Summary
An extremely tense penultimate episode brings things right back to where they started, and things aren’t looking good for virtually anyone.
This recap of Netflix’s Top Boy Season 3 Episode 5, “Has It Come to This”, contains spoilers.
The penultimate ever episode of Top Boy is a grippingly tense affair, one that darkens already morally dubious characters and lays the groundwork for these people at their very worst to suffer a little more before the bill they’ve wracked up with various misdeeds eventually and inevitably comes due.
In other words, the chances of a happy ending after “Has It Come to This” are virtually nil.
Netflix’s Top Boy Season 3 Episode 5 Recap
Picking up from where we left things in Episode 4, Sully is still on the hunt for his missing drugs. However, the closeness of the operation means the pool of suspects is tiny. He starts by interrogating Kieron, who blames it on Si and the Fields gang, and then progresses to shoving a gun in Si’s mouth until he bleeds and pukes all over the floor.
This grim and distressingly realistic scene leads Sully to the only realistic alternative – it was Jaq. He tries to catch her at home, but she isn’t there, and then at Beck’s, but they manage to get away with baby Jack just seconds before Sully and Dushane, who Kieron had tipped off about the crisis, pull up outside.
How does Sully find out who took the stash?
All of this is horribly tense. Sully and Dushane, though particularly the former, exude so much menace that I felt palpable fear for Kieron, who obviously knows Jaq has the drugs and quietly tipped her off about their pending arrival.
When Sully demands he call her from his phone, and then later takes Kieron’s phone off him to look through it, I was completely invested. Kane Robinson is a spectacular British talent, and he only proves this further as the episode progresses.
He’s matched capably by Jasmine Jobson, whose confession to Becks about the situation they’re in is profound. Jaq resolves to tell Sully what she did, and they meet in the usual café, where she asks for a pass, which he won’t give her, and then an assurance that whatever he decides, her family won’t be hurt.
“Jaq, don’t beg,” he says. “It’s disgusting.”
Why does Dushane need to leave the country?
Dushane leaves Sully to meet with Wilson Lee, whose investigator has reliably informed him that MIT are looking at Dushane as the prime suspect in Jeffrey’s murder. Since his prints and DNA are all over the scene, he has no hope of getting off, so Wilson advises him to leave the country.
Dushane has a Jamaican passport in another name, but he needs to retrieve it from his home, which is being watched by the police. So, Dushane enlists the help of Shelley, who gets Naomi to retrieve the items. She does so, but the police spot Dushane lurking and chase him all the way back to Summerhouse, where Mandy is leading another protest against the bailiffs trying to evict the residents.
When the police speed onto the estate, they accidentally run over – and I think kill? – one of the children playing football. Dushane uses the accident as cover to break into his mother’s old flat, where he plans to hide until he can meet with Wilson’s contact, Isaac, who can help him get out of the country for £250K (plus the advance that Wilson has already fronted him.)
Netflix’s Top Boy Season 3 Episode 5 Ending Explained
At the end of the episode, Jaq calls Dushane to tell him what she told Sully. He insists that the exchange must take place at Summerhouse and that he must be present for it.
That seems unlikely, though, since the police killing the kid provokes a full-scale riot, with police being assaulted and their cars being torched as the Summerhouse residents decide they’ve had quite enough of playing nice.
With this, and Stef fantasizing in the mirror about killing Sully with the gun Si gave him, the chances of anyone even surviving the finale, let alone going on to live happily ever after, seem extremely slim.
You can stream Netflix’s Top Boy Season 3 Episode 5, “Has It Come to This” exclusively on Netflix.
