Summary
The second episode ups the ante with some big reveals and developments. With so much chaos so early, one has to wonder if Gangs of London Season 2 might prove too ambitious for its own good.
This Gangs of London season 2, episode 2 recap contains spoilers.
In all the commotion of Gangs of London season 2, episode 1, I forgot all about Billy, who at the start of this episode we see is keeping quite well. He seems pretty even-keel, he’s painting really quite good watercolour paintings, and he’s helping Jacqueline raise her child. It’s a quiet life fishing flies out of the pool, or at least it is until Marian despatches Serwa to inform Billy that Elliot is back in London. Since Billy trusted Elliot and told him where Sean was, resulting in the Wallace heir’s death, Billy is immediately drawn back to the capital for vengeance.
Gangs of London season 2, episode 2 recap
Elliot is busy, meanwhile, with investigating who shot Koba’s driver — the Investors suggest they’ll tell Elliot where his father is if he completes this “special assignment”, though it’s hard to believe. But since the car that the shooter was driving already almost ran Elliot over in the previous episode, he probably won’t have to look far. Koba is too busy to look into the matter himself because he’s occupied using Luan’s wife to strongarm him into entrapping Marian, which Ed is furious about — messing with families is off-limits — but the Dumani patriarch is thrown for a loop when Asif informs him that Alex committed suicide.
Ed obviously fancies Elliot for being behind Alex’s death, so he’s not exactly pleased to see him when he turns up at the scene of three dead Somalians who were also allied with Koba, and who were probably offed by the same person who shot the driver and sped off in that rickety red car. For his efforts thus far, Elliot is able to negotiate a brief visit with his father, who is being kept in a relatively posh residential home, and it’s there that Elliot hides the microchip full of evidence. He makes a call to persons as-yet unknown, telling them he has something they might be interested in, as Billy and several of Marian’s men set off for London to hunt Elliot down, and Serwa photographs Elliot leaving the residential home to help them track him.
If you’re wondering how Marian is funding her gun-running and security, it’s because she has teamed up with Finn’s Albanian mistress Floriana, giving her access to a holding account where Finn was able to squirrel away £1.5 billion of the Investors’ money. So, she isn’t just trying to wrest control of London back from the Investors, but she’s using their money to do it, which is poetic, in a way. However, the bad news is that Asif has a line on the account and is able to force the lawyer who looks after it to transfer ownership of the shell company to him.
There’s a pretty somber tone to this episode as the sudden changes in the status quo begin to have ripple effects for everyone. Ed, for instance, having learned of Alex’s death, goes to see Shannon and tries to persude her and Danny to return home for protection. When she refuses, he goes to see Alex’s splattered body and sobs like a child next to it, a tough man finally broken. Luan, meanwhile, turns on Marian, torturing one of her men into giving up her location so that he can give it to Koba in exchange for his wife; he’s reluctant to betray an ally, but his love for wife supersedes his loyalty to anyone else. It’s a weakness, and he knows it.
And Billy gets his own paragraph. After trying and failing to make a move on Elliot — who’s trying to shop the evidence against the Investors in exchange for protection for him and his father — he turns to drink and then, almost, to an old stash of heroin. Luckily, a conversation with Jacqueline brings him back from the brink, but it’s a close-run thing, and he’s clearing circling the drain. With renewed purpose, he heads out to kill Elliot, and finds him almost immediately at a market where Basem has just been executed — by the mysterious assassin targeting Koba — right in front of his daughter, Saba. Billy takes a few potshots and misses wildly, causing a big shootout between himself, Elliot, and the goons Elliot’s with. Luckily, Elliot buys him time to escape, but as well as being shot, Billy almost drowns when his escape vehicle plunges into the Thames.
However, he’s dragged to safety by the mysterious assassin, who pulls up in that ratty red BMW just in time. Their identity is revealed — it’s Sean, with a big scar and a dodgy eye, but seemingly none the worse for having been shot in the face. It looks like we have a Wallace family reunion on the cards. Elliot watches from across the water in something resembling disbelief.
