“The word got around that finally, there was a real gangster in town.” — Casino

It only occurs to me now, after this excellent episode of Paramount+’s MobLand, that the show has never had a really interesting villain. Discounting the shifting loyalties of the Harrigans themselves, all of whom are basically co-protagonists of the show, there’s really only been the tough-as-nails cockney crimelord Richie Stevenson and the cold-as-ice American macher Kat McAllister. You’ve seen British gangsters and Yankee black-ops bosses a million times. 

Frankie Cooper, by contrast, stands out in a crowd.

With his mop of hair and tracksuits, he looks like a man they found on a desert island somewhere, clinging to the belief that a 1994 festival with Oasis headlining was still going on. His speech is non-stop patter, non-stop bits, non-stop little jokes that more often than not are so smoothly delivered the target isn’t even given the opportunity to get mad. 

He arrives at the big meeting where he’s to negotiate the release of his hostage, Bella, whistling and riding an electric scooter. Other than a goofy white helmet, he’s brought no protection with him at all — no personal weapon, no retinue of guards and lieutenants and underbosses, just him. Meanwhile, the Harrigans have the whole meeting site, their own dockyard, guarded like the Corleone compound in Godfather I. “He looks like a fucking clown,” Kevin sneers, but it’s Frankie who’s made the Harrigans look like clowns. They need all that firepower, and all he needs is a scooter and a can-do attitude.

Frankie sits down with the Harrigans and makes his pitch. The long version is an extremely elaborate and, honestly, sensible restructuring of the business, ensuring fewer leaks and losses, greater security, higher revenue, and most importantly, peace in the streets. The details are many, but there’s only one point that matters at the end of it: Frankie, not Conrad and Maeve, is now in charge. The younger Harrigans can stay in place in the organization, serving as Frankie’s top people. The elder Harrigans get a bullet to the head

At this point, I personally am thinking Take the goddamn deal. I know that’s impossible — men like Harry and Kevin could never brook this assault on their power without looking unbelievably weak — but Frankie seems like a much better boss than Conrad or Maeve. (It seems clear that Conrad is going to let his dick pick the family’s next lawyer for them, for instance.) Frankie talks circles around the Harrigan family braintrust of Harry, Kevin, and Seraphina — more on that later — and his plans are better than anything they’ve come up with. Perhaps most pointedly, he correctly notes that everything was fine until Conrad literally went berserk and started a war with Richie, costing his own family a fortune in blood and treasure. None of the three potential heirs to the throne can even muster a counterargument.

Frankie won’t even go into discussing Maeve, and frankly, who can blame him. The family’s great schemer has one of her most repulsive episodes yet, continuing to rely on Conrad’s son/grandson Eddie as her weapon of choice by climbing into the waterbed where he was conceived and resting her leg across his thigh while stroking his lower stomach. Eddie doesn’t yell or flinch or get up and get out of there. He just freezes. He’s been here before — one of the darkest details in the whole show, and one that complicates our understanding of both Eddie and Maeve, who otherwise come across as borderline comical in their sociopathy. 

Even though the triumvirate rejects the deal, Harry says they held up their end of the bargain and came to the meeting; now Frankie should be a man of his word and return Bella. Frankie says they didn’t keep their word, because the deal was for Conrad to be there, and the younger generation successfully convinced him to stay home, fearing his volatile presence. Frankie plays a nasty game of chicken about it with Kevin, daring him to shoot him as he makes lewd comments about his kidnapped wife. In the end, though, the gangster relents, and Bella is set free.

But Harry can’t rest easy just yet. For one thing, though he doesn’t know it, his estranged wife Jan is still being courted by Jamie, the American McAllister operative; the two of them end a long evening of eating and drinking and talking with one of those theatrical shags that begins before you’re even through the front door. (Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.) For another, his daughter Gina is still together with Eddie, risking Maeve’s jealous rage. And Kavanagh, the honest cop on the organized crime task force, is aware there’s a Harrigan mole in her group, though she hasn’t caught him yet.

Most importantly, Harry knows Seraphina is a rat. When she calls to ask to attend the sit-down, which she heard about during Harry’s speakerphone conversation with Conrad earlier that day, she lets slip that their person they plan to meet is Frankie Cooper. She found this out from Jamie, when he ordered her into attending the meeting, whatever it took. When she tells a suspicious Harry that she heard the name when he mentioned it in his call to Conrad, he knows she’s lying, because at the time he had no idea who their enemy was. Seraphina just told him, and in doing so, told him she’s an enemy too.

There’s one loose end that’s nagging at me, though. Maybe it’s nothing, I don’t know. But when we first catch up with Kevin in this episode, there are two dead men on the floor of his house. I went back and double-checked the end of episode 2, and at no point do we see anyone break in and attack Kevin, nor do we see Harry intervene on his behalf, as he’s busy taking down the men who were sent after Gina and Eddie someplace else in the city.

Meanwhile, the curious fact that Kevin was on the phone with Bella when Frankie showed up to kidnap her comes up again, when Kevin himself brings it up. We’re being asked to believe that Kevin coincidentally called Bella the moment her kidnappers arrived, listened to the whole thing go down, and then — completely offscreen — personally took out the assassins sent after him, who apparently missed the “synchronized attacks” memo and only got to him long after Bella, Zosia, Fergus, and Gina and Eddie’s attackers all made their moves.

Look, I’m no prognosticator. Even in mysteries, where half the point is trying to guess whodunit, I usually just like to sit back and let the vibe unfold. But Kevin’s got the motive: He wants Conrad out just as badly as anyone else. If he was in on the attacks, it explains why he’s so willing to engage in a game of brinksmanship with Frankie while his wife’s life hangs in the balance: He knows she was never really in danger, because he, not Seraphina, is Kat McAllister’s real man inside. To paraphrase Silvio Dante in The Sopranos incorrectly quoting Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III, is it possible our true enemy has yet to reveal himself?

There’s one more very important detail to cover that brings us back to that Casino quote about Frankie, the real gangster in town. When I said he showed up without any kind of protection, I was telling the truth, strictly speaking. I did not say he showed up without a weapon. The bomb planted in his bike helmet, which he leaves behind when he leaves (did you notice? I didn’t), is not much use for protection if you want to survive the blast yourself. 

But discovering Conrad isn’t there per Frankie’s instructions changes his calculations. All he needs to do then is leave the helmet behind for some poor sap to trigger, blowing the entire Harrigan Yards to kingdom come. Seraphina’s car gets caught in the blast; though we’ve yet to see if Seraphina herself survives the blast, you have to wonder if this is why Kat’s minion encouraged her to get to the meeting. Maybe Kat has another Harrigan in her pocket.

At one point in the episode, Harry sums up the situation neatly: This is the worst shit the Harrigan family has ever been in, but the Harrigan family barely exists. When he says this, he’s just talking about the estrangement between Kevin and Conrad. He doesn’t even yet know that Seraphina is a double agent. If I’m right and there’s a possibility Kevin’s a double agent too — acting far more ambitiously than Conrad or Maeve or Harry or Bella believe him to be capable of — it hasn’t crossed his mind yet either. For that matter, Harry’s not fully aware of the lengths to which Maeve is willing to go to punish her enemies within the family, including not only Seraphina but his own daughter Gina. And he doesn’t know that Conrad has received a dementia diagnosis. 

For a guy whose job it is to know all the angles, boy, there are a lot of angles he doesn’t know at the moment.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.