Summary
MobLand comes out of the gate swinging in Episode 1, putting its incredible cast to work in setting up a sprawling gangland drama.
MobLand has such a great cast that Episode 1 didn’t need to do anything to be compelling out of the gate. Luckily, “Stick or Twist” did some things anyway. You could make a case that it did slightly too many things, introducing multiple characters and completing subplots and building to a big moment that feels a bit flattened by an absence of proper context. But that cast, man. It’s hard to overlook.
This being a Guy Ritchie production – he’s an executive producer if not necessarily the guiding creative hand, so you get some of the humour without any of the trademark stylistic flourishes – you’ve got a good idea of what to expect. It’s about a brewing war between rival crime families in London’s underworld, thanks to a pretty complex interweaving of professional conflict and personal happenstance. Several of the key players are arch stereotypes and/or very eccentric. You get the idea.
But Episode 1 at least gives us a sense of MobLand’s overall shape. Pierce Brosnan is Conrad Harrigan, the patriarch of the Harrigan family, a criminal dynasty with fingers in all kinds of unsavoury pies who have enjoyed enormous success from drugs and guns but are mostly kept afloat by their incredibly capable family fixer, Harry (Tom Hardy). Immediately, Harry is tasked with cleaning up a mess created by Eddie Harrigan, Conrad’s insufferable grandson, which looks set to bring the Harrigans into conflict with the Stevensons, the rival outfit with whom they’re competing for turf.
There’s a more personal element to this. Richie Stevenson, the gang’s leader, is looking for his missing son Tommy, who was last seen on a night out with Eddie, despite the two of them famously hating each other. But nobody, including both families and crucially the show’s audience, knows what happened to Tommy yet. We only get a snippet of the night out early in “Stick or Twist”, and the main takeaway is that Eddie needlessly stabs someone who he suspected of planning to do the same to him.
This is the initial predicament that Henry is supposed to sort out. And he does, very capably, without realizing that Eddie might have harmed someone much more consequential during the same evening. Eddie lies about everything and is rash to the point of being psychopathic, so it looks likely that he probably killed Tommy. And if he did, there’ll be Hell to pay.
Tom Hardy and Pierce Brosnan in MobLand | Image via Paramount+
Of course, this is what we’re supposed to think, which makes me feel like it’s probably not what happened. But this premiere makes a real point of highlighting how ruthless and trigger-happy the Harrigans are – the opening scene finds Harry trying to peacefully settle a dispute between two gangs and being instructed to play it safe by wiping them all out – so that we worry about them jumping the gun without all the information. And that’s almost what happens! When Harry meets with Richie to discuss Tommy’s disappearance, he has a kill team waiting outside to kill Richie – in an echo of the opening scene – if he gets the sense that things can’t be resolved. He defers to Conrad on this, and he’s definitely inclined to have Richie taken out to solve a problem before it worsens, but he’s talked out of it by his wife, Maeve, which brings me to another thing.
Maeve counselling Conrad to spare Richie makes sense in the moment, but becomes suspicious in hindsight. She’s right that they don’t know what happened to Tommy and shouldn’t jump the gun, and she’s also (presumably) right that they’d both like to be present for Richie’s eventual demise. But she later engineers a scenario in which Conrad’s childhood friend Archie is framed as a double agent for the Stevensons because he balks at Conrad’s plan to forcibly take over their fentanyl trade. The two things taken together imply, at least to me, that it’s Maeve playing both sides.
At the very end of MobLand Episode 1, there’s a bit of an indication that Conrad might be suspecting this. When Maeve attempts to comfort him when he’s rattled about killing Archie, he aggressively snaps at her, visibly discomfited by the event. Now, it could just be a case that he’s torn up about killing his mate and having to maintain a ruthless persona in front of the rest of his assembled family. Or, arguably more interestingly, he could be realizing that his wife is playing him.
But that’s for future episodes to unpack. In the meantime, “Stick or Twist” is a pacey and lively premiere that suggests MobLand isn’t going to just lean on its cast, but it’d do well to sprinkle in a few elements that’ll help it stand out in an always overcrowded gang-drama market.
