FRANKIE COOPER: Did you just sacrifice yourself, Harry? For Gina?”

HARRY DA SOUZA: I don’t fuckin’ know, do I? Tell you what: We’re about to find out, aren’t we, yeah?

ME:

There’s no point in burying the lede here. For all the stuff that went on this episode of Paramount+‘s MobLand, for all of the surprises and betrayals, the fireworks between our man Harry and his newfound nemesis Frankie are the main attraction.

They’re not loud, the way fireworks are. Both men are (almost) unfailingly soft-spoken, Harry in his world-weary way, Frankie in the manner of someone who thinks it’s all one big joke that only he is in on so why get worked up? A furrowed brow, a sly smile, voices that seem to seep out of the speakers’ mouths like steam or smoke. 

That’s the baseline of what actors Tom Hardy and Johnny Flynn are bringing to the table when Harry and Frankie have their sit-down in an abandoned pub. They’re there to discuss the kidnapping of Harry’s daughter Gina, who has the misfortune of escaping from Maeve Harrigan at the Cotswolds just in time to show up at her house while it’s being raided by Cooper goons. 

That sequence is worth singling out for its excellence, too. Insisting on taking a bath before fleeing the country to safety, Jan reclines in the tub, listening to Damien Rice’s yearning ballad “The Blower’s Daughter.” Meanwhile, Harry murders one Cooper soldier after another with a silenced assault rifle while blasting “The Fixer” by Humble Pie. Brilliant song selections, and as usual, crackerjack action-thriller filmmaking.

But even though he takes out the pawns, the king is still in play. Frankie gets the call that there’s activity at the Da Souza house at his home, where he’s eating toast, feeding his twin baby sons, and contemplating the murder of his current (estranged) wife Mel (Chanel Cresswell) while she badmouths his dead son’s mother and tells him the kid hated him, as does with everyone else in his life. He races over in his bathrobe with a mug of coffee, a piece of toast, and an uzi. When he spots Gina on the street blocks away from the house, he reacts like it’s Christmas in July.

The two of them have a fascinating dynamic all their own. When she gets kidnapped, Gina knows only two things: first, anything beats the Cotswolds, where she’s got Maeve telling her to kill herself constantly; two, she’s not afraid, because her dad will kill anyone who threatens her. This enables her to interact fearlessly with Frankie, though there’s always an implied element of violence: watching her toss her smoothie at his face is one thing, but watching him toss his at hers is more like watching Cagney smash that grapefruit into his gal’s face. 

Even so, they eventually settle into strapping on goggles and shooting suction-cup Nerf darts at each other’s faces, down there in the panic room where Frankie’s dead son Michael once played. When Gina figures out that Michael is dead and that this is why she’s been kidnapped, that’s when things get ugly. Though he gives her a knife and ample opportunity to stab him, he disarms her easily and holds it to her throat while on top of her. “I am having to fight an extremely powerful urge,” he tells her just before this. The urge is left unstated but, again, heavily implied.

When Harry attends Frankie’s sit-down, he does so over the objections of his longtime friend Kevin Harrigan, who wants to join up with Frankie, not just to save Gina but to take out his own parents. Harry straight-up tells Kevin he doesn’t have it in him, and goes his own way.

Their verbal sparring is so good it’s tempting just to transcribe the whole scene. It’s dynamite stuff, and what it comes down to is this: Yes, Frankie has Gina in his clutches and an army of enforcers outside. But it takes seven seconds for someone to make it from the front door of the pub to the place where he and Frankie are seated, and in that time Harry can do immeasurable, irreparable damage to Frankie’s body and face. As he points out to Frankie, the issue of how he would escape alive after doing so is his own problem; Frankie’s own problems will be over by then, you can count on that.

So Frankie lets both Gina and Harry go. But the world they reenter is very different from the world they left behind. Crashing a party at the ambassador’s residence just to show he can, Frankie has already demanded that Kat McAllister into action earlier in the episode. She and Colin Tattersall use Kavanagh’s organized crime task force to search the Cotswolds for bodies, and they dredge up Frankie’s poor, horrifically tortured pal Jojo from the lake almost immediately.

Harry gets the call on this from Paul, who’s making his way back to the house from the village with, of all people, Eddie Harrigan. This miserable piece of shit has been tasked by that other miserable piece of shit Maeve with assassinating Harry, which he plans to do with explosives; he threatens to rat Paul out to Maeve regarding him ratting out the Ireland mission to Harry unless Paul cooperates.

The moment Harry gets the call, he springs into action, alerting Kevin, Zosia, and Seraphina, who’s still elbow-deep in her scheme to take over the outfit with her stepfather’s cash. Kevin in turn alerts Bella. Jan, as best I can tell, is left in the dark to panic about the health of her daughter all on her own.

However, Harry also gets a call from Kat, telling him the Harrigans are now over, and thanking him for what he is “about to do” for her. Is she putting him to work, or does she have more sinister plans for the man who is, to quote a wise mutant, the best there is at what he does?

And where are Conrad and Maeve? Attempting to hijack a massive Cooper coke delivery, only for Conrad to start seeing dead people behind the wheel of the getaway car. Though he manages to come to a stop without crashing, the Cooper coke gets away — and Maeve has all the proof she needs that her frenemy of a husband is no longer fit to lead.

What a fabulous episode of a fabulous show. Hardy, Flynn, Joanne Froggat, and Teddie Allen are riveting every second they’re on screen. Anson Boon and Helen Mirren, meanwhile, make you want to reach through the screen and throttle them. (To be fair, it’s possible Eddie plans to blow up Maeve rather than Harry, in which case all is forgiven.) The action remains thrilling and nasty, the dialogue clever and cutting, the relationships surprisingly complex and ugly, the show itself stylish and frequently beautiful. MobLand is so much better than it needs to be, and better than a lot of shows try to be.

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.