genre as another symptom of a terminally sick society that, instead of choosing to help people of color, sexual minorities, and sex workers, was doomed to merely empower white women on their morning commutes.

This is all a long preamble to talking about the film Red Rooms, which released in 2023, but nobody you know has seen. That’s changing a bit: an upcoming Blu-Ray release for the film seems to be sparking new interest on Letterboxd.

Red Rooms is a 2023 French court drama that was perhaps overshadowed by the other big 2023 French court drama, Anatomy of a Fall. That it’s a far better film than Anatomy of a Fall is selling it short: Red Rooms is easily in the top five films I’ve seen in 2024.

The story follows Kelly-Anne, played by Juliette Gariépy, a model and online poker player who is attending the murder trial of a man named Ludovic Chevalier. In one long, unbroken shot, the camera floats through the courtroom as the prosecution introduces the case: Ludovic is accused of murdering three teenage girls, filming the murders, and broadcasting them online. The nominal red room is something of an urban legend, a nightmarish space where murder is transformed into grotesque spectacle for others. David Cronenberg played with the red rooms legend in Videodrome, sending James Woods on a hellish investigation into a cult that is using red rooms to, paradoxically, purge society of the kind of viewer who would actively seek out this content. Videodrome’s most famous line—“Long live the new flesh”—is a sort of prophetic prayer for the media space Red Rooms is exploring in 2023, one where a woman like Kelly-Anne can become her own kind of murderino for the worst days of three young girls’ lives.

Who is Kelly-Anne? The camera, in this long, unbroken opening shot, finally settles on her in the courtroom audience. She’s lovely, in that French way: eyes as big and round as macarons, and a stare as cold and cutting as a guillotine. She sleeps in a cubby outside the court building. She’s the first in line at the courtroom security checkpoint. She takes the same seat in the far back row of the courtroom, the victims’ parents shoulders facing her. Is she homeless? No. She has a nice high-rise apartment, we learn, where she seems to spend most of her time playing video poker and earning outrageous sums in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. She only seems to consume smoothies. She is also a model, dressing in high fashion couture, posing enigmatically at a series of photoshoots. We never see her taking pleasure in these pursuits: there is a grim efficiency to Kelly-Anne’s life that narrows her pursuits to two domains: making money, and attending Ludovic’s trial.

Who is Kelly-Anne? We will be asking this question over and over for the next two hours, as we rarely leave the presence of Kelly-Anne, but whose motives and psychology become more and more inscrutable (and alarming) as the movie goes on. Is she a murderino like the MFM listeners, trapped in a fan’s echo chamber of empowerment and therapeutic best practices? Or is she… something else?

There’s another woman who keeps attending the trial, a mousey freak named Clementine, who catches the eye of Kelly-Anne. They share a lunch at break, and Clementine reveals what kind of murderino she is: more or less, she’s in love with Ludovic. Clementine gives an impassioned defense of Ludovic’s innocence, noting that the evidence the prosecution is relying upon is flimsy—that masked white man in the red room tapes, while he looks like Ludovic, could be any of a thousand white guys in Montreal. Kelly-Anne listens to Clementine dispassionately. Kelly-Anne looks, in fact, like a predator regarding some perfectly stupid prey. We understand pretty quickly that Clementine is a lunatic of a sort; she has that crazed, cultish energy of a Manson follower, of someone who can’t see beyond the quivering penumbra of their horniness to the grisly subject of their horniness (horniness usually requires this kind of defective vision).

Kelly-Anne doesn’t seem horny for Ludovic, nor for Clementine. In fact, Kelly-Anne doesn’t seem at all sexually motivated—though she invites Clementine back to her apartment, she makes no move to fuck. She seems to pity Clementine: the girl has traveled from the provinces to Quebec, and is running out of money. She says Clementine can keep her things at her apartment. She shows Clementine her computer array, and the artificial intelligence that she has programmed herself. We learn Kelly-Anne is quite good with computers, and with masking her online presence.

The trial progresses. Clementine and Kelly-Anne are now sleeping outside the courtroom together. The camera begins to take more interest in the victims’ parents, in particular Francine, the mother of the youngest victim. We learn that two tapes exist for the two other victims, but the third tape for Francine’s daughter was never found. In interviews with the press, Francine actually calls out the presence of Kelly-Anne and Clementine and the other murderinos attending the trial. One of the bitter ironies of fair and public trials is that they must be open to the public, which of course means that a murderino like Clementine, horny for Ludovic, is allowed to attend the same back-and-forth discussions of how your daughter was dismembered.

Kelly-Anne, so good with computers, discovers the address of Francine’s home. She goes on the dark web and… figures out Francine’s front door passcode. She begins to stake out the mother’s home, walking up to the memorial for her slain daughter, walking up to the windows. She peers inside. She goes to the front door, unlocks it, turns around, leaves.

Who is Kelly-Anne?

In one virtuosic scene at Kelly-Anne’s apartment, she and Clementine tune into a call-in TV show discussing the Ludovic case. Kelly-Anne projects the show on one of her apartment’s empty walls, while Clementine calls in. The hosts pity Clementine. They say she has been corrupted by the media, by her own foolishness. The framing of the scene, with the computer monitor positioned behind Clementine, and Clementine staring at the projection on the wall, suggests that people like Clementine live in a maze of mediating screens, the stories we tell about guilt and innocence, about empowerment and therapeutics, sold to an audience that has already made up their minds about their own righteousness (that their minds are made up of what they consume goes, gracefully and conveniently, unacknowledged).

The hosts hang up on Clementine, who is left in bitter tears. She knows Ludovic is innocent. She just does. This is when Kelly-Anne does something unlike herself, so far as we know her: she asks if Clementine would like to see the red room tapes. How on earth does Kelly-Anne have them, Clementine asks. Kelly-Anne tells her about the dark web, about media secreted inside media, screens within screens. Clementine agrees to watch the tapes, and the film pulls off another great trick: instead of showing us the tapes, it shows the two women watching the tapes. Their faces are bathed in red light. Clementine’s eyes begin to shimmer with tears. We hear horrible sounds from the tapes. Clementine looks as if she is about to vomit. Beside her, Kelly-Anne’s inscrutable face. What is she feeling? Her face changes like a glacier calving changes: one elemental coldness collapsing into another elemental coldness. She blinks. She stares. She looks over to Clementine, reduced to a quivering mess. The tapes end, and Clementine rushes to the bathroom to vomit. The next day, Clementine moves out of Kelly-Anne’s apartment and leaves Montreal.

It’s at this point that I won’t go further into what happens in Red Rooms, because the film still has some incredible and disturbing surprises. A late scene in the courtroom, involving Kelly-Anne and a costume change, had me screaming out loud in astonishment, then laughing at my own astonishment. There’s a climactic scene, too, that involves an auction and ungodly amounts of bitcoin that is shot and edited like a taut thriller. Even though what Kelly-Anne is bidding on is unspeakable (as is what she plans to do with it), I found myself rooting for her. Like a rabid murderino.

In this regard, Red Rooms’ greatest trick is probably getting you to empathize with a true freak like Kelly-Anne, who will go down alongside the Woman in Scarlett Johansson’s Under the Skin as one of cinema’s great freak fatales. There are limits to this kind of synthetic empathy, of course: regarding the pain of others isn’t the same as experiencing their pain. (Just as regarding freaks does not necessarily make you a freak—though maybe you ought to stop doing that.) Susan Sontag noted this distinction in her famous essay of the same name, Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag, after interrogating the value of war photography, arrives at a place of empathetic uselessness. She writes,

Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture. There’s no threat of protest. They are not about to yell at us to bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They haven’t come back to life in order to stagger off to denounce the war-makers who sent them to kill and be killed.

The victims in the red rooms aren’t looking out at their audience. They aren’t interested in shaming them for looking. For wanting to look. Their interests are far more immediate: they are begging to have their lives spared. Sontag goes on to say of the dead that they are “are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? ‘We’—this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like.

So what is the appeal for the murderino? For Kelly-Anne? Why do we want to look into these red rooms at all? For Sontag, the answer is simple: these photographs let us feel lucky that it wasn’t us. The red room is a relief, in this regard: it is their red room, not ours. When the hosts of My Favorite Murder say they are empowering their murderinos, they’re saying this: you are not dead. Congratulations.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

(Update: Season 3 is here!)

I mean, he’s still dead, obviously, so he has a good excuse. But in Season 1, he was a looming presence from beyond the grave. The episodes were periodically stippled with flashbacks to Sean’s past, where we saw how his father towered over him, Colm Meaney’s fleshy bulk making the slender Joe Cole look effeminate and fragile by comparison.

Season 2 still intermittently uses flashbacks (and flash-forwards) as narrative devices, but Finn doesn’t show up in any of them. Colm Meaney is nowhere to be seen in the whole season; presumably not invited to reprise his role.

He gets namechecked here and there. In this very episode, Sean and Koba are trying to gain the favour of Bibi Agostini, a Parisian people trafficker who was once Finn’s business associate and potential mistress. (Tamar Baruch plays Agostini with a cruel, matriarchal sort of charisma. Between her and Marian, Finn obviously had a type.) The three of them have a laugh together about what a horndog Finn was.

And yet – even though this whole show was set in motion by Finn’s assassination – his memory feels vague and distant. Despite the lip service in the dialogue, I don’t get the sense that Finn is a motivating factor for Sean anymore. Sean’s whole mission at this point is to consolidate his control over London.

And, like… why?

Didn’t he have his whole personal epiphany back in S1 E8, when he reckoned with the fact his father was a philandering arsehole who effectively disowned him? Didn’t he have his heart-to-heart with Alex in S1 E9, when he so fervently insisted: “We are not our fathers”?

I could buy that Sean wanted revenge against the Investors for his father’s death, but it seems he’s functionally achieved that already. S2 E6 treated the assassination of the Investors as if it were a footnote in the overarching plot; rendered offscreen, reported to the audience second-hand through news bulletins. What, then, is driving him to crown himself God-King of London? What matters to him that he’s working towards?

In S2 E3 he declares, passionately: “I’m a Wallace!” Sure. Fine. But what does Wallacehood entail, at this point? Is Sean really committed to carrying on the legacy of his cowardly loser of a Dad? What’s stopping him from just living the rest of his life on a Malibu beach? It seems like the writers need him to be a power-hungry megalomaniac, just to justify the plot points they have lined up.

Season 2’s character writing is very superficial. I don’t understand what Sean wants; or, if I do, I don’t understand why he wants it.

Nor Marian; I still don’t buy that she’d sell Sean out as easily as she does, let alone hold Billy prisoner at gunpoint when he gets wise to her treachery. This loose alliance between her, Shannon, Ed, and Luan against Sean, Koba, and Asif feels like an unconvincing state of affairs. We’re approaching the end of the season, and the lines for the climactic battle needed to be drawn somewhere, but this just seems arbitrary. What commonality do these particular characters share? What am I supposed to find compelling about their working together? I get the impression that none of these people have convictions or allegiances that run very deep; no person or philosophy that they won’t turn their back on the moment the wind starts blowing the other way.

And then there’s Elliot. I understand what Elliot wants, at least: he’s on a full-blown rampage at this point, brutalising and killing a lot of people in this episode for a shot at revenge against Sean. Again: I don’t like the fact that this is the trajectory his character arc took. Until now, Elliot stood in contrast to the power-hungry criminals around him. All the violence he committed was always in defense of something; either an ideal or an innocent.

Now, after the murder of his father, Elliot has turned into… well, John Wick, essentially. He’s a sharply dressed avatar of vengeance, out to punish and destroy the people who wronged him.

And that’s kinda boring. So he’s out for revenge: who isn’t out for revenge in this fucking show? It’s like the default state that everyone drifts towards by Brownian motion. It makes the cast feel homogenous. There’s no meaningful difference between one character and another; they’re all just rocks in a rock tumbler, rendered smooth and indistinguishable by friction and impact.

And yet – plot twist – I think S2 E7 is a damn good episode of TV.

“Superficial,” I called the writing: and that it is. But Gangs of London is good at superficial pleasures. Its story’s large-scale, long-term details may be gibberish, but when it comes to the short- and medium-term? This show can still shred when it wants to.

Corin Hardy returns as director, helming the last two episodes of the season. He orchestrates this penultimate episode around a single, protracted set-piece; Elliot’s infiltration of a Parisian nightclub. It’s the best set-piece of Season 2; maybe the second-best set-piece in the whole series, trailing only the epic gunfight in S1 E5.

The setup: Asif’s London-bound shipment of heroin has been hijacked (Luan and Marian are behind it). Without the cash-flow they were supposed to get from the heroin, their position is compromised. Sean hits upon a solution: one of his father’s old associates in Paris, Bibi Agostini, who might front him the drugs he needs to stay afloat, in return for a favourable business relationship. They take Saba with them, to act as a French/English translator.

Marian leaks this plan to her co-conspirators, and Elliot takes it as an opportunity to catch his enemies unaware while they’re on foreign soil. He meets up with a team of mercenaries in France to trail Sean and Koba, looking for an opening to strike. He finds just such an opening when he captures Saba. Reminding her of the night in the fishmarket when he saved her life, he offers her an opportunity to get her revenge on the Wallace scion, by facilitating his.

Saba takes him up on his offer; she plants a gun in a toilet cistern (a nod to The Godfather? Probably!) in the nightclub where Sean’s party meets with Agostini, and covertly feeds Elliot information on where to find them. These scenes feel like playing a stage of a Hitman game, in the best sense of that comparison. Jahz Armando portrays Saba as a lamb descending into the lions’ den; she’s part of Sean’s entourage, but Sean is well aware of the animosity she bears him for killing her father. One false move or badly-timed glance at her text history could leave her catastrophically exposed, and Elliot’s operation utterly compromised. Hardy ekes exquisite tension out of moments like her being frisked by club security, and the process of actually planting the gun.

Nevertheless, she plays her part well, and the plan gets as far as Elliot making his way into the club, armed and masquerading as a waiter headed to Agostini’s VIP booth. It’s here that the episode pulls its showiest flourish: it does the Silence of the Lambs thing, where the cross-cutting between the Agostini meeting and Elliot’s approach to the VIP booth deliberately misdirects the viewer. Elliot gets into a gruesome fight with the guards outside, and bursts through the door…

…And it’s the wrong booth. He’s just exploded as a tidal wave of blood and death into a karaoke party being thrown by a completely unrelated group of wealthy Koreans.

Saba, looking extremely uncomfortable as Sean and Agostini toast a new partnership, sneaks a look at her phone on another floor of the club. Her all-caps message – “WRONG ROOM ABORT” – has failed to send.

Elliot is left to fight his way out of the club, and his battle through an army of pissed-off Korean bodyguards is an epic. (One of his opponents is played by Jean-Paul Ly, star of the fun 2017 Cambodian Raid knock-off Jailbreak). Nightclubs are overrepresented onscreen as spaces for stylised, ultraviolent action, and I think there’s a reason for that. There’s something about a space that’s designed to facilitate sensory excess and Bacchanalian hedonism that automatically lends itself to scenes of cathartic, bloody expression.

I compared Elliot to John Wick in this episode, and the comparison wasn’t idle. Gangs of London’s budget doesn’t extend to a set as grand as e.g. the Berlin club in John Wick: Chapter 4, of course, but the club in S2 E7 fulfills a similar function. Elliot’s journey is Orphean; descending through, then escaping from, a literal underworld. The trick with the cross-cutting just serves to underline the impression the club makes, with its reflective surfaces, and neon colours, and labyrinthine floorplan, and ear-splitting EDM. It’s a space that’s irrational; surreal; inebriating just by virtue of stepping inside.

And Hardy makes terrific use of the space. DP Björn Charpentier employs the kind of roving handheld and energetic pans and tilts that I associate with Matt Flannery’s camerawork in action scenes, milking the fight for every drop of its intensity. What begins as a gun battle transitions to a brutal melee, Elliot using a mic stand as an improvised polearm for some gnarly finishing moves. Tim Connolly’s choreography sings.

S2 E7 is tautly paced and well-structured as a discrete episode of TV; plotted with the kind of flair and focus that I remember from S1 E3 and S1 E4. It starts from a clear inciting incident (the hijacked heroin shipment), and from there the tangled subplots dovetail and converge in ingenious ways. It points the way to a climactic reckoning from its first moments, and methodically brings its tension to a boil as it approaches that climax, such that the eventual explosion of spectacle feels earned as a pay-off.

It punts Elliot and Sean’s final confrontation to the season finale, but even though the final battle is deferred by the wrong-booth twist, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out or a narrative dodge. There are material consequences to this failed assassination attempt. Agostini cancels the deal when she sees Sean and Koba as vulnerable, leaving their position in London more tenuous than ever. Saba is discovered as a saboteur, and although Elliot escapes, CCTV footage confirms to Sean just who is trying to kill him… and leads him to suspect who among his confidants betrayed him.

It’s great fun; the most straightforwardly fun that Gangs of London has been in ages. It finds the show in the mode where it’s most comfortable with itself; playful genre pastiche, remixing tropes and images handed down from Johnnie To and Michael Mann and Kim Jee-Woon and Chad Stahelski.

After the nightclub sequence, the episode still has one surprise up its sleeve, however, and it’s a nasty one. In the final scene, Sean is back in the Wallace townhouse, working himself up to confront Marian about her treachery. The conversation is cut short, though, when they take delivery of a package: a cardboard box, with one of its corners seeping something unsavoury. They look inside… to find Billy’s severed arm.

An earlier scene in this episode sees Elliot monologuing directly to the camera, talking about the experience of being “a pawn in someone else’s game.” The humiliations that he and his father endured all their life at the hands of the wealthy and powerful. “Pawns can’t be kings,” he was taught in childhood.

It’s an eerie, intense scene; framed in extreme close up against a pitch-dark background, Dìrísù’s face lit from below by a single, dim lantern. The episode returns to this framing device at the end; we discover that the person on the receiving end of Elliot’s monologue is a visibly scared Billy, strapped to a chair. He grows more terrified still when the dead-eyed Elliot advances towards him, wielding a hatchet.

If pawns can’t be kings, Elliot wonders aloud, can kings instead be turned into pawns? Can the elites of the world be made to understand the suffering, the degradation, the humiliation of the powerless? He’s worked so hard and sacrificed so much for the hope that the rich and the influential can be held to account by societal justice. Now, though, Elliot is finally prepared to adopt a rather more Nietzschean worldview; that the ability to inflict pain and suffering on others is sovereign.

The chess analogy is sophomoric, and not even terribly apt. (Can a pawn become a king, or a king a pawn? Well… no, not according to the mechanics of any chess game I’ve ever played. Bit of a dead-end of a metaphor.) Nevertheless, Gangs of London is keen on its chess imagery. In the key art for Season 2, used to advertise the show on billboards and streaming service landing pages, the London skyline is rendered to have its towers look like game pieces. The show would like its viewership to conceptualise it like a chess game; for its constant shifting of power dynamics; for its gambits and counter-gambits; for the ways that players can be suddenly and ruthlessly removed from the board.

Now, I like chess as much as the next nerd. (I’m not good at it, but I like it.) I enjoy the dilemmas it generates, in the choice between one move or another. I enjoy how seemingly innocuous decisions early on can have drastic ramifications further down the line. I enjoy how carefully laid traps and careless mistakes can lead to immediate reversals of fortune. I enjoy the ways that players can spend dozens of turns manouevring and counter-manouevring, building a latticework of tension and pressure between pieces, only for it to finally snap, ending in a bloodbath that clears a third of the board.

All of these are pleasures that I get from S2 E7.

The trouble is… well, I don’t empathise with chess pieces. It’s a game that’s deliberately abstracted and decontextualised. The pieces don’t meaningfully represent or refer to anything except the actions they can perform in their ludic environment. I might be annoyed if my knight is taken, but it’s not because I was ever fond of that knight; I’m just annoyed that I’ve lost its utility.

That feels, to me, like the wrong attitude for a showrunner to have about the characters with whom they populate their fiction. It goes a long way towards explaining why Season 2 feels so casually inhuman. If the dramatis personae are all just pieces on a cosmic chessboard, it helps me understand why their motivations and allegiances feel so slapdash and arbitrary, even while their conflicts can be as precise and as thrilling as they are here.

This episode features, perhaps, my favourite bit of acting in the entire show. After butchering Ms. Kane in her home, Elliot wanders in a daze for a while, before finally ending up back in the dingy hotel room where he left Ed with Shannon. Shannon finds him slumped in an armchair, wearing the same glassy, vacant expression he’s had ever since seeing his Dad’s body at the airport.

I’d actually found myself going off Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù’s performance as Elliot in the first half of this season. As a hitman for the Investors, and a rat for Singer, Elliot was inexpressive; dour; prickly. For a while, I thought Dìrísù had lost the thread of the show’s most relatable character.

But then, in this sequence, all of the turbulent emotions that Elliot’s kept a lid on come boiling to the surface at once. We’ve never seen him like this before; he sobs, and babbles, and hyperventilates, and clutches at himself, jerking away when Shannon horrifiedly tries to comfort him. These are the mannerisms of a small boy, learning that No, in fact, It’s Not All Going to Be OK. They’re the mannerisms of a person in the grip of anguish so acute that the experience is literally intolerable, from one second to the next. It’s authentically upsetting to watch; more so than any of the simulated gore effects Gangs of London routinely trafficks in.

As much as I hate the choices in the show’s writing that led this character to this point in the first place, I find that I completely buy the depth of Elliot’s pain. And, when Shannon reveals to him that Sean is culling the Investors, and he puts two-and-two together that Sean was the one who killed his Dad for that flash drive, I buy the profundity of his need for revenge.

That’s the thing: Gangs of London is very good at melodrama. It knows the gestures to use to communicate epic rage, and terror, and sorrow, and dread, and heartbreak. It knows exactly where to place the camera, and what direction to give its actors, to convey emotional urgency and depth of feeling.

Most of the time, anyway. S2 E6 also contains my least favourite piece of acting in the whole show. Now that they’re well on their way to wiping the Investors off the board, Sean and his new ally Koba try to win Asif over to their side. Asif’s smuggling operation is the biggest in London, and he stands to lose the most if the Investors cease to not be unalive. Sean and Koba need him in their corner if they want to control London.

Without Sean’s knowledge, Koba offers Asif a “sweetener”; something to make a change of allegiance more palatable. That sweetener is Lale: the woman who murdered his son. Lale is snatched away from the heart of her hideout, and wakes up to find herself suspended from her ankles, hanging hogtied from a rope in Asif’s drawing room.

Sean confronts Koba about the deal he made; selling the woman he loves(?) for a foothold in London’s criminal ecosystem. Koba justifies himself: the Investors are weakened, but not destroyed. They’ll come back, and when they do, he and Sean need to be entrenched as the dominant power in this corner of the global economy. “Don’t be led by your dick, Sean,” he admonishes the Wallace scion.

Sean gets right up in his face and screams: “This is not! About! My! FUCKING! DIIIIIIICK!!!”

That’s a pretty terrible line of dialogue, all by itself, but what elevates it to realms of unintentional comedy is Joe Cole’s shrieking, go-for-broke line delivery, accompanied by a scare-chord on the soundtrack. Here, the actor leans all the way into the histrionic gestures that caused me to find Sean off-putting from the word go.

S2 E6 benefits from having a tight scope and a taut pace. The episode is structured around Lale’s capture and imprisonment. Reader: if you’ve been following along with this series of recaps, you’ve probably picked up that I simp for Narges Rashidi, in her role as the leader of the Kurdish insurgency. So be it: this episode gives her the spotlight, and she dazzles.

Being the resourceful freedom-fighter that she is, she manages to swing herself like a pendulum over to a table, where Asif left Chekhov’s whisky snifter. Crushing it in her palm, she surreptitiously cuts through her bonds. She almost manages to kill Asif, after goading him with the memory of the son she slaughtered. Theirs is the oldest and most deeply-felt enmity between any two characters in Gangs of London, and Asif Raza Mir makes a great scene partner for Rashidi; where he puts up a smarmy facade with other characters, with her, his hate is lain bare.

She almost delivers the coup de grâce, but Asif activates the house’s alarm, and she has to fight her way out through waves of bodyguards.

Gangs of London is at its best for as long as it stays suspended in its set-pieces, and S2 E6 has a tremendous one. Director Nima Nourizadeh already did a great job with Elliot’s infiltration of Koba’s compound in S2 E5, and Lale’s escape from Asif’s opulent townhouse is even better. Her battle leads her from a dining room, through a kitchen, to a climactic, vicious struggle with multiple simultaneous opponents in an opulent bathroom.

The sequence plays with high-contrast, Nicolas Winding-Refn-esque lighting, a visual affectation that contrasts the cinematography’s usual drab palette. The bathroom’s ambient lighting is controlled by a panel on the side of a hot tub, which keeps getting incidentally mashed by the combatants, cycling through primary and secondary colours. A light source is even incorporated into the choreography itself; when Lale uses a torch to stave in an opponent’s skull, the blood-drenched bulb briefly casts the scene in a deep, ruby red. It’s very Evil Dead 2; not remotely a plausible way for the light and the blood to interact, but it’s a memorable, stylish flourish, which is all the justification it needs.

The craft that goes into shaping these high-key action beats is reliably exemplary in Gangs of London. The choreography is intense; the physical performances are persuasive; the rhythms of tension and release are orchestrated with confidence and flair. Most movies – let alone TV shows – struggle to meet the standards that this show routinely sets for its action.

But, as Season 2 wears on to its conclusion, it grows harder to ignore the way that the spectacle is trotted out like a show pony, repeating the same handful of tricks with minor variations. This could work in a more episodic, monster-of-the-week mode of television. But we’re not in that mode: this is serialised drama, the dynamics shifting wildly from one episode to the next. The showrunners keep contriving new reasons for ultraviolent conflict, but that violence is increasingly divorced from any sort of coherent context.

In this episode, for instance, Shannon brokers a meeting between Ed and Marian (two people who, if you remember, tried to kill each other the last time they met in person). Marian has misgivings about Sean aligning himself with Koba; misgivings so severe, apparently, that she’s willing to depose her son and reinstate the old Wallace-Dumani partnership, with the elder generation re-emerging as the rulers of London.

Which… what?? I mean, seriously, if you take a step back and think about it: what??? Back in Season 1, Marian was one of the main agents who caused the rift between the Wallaces and the Dumanis in the first place! She was the quickest to assume that Ed was complicit in her husband’s murder, and the first to encourage Sean to blow everything up in reprisal. For her to ally herself with Ed, against Sean, is such a wild 180 for the character to take.

Sure, she’s expressed some grudging reticence about Sean’s leadership, and she has reason to dislike Koba. (He tried to helicopter-assassinate her, after all.) But, I mean… Ed’s tried to kill her, too, and that represented an intimate, personal violation of trust, as opposed to Koba’s remote, indifferent professionalism. The groundwork has not remotely been laid for such a sharp, sudden change in this character’s priorities, and I’m not convinced by the perfunctory dialogue handed to Michelle Fairley.

Do you see what I mean, about the lack of “coherent context”? I’ve tried very hard in these reviews to recount the events of Season 2 as though they make sense, so I don’t think I’ve quite captured the feeling of the show steadily becoming unmoored, free-floating nonsense. Anyone might betray anyone else, at any time, for any reason, as long as it generates a pretext for more fight scenes.

Case in point: Lale successfully escapes Asif’s lair, though not before he gouges a chunk out of her foot with a poker. She limps barefoot into the rain-damp streets of London in the middle of the night, gasping and whimpering from her incredible exhaustion and physical pain. An SUV pulls up beside her, and the driver climbs out to greet her. Terror turns to relief on her face: it’s Sean.

He gently loads her into the back of the car. Lale’s inner monologue echoes romantically on the soundtrack: “You came for me… you came for me…”

Then, Sean delivers her right back to Asif’s house.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, as he shuts the door behind him. Lale is dragged down the hallway by her hair, screaming her lungs out, back into the Hell she just fought so hard to escape.

Like I say: the melodrama of it is effective. Rashidi throws herself body and soul into this episode, selling the bejesus out of this ferocious warrior-woman who clings to a single, tenuous thread of hope, only to have it snap. The direction milks Sean’s betrayal of the person he loves(?) for every drop of pathos and cruelty.

But, when considered soberly: is this really the most productive course for Gangs of London’s ongoing drama to take? Why, exactly, does Sean feel that he has to deliver Lale to Asif? The script frames it as something he does sorrowfully and reluctantly, as though he has no other choice… but why? He’s holding all the cards right now. The Investors are running scared after he obtained the flash drive; we hear news reports of overseas financiers being murdered in their droves. And he’s made Koba and Asif look like punks for the last five episodes; why should he have to indulge their whims? He’s not between a rock and a hard place, here.

If Sean did decide to rescue Lale from Asif’s clutches, sure, that would drive a wedge between him and his new allies… but wouldn’t that be a better way to generate conflict as we head into the season’s endgame? Wouldn’t it give Sean a little bit of humanity, some meaningful inner conflict, for him to have someone he protects out of love, despite the strategic advantage? If this was, in fact, About His Fucking Dick? Would that not complicate him in an interesting way?

Corin Hardy wanted Gangs of London to be “the most dangerous show on television.” I think we’re seeing the results of that mission, once again. Every time a character reaches a crossroads, they take the darker path, without fail. They invariably choose the course of action that will lead them to become more callous; more inhumane. (The sole exception I can think of is Ed, coming to Luan’s defence in Episode 4: lo and behold, my favourite character beat in the season.)

After a certain number of crossings, the darkness becomes numbing; banal; expected. It’s not shocking for Sean to betray Lale, at this point; he’s demonstrated, ad nauseam, that he’ll pursue power at any cost. The melodramatic way that Sean is framed in this moment treats him like he’s a tragic, conflicted antihero… but he really isn’t. At every inflection point, every moment that counts, he’s revealed himself to be a brutal, cruel, ruthless mob boss, and Joe Cole’s moist-eyed performance can’t distract from how one-note his character has become.