There’s a story Conrad Harrigan tells Gina Da Souza about her father and his fixer, Harry, in this week’s MobLand that’s worth paying close attention to. Harry, he says, honed his skills first in juvenile detention, then in a globe-trotting career as a soldier and mercenary, where he saw the worst of the worst. When Conrad hired Harry’s private security firm for a case, he and Kevin recognized each other from their time as friends inside, Harry joined the Harrigans, and the rest is history.

Some time later, Harry held a man down while Conrad cut his balls off. “Harry didn’t blink,” he tells the girl.

The point, he says, is that the kind of loyalty that will lead a man to help another man cut a third man’s balls off will also serve her and her mother well, despite their split, which Conrad learns about from Gina (at whom he leers in his usual fashion) for the first time. That loyalty is both Harry’s best quality and his worst.

Tom Hardy echoes this binary nature in his performance. Harry’s most disarming quality is how casual he seems, how loose and laid-back even though he’s a battlefield commander. He peppers his speech with “yeah”s and “all right”s that deflate the gravitas of what he’s saying, no matter what that is. It’s a trait that can calm the most panicked people…or panic the most calm, because whether he’s saving someone’s life or ending it, it never changes. 

What seems endearing in one circumstance becomes repulsive under another. When you’re forcing a cop you bought off but who is now compromised to hang himself from a tree in the woods in the rain, for instance, that shit is no longer adorable. It’s nightmarish. Harry reminds me of Tommy from GoodFellas or Nicky from Casino: They really are funny guys, until they pop your eye out of your head with a vise. Their charm is poisonous.

Finch, the police detective whose “suicide” Harry induces by promising to take care of his wife and children afterwards, learns another lesson about Harry, and by extension all of the Harrigans: When you get involved in their lives, your life becomes contingent on your continued utility to them. The moment Harry figures out Finch has been cut out of the loop in the organized crime task force — he and Zosia stage a dramatic machine-gun smash-and-grab high street jewelry store robbery in broad daylight, abandoning a known Harrigan vehicle on the scene, and he never hears about it from his colleagues — his life is effectively over. There’s no sense in arguing it with him, either. To Harry, the value of a life is as open-and-shut, black-and-white as simple math(s). 

The same holds true for Seraphina as it does for Finch. She finds Harry’s soft-spoken demeanor absolutely terrifying when she realizes there’s no way around it, she has to confess that she is Kat McAllister’s inside woman with the Harrigans. All she asks in return is that he just get it over with quickly.

But Harry spares Seraphina. In part, he says, it’s because he understands why she accepted Kat’s offer to topple the unstable Conrad, since he nearly took it himself. (Elsewhere in the episode, the increasingly erratic boss questions Harry’s loyalty; Harry gets right up and leaves, letting him shout insults at his back.) He tells Seraphina that she can now serve as a double agent, pretending to work for Kat against the Harrigans when she really works for the Harrigans against Kat. 

Seraphina should call DI Finch and ask him what Harry will do to her if her cover gets blown. Oh, wait, right. Never mind.

It’s clear that Harry would not be as callous with his own family as he is with Finch or even Seraphina, who’s a sort of adoptive half-sister. No, anyone who’d threaten to permanently tear him from his wife and child the way he just did Finch would be in the ground before long.

There’s a philosophical reason for all this, by the way: Wilhoit’s Law. “Conservatism,” wrote the composer Frank Wilhoit, “consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Who gets away with murder and who gets arrested for jaywalking? The in-group decides. At root, conservatism and gangsterism operate by the same “might makes not just right, but rules and regulations” principle.

This is why Harry’s enemy, Frankie Cooper, knows to target Harry’s family, his real family, if he really wants to break the man. (“He’s already broken, just into the right shape,” Conrad theorizes elsewhere.) At the very end of the episode, Harry receives a video of his estranged wife Jan having sex with McAllister’s agent Jamie — filmed by Frankie himself, who broke into the Da Souza home and turned the camera around to preserve his own smirking reaction to the festivities for Harry’s later enjoyment. 

Frankie knows there are lots of tough guys who make a big show of their willingness to kill for their family who have probably never changed a diaper or attended a dance recital. That describes Harry pretty well. It’s like baiting a bear.

On the other hand, is this kind of loyalty, which mistakes lethality for love, better than the alternative? None of the Harrigans seem to give the slightest shit about each other anymore. Bella verbally tears Kevin limb from limb over his failures during the disastrous negotiations for her release, barely making a secret of her preference for Harry and (I think) implying that Kevin’s sexual abuse in prison broke him as a man. Conrad straight-up declares himself and Kevin on opposite sides of a war, even with Kat McAllister’s plans advancing one dead body at a time. As mentioned, Seraphina’s treason against her dad is uncovered at last. 

So is Maeve’s scheme. Conrad finds her supply of poisonous antifreeze. Maeve is also preparing to devastate her grandson/chosen one/sexual abuse victim Eddie by having his girlfriend Gina murdered on their trip to Ireland. Meanwhile, she’s also continuously trying to have Conrad kill Harry, while also being enormously insensitive to poor Paul. I wonder how much even the most loyal soldier can take of this shit — especially after he finds himself the unwitting getaway car driver after Conrad commits a machine-gun massacre at one of Frankie’s businesses. 

Throughout this episode, the score, by composer Clint Mansell, rises to genuinely emotional height, swelling and swooning in a way I just don’t associate with this genre. But it works so well here. MobLand is cutting pretty close to the bone here, challenging our enjoyment of high-octane gangster antics with painful interpersonal dynamics and chillingly callous behavior. Everyone is betraying each other, showing each other than nothing and no one and nowhere is safe. How does an honest killer like Harry make a stand in a world of dishonest ones? And what is it about us that makes us believe there’s a distinction worth a damn between the two types in the first place?

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.