Summary
A great action sequence and a couple of grim character turns are highlights in an episode that proves once again that the second season is willing to go places narratively that the first outing wasn’t.
This Gangs of London season 2, episode 6 recap contains spoilers.
In Gangs of London season 2, episode 5, Sean Wallace made himself a king, essentially. And in this episode, he gets to enjoy it for about five minutes before his new business partner starts taking liberties. Typical, isn’t it?
Anyone who watched the first season of Gangs of London will recall that a lot of it was about Sean being utterly ill-prepared for leadership. He’s rash, volatile, and in many ways childish, and this kept manifesting again and again. The second season has, thus far, depicted him as a somewhat more thoughtful and strategic player in a big game he can’t control, but here we begin to see all that unravel. It starts with Asif.
Gangs of London season 2, episode 6 recap
The idea is to strongarm Asif by giving him freedom within London in exchange for access to his network and infrastructure. If he doesn’t deal with Sean and Koba, he won’t deal in the capital at all. He isn’t keen on the sales pitch, so Koba privately throws in a sweetener — Lale. When Sean finds out, he has what can only be described as a tantrum, punching the walls and everything. Koba has potentially turned all of their Kurdish allies again them, and he has made a mug of Sean in the process, which you have to imagine was at least partly his intention.
While Sean is sulking, Elliot has completely lost it. After murdering Miss Kane he leaves her body for her daughter Imogen to find, then he goes to see Shannon and blames her for preventing him from leaving. He has lost the one person he had left in his life, and with that, he seems to have lost the one thing tethering him to sanity. Shannon tells him that Sean has teamed up with Koba and that he has secured the alliance by taking down the Investors, which means Elliot puts two and two together and realizes that it was Sean who had Charlie and Singer killed. And he’s pissed. But Shannon talks him out of behaving too rashly, instead convincing him to let her help in taking down Sean and Koba.
As it turns out, Elliot saving Ed might have been a good thing after all. Marian goes to see him and proposes a new deal, one in which the two of them regain control of London. This would probably be something that Elliot would go in for, at least more so than a scenario with Sean and Koba on top.
Meanwhile, Asif has Lale strung upside-down in his study, ready to torture her. Of course, she’s able to free herself, and a good chunk of the episode is devoted to her absolutely owning her way through Asif’s guards. Here, I think, the show comes closest yet to achieving the same highs as the first season in terms of the action — that same pivot to horror is there as Lale stalks around the house, but the stylish lighting and staging of the brutal hand-to-hand fight is really something. She barely makes it out alive, but she does make it out — and Sean is there waiting to save her.
Only, he isn’t. As Lale slips in and out of consciousness, she just assumes Sean is taking her safety. But when she comes to, she realizes he has carried her right back to her doom. As she’s dragged away by the hair, her screams echo down the corridor, and Sean’s eyes fill with tears as he leaves, knowing he has crossed a line he can never come back from.
