This article discusses who shot Sully in Top Boy Season 3, and naturally contains major spoilers for the series.
Top Boy Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix, bringing the long-running British crime drama to a powerful and exciting conclusion.
But while the Season 3 ending brought many of the ongoing storylines to their logical conclusion and sent multiple characters on different paths, it still left a few lingering questions. And the biggest of them all is simply this: Who shot Sully?
Well, that’s what this article is about, but be warned — you might not like the answer. Nevertheless, we’ll do everything we can to unpack the circumstances surrounding Sully’s death and try to deduce who the perpetrator might potentially be.
Who is Sully in Top Boy?
Sully, played by Kane Robinson, has been a protagonist of Top Boy since way back in the Summerhouse days. He and his best friend Dushane (Ashley Walters) built a drug empire and stayed on top of London’s criminal underworld by ruthlessly eliminating their rivals.
While Dushane is more calculated and ambitious, Sully is historically more principled and impulsive. He’s also the more violent of the two and has the highest body count of anyone in the series, which inevitably contributed to the final scene of the show. He has no shortage of enemies.
Sully is also the most complex character — he has lost the most, suffered the most, and exercised the most vengeance, leading to him being easily the most traumatized and broken figure in the show’s ensemble. Since the Netflix rebrand, he has been personally responsible for the deaths of his friend Dris, the corrupt cop Juan, and Jamie. In the Season 3 finale he was instrumental in Kieron’s death. He helped Dushane kill Jonny and Tadgh McGee, killed two of Isaac’s goons, and ultimately killed Dushane himself.
Who shot Sully in Top Boy Season 3?
In the closing scene of Top Boy, Sully is shot in the head through the driver’s-side window of his car by an unknown assailant.
Thematically, neither Sully nor the audience are supposed to know who the shooter was. The point is that Sully has made so many enemies that one of them was bound to catch up with him sooner or later, and they did.
However, the show did give us a brief glimpse of the assailant, and we are able to make a few deductions. The shooter was wearing a dark jacket with a high collar and seemed to have long-ish, blonde hair — they looked a bit Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates. Either that or they were wearing a motorcyle helmet, but I went through it frame by frame and it looked like a blonde do to me.
Did Stef shoot Sully?
Throughout the third season, Jamie’s younger brother Stef is positioned as the person to eventually take Sully down, and in the finale he does confront him with the intention of doing so. However, he ultimately decides that Sully isn’t worth it, breaking the cycle of violence.
This, and the fact that the glimpse of the shooter didn’t look anything like Stef, means it wasn’t Stef who shot Sully.
Did Jaq shoot Sully?
One of the big twists of Season 3 is that Jaq, formerly Dushane and Sully’s most loyal lieutenant, became disillusioned with the street life after the overdose of her sister Lauryn and seeing the state of their clientele. On an impulse, she stole 25 kilos of drugs from Sully and Dushane, with the reluctant complicity of her friend Kieron.
After Sully has Kieron killed for lying to him about this, Jaq seems like she might be a likely suspect in his death. However, by the time Sully was shot she had already returned home to Becks, presumably with intentions of leaving the life behind and starting afresh. And, again, the shooter didn’t look anything like her. Jaq didn’t shoot Sully.
The likeliest answer is that Sully was killed by an associate of the Irish, or Isaac, or perhaps even Lizzie and Lithe. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as the entire point of his death is that it could have been anyone given how many enemies he had made.
