Summary
MobLand wastes no time escalating things between the Harrigans and the Stevensons in Episode 3, and all-out war doesn’t seem far away.
MobLand clearly isn’t interested in hanging about, is it? If you thought the brewing gang war between the Harrigans and the Stevensons was something that might take, I dunno, half a season or so to get going, Episode 3 disabuses you of that notion by opening with Kevin’s house blowing up.
There’s no debate about who did it. It was Richie Stevenson, who doesn’t yet know what we learned at the end of the previous episode – that his missing son, Tommy, has been hacked into several pieces and stored in a box. Kevin’s well-appointed terraced house goes up in a shower of rubble to let the Harrigans know what time it is. Kevin and his family aren’t in there, but the message is nonetheless received.
This is why Harry needs the “Plan B” of the title. Richie wants answers, and the only ones the Harrigans have to give are going to make the situation worse. The club owner, Valjon, is presently being held in a plastic-lined shipping container where he has been battered half to death. The beating compelled him to reveal the truth of what happened to Tommy, which is – unsurprisingly, to be fair – that Eddie stabbed him “50 or 60 times” and paid Valjon ten grand to dispose of the body. The money hardly seems worth it now. And seriously, 50 or 60 times? Kid’s a nutter.
To be fair, Eddie denies this, but there’s zero indication that he might be telling the truth. The more compelling question seems to be how far the Harrigans will go to protect him despite how much of a crazy liability he is. Harry and even Kevin himself seem inclined to just hand him over and have done with it, and you get the sense that Conrad would do the same if it wasn’t for Maeve being in his ear. What’s her agenda, seriously? We’ll return to her in a bit, but she’s the one character who, thus far, I really can’t figure out. She feels like a transplant from a different show.
Anyway, Plan B. It’s a long shot, but Harry orders some surveillance on Valjon’s wife and kids so that he can threaten to kill them if Valjon doesn’t play ball. His own life is forfeit, obviously, but he can still save his family if he simply convinces Richie that he killed Tommy himself, for his own reasons. Richie is predictably suspicious about this when Harry drops him off, but he’ll have to get the truth out of Valjon via torture, which takes a while. He’ll presumably report his findings next week.
Meanwhile in MobLand Episode 3, there are other matters to consider. For instance, Kevin’s wife Bella, seemingly unconcerned with the family home being blown to bits, continues to work on her own private plan to introduce her French friend, Antoine, to the British corridors of political power through the convenient medium of her corrupt hoity-toity father. It’s still not entirely clear what Bella’s up to here. Antoine is filming the meeting, which I suppose is her gathering some kompromat on dear old dad. But it backfires either way since Antoine uses the footage to blackmail Bella, making the whole thing Harry’s problem.
Anson Boon in MobLand | Image via Paramount+
On the subject of things we’re unclear about, Bella still can’t stop throwing herself at Harry, but I’m not sure if she’s propositioning him for the first time or trying to rekindle a dalliance from the past. Harry resists and offers to sort Antoine out, but this strikes me as a potentially more combustible situation for the Harrigans than even the threat of outright war. Something to keep an eye on.
The war thing would be a bit less of an issue if certain characters, namely Maeve, didn’t seem so keen on it. But not only has she apparently resigned herself to the possibility, but she’s already drawing up a hit list, at the top of which is Tommy’s mother, Vron. Apparently, Vron’s quite a laugh, but Maeve is adamant she should be the first to go, despite Conrad’s concerns that it’d put Maeve “on the board”, so to speak. As she rightly points out, she’s always been on the board. But to what extent? Why is she so keen on targeting this woman in particular? Why is she so complimentary of Eddie having stabbed someone fifty or sixty times? How has this family ever achieved any success with her at the head of it?
The answer to that is probably simple enough – because it’s Harry who sorts everything out. But he’s being spread pretty thin in “Plan B”. As well as relocating his family to the river barge of a reluctant gambler who owes him £30K, threatening to have Valjon’s family murdered, trying to smooth things over with Richie, giving the police the slip, and resisting Bella’s advances, he’s also trying to help his cleaner, Maria, get her mother into a nice retirement home. While he’s there, he also spots an older man whom he clearly recognises as a violent, abusive copper from his youth. Harry’s backstory has only been lightly teased in flashbacks thus far, but this seems like something he’s still grappling with, as if he doesn’t have enough going on.
With all this going on, it’s easy to forget about the police, who are mostly relegated to following Tommy around and getting run ragged by Harrigan counter-surveillance. But at the end of MobLand Episode 3, Fisk finally gets the break he needs – a tip-off about the location of Archie’s dead body. “Plan B” ends with the geezer being dug up, sharing a random lady’s coffin. The net is closing, the straws on the camel’s back are mounting, and the house of cards is threatening to topple. After another seven episodes of this, who knows what might have happened?
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