I actually feel bad for Richie Stevenson. How can you not? The day after he buried his son, who was stabbed dozens of times and chopped into bits, he lost his wife, who blew up along with her car in their own driveway. All this misery has been inflicted upon him and his by the Harrigans. In fact, they call to crow about it, with first Conrad then Maeve and finally even young Eddie taking turns gloating about the killings and their responsibility for them. In any other situation these would be the bad guys, and you’d be rooting for the cockney tough guy to burn their country house down around them; when he tells them “Run,” you’d cheer. But the Harrigans are the protagonists of MobLand, so now we’re along for their ride.
But it’s not quite clear who’s at the wheel. When Kevin confronts his mother about ordering the hit on Richie’s wife Vron, Conrad takes the blame, or claims the credit, instead. But his grasp of the operational details is shaky, and his rationale — no one insults “Conrad the Dread One Hundred Fuckin’ Guns Harrigan” without paying the price — is, as Kevin puts it to Harry, the stuff of “dying empires” and their mad kings. (Coming soon to a constitutional republic near you!) It seems more likely that Conrad found out about the hit after the fact along with everyone else, but pretended to have orchestrated it in order to save face in front of his family and soldiers and maintain the illusion that he’s in total control. Now he has to, as they put it on The Wire, fight on that lie.
While Maeve is having the time of her life, the other women of the family are not. Swept up along with all the Harrigans and brought to Conrad’s country house in the quaint region of the Cotswolds for safekeeping, Jan and Gina Da Souza are varying degrees of fed up with Harry. Jan drowns her sorrows in wine and pills with Bella, Kevin’s wife — and Harry’s former lover. There’s definitely an okay, you know that I know that you know vibe between the two of them, by the way.
Gina, by contrast, is incandescently furious: Harry yanked her out of an important exam due to all these criminal shenanigans, and it’s the last straw for her. She encourages her mother to simply take her and leave him, since she knows her mom can’t possibly be any happier living like this than she is. Jan dismisses the idea, but she doesn’t confirm that she loves Harry when Gina asks her, either. This leaves her vulnerable to the continuing efforts of undercover cop Emily — while Gina may be vulnerable, in a different way, to the roving eyes and hands of Conrad himself.
As for Harry, he’s sent to Antwerp to tie up a pair of loose ends. Family failson Brendan and his half-sister and unlikely business partner Seraphina are there for their big uncut-gems deal, and they’ve left their phones behind in a safe to avoid being tracked. So they have no idea that the Stevensons and the Harrigans are officially at war, leaving them sitting ducks for Richie’s Mexican allies to take down…once Richie gets their location from Maeve, who hates Conrad’s “bastard” daughter and wants her dead. Brendan, she insists, is to be spared. Okay Maeve, sure, whatever you say!
The jewel deal, a painstakingly negotiated and tense bit of business that plays out over a series of scenes, ends in gunfire. (It’s a clever bit of business, actually doing all that buildup only to knock the whole house of cards over.) Richie’s assassins wipe out every single character the episode introduces for the storyline, then train their guns on the Harrigans, even as Harry races to the site of the shootout on a stolen motorcycle. He can’t possibly get there in time to save them unless some misleading cross-cutting is being done here, but that’s the cliffhanger ending, and it’s 1960s Batman-esque in how charmingly flagrant it is. Will they live or die? Tune in next week to find out!
I certainly will, and happily. MobLand isn’t swinging for the fences or plumbing the depths, but it’s not trying to be The Sopranos and failing, it’s trying to be a show in which a bunch of cool attractive people bark orders or dodge bullets, with Tom Hardy’s deadpan machismo as its center of gravity. It’s easy as pie to assemble a great cast, write a big genre piece for them to perform, and call it a day, counting on familiar beats and familiar faces to carry the project. It’s much harder to do this well. (Does anyone else remember Zero Day?)
On the big screen, there’s a reason Conclave last year and Sinners this year caught on the way they did: big beautiful costumey pulse-pounding thrillers starring beloved actors that actually work are rarer these days than hen’s teeth. Both of those films are a sight more serious-minded than MobLand has shown itself to be, but the principle remains the same here. There’s a lot of unclaimed territory between tenderloin steak and fast-food franchise crap. Sometimes people just want to eat a goddamn burger. Give it to them!
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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