So let’s get all this straight.

To pay off a dangerous mob boss, Eddie Horniman and Susie Glass need a marijuana decriminalization bill to pass. To pass the bill, they need support in the House of Lords. To get that support in the House of Lords, they have to bribe the Lords. To bribe the Lords, they have to use Lord Hawthorne. To use Lord Hawthorne, they have to frame him for killing a lover while he was blacked out. To keep Lord Hawthorne from collapsing while they’re using him, they have to tell him they blacked him out and he didn’t kill his lover. 

And Furthermore: To further secure their support in the House of Lords, they’ll need the backing of the Lords Spiritual, bishops with the Church of England. To get the backing of the Lords Spiritual, they’ll need the support of the Bishop of Sussex (Tracy Horrocks, an extraordinary bit of casting), who hates drug use. To get her support, they’ll have to bail her son Oscar Thorne (Jamie Ward) out of trouble.

Still with me?

To get Oscar out of trouble, they’ll have to placate Pat Gallagher (Stanley Townsend), the Irish gangster turned fight promoter to whom he owes tens of millions of pounds. To placate Pat Gallagher, they need to keep him out of jail. To keep him out of jail, they need to make sure he gets a visa from Sheikh Khalid Suliman (Moayad Alnefaie). To get the visa from the Sheikh, they have to give him an ultra-rare breeding falcon that Oscar purchased for the purpose. 

To give him that ultra-rare breeding falcon, they have to find where the hell it went after Oscar locked it in a room full of female falcons in hopes of breeding it himself and then lost it. To find where the hell the falcon went, they have to find the female falcon it mated with (falcons mate once, for life), and let it loose, because an idiot security guard named Aslan (Tom Davis) stole it, then took its hood off when Eddie found it and forced him to return it, causing it to chase a security drone off into the distance.

In the end, nearly everything works out. Bribes, falcons, visas, sheikhs, Irish guys — everything and everyone gets where they need to be. So now there’s nothing stopping Lord Hawthorne and the Bishop from leading the charge and getting the bill through the Lords.

Except for one thing. While Eddie and Susie intend to have the bill passed, their boss Bobby does not see their vision. So to keep Lord Hawthorne from becoming defiant and passing the bill, Bobby has him killed. This, indeed, has the intended effect: His death from a “heart attack” that somehow caused him to plummet from his window is the kind of message even hereditary peers can read loud and clear. Everyone, even the Bishop whose son they spent the whole episode saving, votes against it.

Meanwhile, Susie and Eddie’s personal lives are taking a turn. Everyone can see that there’s some kind of spark between them, even though they keep denying it. (To the show’s credit, it’s kept even innocuous physical interactions between them to a bare minimum; if and when they finally go for it, them sparks will fly, baby.) Even so, Eddie moves on to a very willing Bella, while Susie continues her forbidden affair with handsome coke maven Joe Green.

But when the four go to a fancy restaurant for a double date, Joe gets into it with an asshole frenemy who spots him from across the room. Eddie, to his chagrin, discovers that Joe’s a real hothead: He’s brought a gun to a restaurant, tucked in his waistband, and he flashes it at the asshole over some harmless ball-busting. On the way out, he actually assaults the guy, forcing Eddie to bribe the staff to keep the police out of it.  

The real mano a mano showdown here isn’t Eddie and Joe — believe it or not, it’s Eddie and Bobby himself. Escorted out of prison by guards directly to his family’s boxing-gym headquarters, he chews his daughter and her pal out for defying his orders. He tells Eddie in no uncertain terms that he’s just an employee, a general under the command of a field marshall…and more than that, a snake who’s hypnotized his daughter. 

The term infuriates the duke. Determined that no one ever mistake his kindness for weakness, Eddie shows no fear or hesitation in shouting right back at the old gangster. However foolhardy it is, Theo refuses to just sit there and take it from this guy. And just like that, Bobby Glass is Eddie’s enemy. Susie, meanwhile, is sentenced to exile — two weeks vacation, during which time he’ll sort out the duke. He does so by having goons throw a black bag over Eddie’s head.

There are two things really worth emphasizing in this episode. The first is how nice it looks. Taking over from creator and co-writer Guy Ritchie, director Eran Creevy displays a striking eye for color and framing. My favorite sequence in the whole episode is just Lord Hawthorne (god rest ye, merry gentleman) in ceremonial red, literally hiding his face in the wardrobe as he calls her with his crisis of conscience, while Eddie and Joe verbally spar in silhouette in a hallway lit in cold blue. Elsewhere, Susie and Bella converse in a crimson-lit multi-mirrored room that wouldn’t look out of place in Suspiria or The Neon Demon.

Coupled with these visual flourishes comes a verbal savagery about these wealthy predators that I find I’m really enjoying, in this time beneath the rule of wealthy predators. “Your heart is black, Susie Glass,” Lord Hawthorne tells her after finding his backbone at last. “Your soul is poison. The day will come when you will know nothing but true loneliness. It’s all you deserve…because you are a complete cunt.” I might have opted for something more poetic there, but the point stands.

Even more bracing is a throwaway line from Susie that I don’t know if I’ll ever stop thinking about. After she and Bella exit the cool Suspiria ladies’ room, Susie makes a comment that sums up so much about our age of kakistocracy, and our adaptive strategies to it. “If you can’t be happy, be merry,” she says, heading back to a table that has just ordered multiple bottles of champagne that cost more than my yearly income. It’s the Cabaret spirit made manifest, uttered by the kind of amoral money-grubbing gangster that made the world after Cabaret possible: Times are dark, but we’re having fun, aren’t we? Aren’t we? Aren’t we?